This is Brazil. I’m all for freedom of speech, but not all cultures are the same and neither are local laws. Sometimes what works for America doesn’t work elsewhere.
I’m glad they shut it down instead of following the government demands because the company has a set of values, but that’s about it.
Some of those laws prohibit criticism of their respective governments, sex education, or pornography (including things most people in the US or EU would not consider pornographic).
Yes, that's how it works. Specifically, the common argument that applies to most companies (incl. Rumble), is that you're trading within that country if anyone from that country is either paying for your product/service, or making money from your product/service; and therefore you essentially need to function as (if not actually legally have) a per-country corporate subsidiary amenable to the laws of that country, if you want to continue doing that.
And sometimes it's even worse; for at least the US and Canada, companies trading with people living in these countries have to know and follow the laws of the state or province their customers live in, when serving those customers.
These are mostly simple things like tax codes, yes; but sometimes it's things that are far more arcane — for example, Quebec prohibits promotional first-period pricing that automatically transitions into regular pricing (they consider this a predatory practice.) Companies that advertise promitions in Canada often have fine print that says "offer not valid in Quebec" because of this.
This tangled mess of required region-specific logic is, by and large, the moat of e-commerce platforms and payment processors. It's why even large e-commerce services like Steam, that build all this logic internally for most countries, will still integrate with payment processors like Stripe or PayPal — those services are made options to cover the long-tail of countries they don't want to learn and maintain regional rules for.
It's also why many companies don't bother to actually sell into every market; and instead allow companies that specialize in "partnering with foreign companies to sell their products into our own domestic market that we understand well" — a.k.a. importers — to do that for them (and skim off some of their margin in the process.)
I think an equally valid (and frankly more reasonable) interpretation is that if anyone from another country is paying for your product/service, then they're trading within _your_ country. If in doing so they contravene laws of _their_ country (e.g., forbidden speech, taxes, etc.) then that's their problem, not yours. This interpretation has the advantage of actually being enforceable, unlike the alternative.
And if a country doesn't like that then they're free to "protect" their citizens by building a Great Firewall, which is _totally and only_ for their people's benefit.
In this scenario, the foreign investor is in a sense creating a legal "proxy person" — a virtual citizen of the country where the exchange exists. The foreign investor is then telling the proxy person to do the trades for them. If the pretend proxy person breaks the law, the real investor gets in trouble... but in ways that are more similar to the ways corporations get in trouble, than the ways citizens of the country get in trouble.
(And some countries don't even allow the creation of these pretend proxy persons; instead requiring you to employ, and hand your money over to, a real proxy person, who will face the domestic legal consequences for executing your trades! This is how e.g. Bahamian shell corporations work; it's also how foreign real-estate investments work in the Philippines. It's never a good time.)
"The purchaser representing themselves legally in the country they're buying from" is also how the aforementioned import arrangements work. The importer registers an export company in the source country — essentially a proxy-person, though in the shape of a corporation — and the export company is what buys the goods and sends them to the import company.
Most trade isn't like this, though, because most trade isn't between legal peers (like an exchange and an investor — both basically "typed as" corporations for the sake of the trade, even if one is a sole proprietor); but instead is between one large company and a potentially-huge number of individually-legally-naive individual consumers.
It is impractical to ask all the people who want to buy a product, to create a foreign trading presence for themselves in the country of origin of that product, as if they were a professional importer. Governments don't want to maintain — or especially to validate and audit — huge databases of hundreds of millions of foreign individuals trading locally. Banks don't want to have to open and maintain hundreds of millions of tiny, individual, unprofitable(!) foreign-deposit accounts for those individuals to use to operate legally in the country.
So instead, governments and banks choose the far simpler route: making the foreign corporations register themselves in the markets they operate in. There are far fewer corporations to keep on the books for both the governments and the banks; and it's far easier to manage their accounts (because corporations are on average more competent at that kind of thing; because unlike individuals, corporations can afford to pay ~hundreds-of-dollar levies to maintain the systems tracking them and keep the bank-accounts revenue-positive for the banks; and because corporations will coalesce bank transfers, turning billions of little daily transactions to individuals' foreign-deposit accounts, into just a few daily transactions to each corporate foreign-deposit account.)
Ignoring the pragmatics, though, there's also a key distinction even in theory: when a company X from country A, trades with consumers in country B, company X is seeking to pull money out of (or put money into) a credit card or bank account that exists in country B (and which is denominated in the currency of country B), and move that money to/from country A, where it will then get exchanged for the currency of country A and drop into the company's country-A bank account.
The manipulation of the country-B bank account, can only legally be done (for most values of country-B) by a company legally registered in country-B to operate on the payment networks of country-B. There has to be a payment server sitting there physically in country-B, connected by dedicated line to the inter-bank network the banks of country-B use; and that payment server has to have signing certs installed to emit messages on the line that will be accepted by the network — signing certs which required a bunch of legal and contractual and trust-handshake hoops to be jumped with the banks of country-B before they'd be issued.
So these are the only options for getting access to such a payment server. Either:
- company X forms a country-B subsidiary XB, that goes through the process of applying for the certs and setting up the payment server; or
- company X pays existing country-B-local payments company Y to use their payments server to do the money-moving-around for them; or
- company X pays multinational payments company Z to provide them a country-agnostic interface for moving money around; when requested by X to perform a country-B transaction, Z will then either signal the servers of their existing country-B-local subsidiary ZB — or will pass the message to their country-B-transaction-partner Y — to do the real money-moving around.
Anything that seemingly doesn't have one of these three fundamental shapes — but which still results in a company in country-A moving around money in a country-B bank account — is just window-dressing on top of underlying infrastructure that does have one of these shapes.
I think it's not completely incompatible with my view, though: if you don't have a country B subsidiary (the assumption underlying this entire discussion!) then the most country B can do is tell the payment processing company you're contracting with to stop doing business with you. That's completely fair and I see it as a kind of "financial firewall" for country B.
Even this power is subject to some checks and balances, though: 1. If your service/site is popular, country B's population may object to no longer being able to do business with you and put pressure on country B's government. 2. You could bypass the financial system with crypto payments. (Yeah, not terribly practical for most use cases, but could become more popular in case of government overreach.) 3. Ad-supported businesses — like the one in the original article, apparently — are immune to this kind of intervention!
Ultimately, a country can only control entities with a physical presence inside its borders, and while some common commercial architectures necessitate this (to some degree) not all do. Countries that make laws that pretend otherwise just end up looking silly.
Strange - here in Lapu-Lapu, a too-nasty salesperson has convinced me (a foreigner) to enter a contract to buy a not-yet-built condo unit. I just pay a certain amount every month using my bank account, they get the money, and on an agreed-upon date, the unit will be mine. I can go at any time and watch how the construction work proceeds. So far, their proposed date looks like a reasonable expectation of when the unit will be ready.
In other words, it's the same process as in my former home country.
For legal and tax purposes, most countries do abstract over the separate low-level concepts of plot-of-land ownership and condo ownership, resulting in a legal ADT called a "lot"; where each "lot" has its own title that can only be transferred through a notarized process; has yearly property taxes levied against it in proportion to its market value; etc. This isn't a natural abstraction, though — just a common legal "interface" used by the government to manage instances of the two separate underlying contractual implementations. Those implementations still each have their own separate laws that apply to them.
Which brings me to the point: foreigners are forbidden from owning plots of land in the Philippines.
That doesn't stop you from owning a condo — because buying a condo doesn't translate to buying any land.
But you can't legally buy a house in the Philippines — since that purchase would come with land. (Or rather, is a purchase of land, where that land happens to at this moment have a house on it.)
Instead, to do something equivalent to buying a house, you'd need
1. a Philippines citizen (a real proxy person) to buy the house for you, and then assign you
2. a 99-year transferrable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leasehold_estate on the land, explicitly written to come with
3. possession of the "materials that make up all current structures built on the land" (so you can tear the house down, if you like), and
4. the right to build whatever other new structures you like on the land, and use them for whatever purposes you see fit, including subletting.
(I'm actually not sure whether there's any legal instrument the proxy-person can grant you that would allow you to apply to re-zone "your" land. They might have to apply for that in your stead!)
It is different in terms of enforcement for someone running a server in their apartment and a corporation. And it depends on the law broken. If you’re running a piracy server in Haiti, the US government can decide they want to shut you down. But if it’s something minor, the government will just ignore you. Companies are different because they’re easier to target when it comes to enforcement.
Well sure, if Brazil wants to build the Great Firewall of Brazil, they can do so.
This happens all the time in every country.
Also, they don’t need a firewall, ISPs can block domain names (which the courts can force them to since they operate in the country) very easily and is used across the world.
Of course when a company is trying to do business in a country, it needs relationships with local companies, access to banking and payment infrastructure, etc... and governments can certainly prevent those from doing business with it. It doesn't sound like that's the issue here though.
If there is a mechanism by which the government of Brazil can force a company based in the USA or Canada to block visitors to its website, I would like to know the details so I can advocate that the USA withdraw from the relevant treaty. I'd apply the same logic to the USA trying to force foreign websites to shut down or block visitors from the USA.
sounds scarier than 4chan
Gab was kicked off those platforms for not touting the “party” line on the covid shot, trans stuff, and other social hot button issues.
https://www.thewrap.com/far-right-social-network-gab-back-on...
I've asked essentially this same question several times of those people and never gotten more than vague handwaving in response.
I remember when free speech was an ideal that was universally recognized as crucial to a functioning democracy.
"Making drama" by refusing to participate in a censorship program strikes me as admirable.
What a strange world we live in where so many people sneer at the concept of free exchange and the marketplace of ideas, and those that seek to support it.
We call it "crimen injuria" in our laws - right to dignity is defined in our constitution and frankly this has NO place in our society considering our history.
You must live in a very different world than I do.
"the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom." - John Locke
I don’t do business in North Korea so I’m not interested in upholding their law. I do do business in France so I have to obey their laws.
There tends to just be one country which holds its domestic laws as relevant to people not doing business in their country.
* Request extradition
* Fine local advertisers
* Confiscate any payments
* Harrass the ISPs who carry the service
* Harrass local users
I do nor advocate any of the above
But the idea a business that trades internationally can say "fuck you" to a nation state is childish
There can be terrible consequences
This often works and rarely lasted more than a day. I don't think I was ever personally affected by one of those blockings when I was in the country.
I don't really remember any case where a large server failed to comply and remained blocked.
EDIT: There are things that were blocked and remained blocked forever, but they're often things like piracy, CSAM sites... which are things that often get blocked even in the USA. Sometimes this is a harsher block directly at the host of the website, either via court order when it's a Brazilian host, or because international laws were broken, or because the host simply complied.
Business implies commerce, monetary transactions. It doesn't imply access however.
What a court in Brazil can do in case of a "no", is then block the whole website, often done in simple ways (DNS) at local ISPs. It can also put the burden on local representatives of Rumble in Brazil, as it did with Facebook in the past (this means jail time for not complying with a court order).
In theory some people below mentioned that it can also forbid local Brazilian entities from performing commerce with the entity (like eg: fining advertisers paying for ads, or the advertise), but I'm not sure how that would work, since I'm not a lawyer.
If free speech doesn't work in some particular culture, then it's that culture that needs to be discarded, not free speech.
Trading with Iran is one example of that. You can be effectively shut out from the financial system of the world if you decide to ignore US sanctions, even when you don’t have entities, customers, suppliers, or employees in the US. Cuba and Panama’s existence are other examples of when countries ignored the US and paid the price.
I don’t think the US is particularly evil or anything like that, but true free speech is a whole lot easier to safeguard when you’re not relying on the patronage of a superpower. And today, most countries either are a superpower in their own might or rely on one for participation in the global economy and modern world.
…and there’s some cruel irony in suggesting the dismantling of a culture to leave room for free speech. I believe any sort of sustainable freedom of speech will have to grow organically into the culture. And that unfortunately takes time.
And when it's literally about Nazis (it seems like it always is) ... Rumble isn't the one looking like they have standards here.
Seeing some your nuts in the US in positions of power - Jewish Space Lasers and QAnon adherents it shows me how unregulated free speech don't work so well.
It might have been the case when the reach was the next town by donkey but in this day and age all it takes is an unhinged person to start a new cult around kids being molested at a Pizza Palour.
What is going on is basically the government ignoring the constitution, and the Supreme Court allowing it, because they are corrupt.
Free speech is the only exception. Bad ideas can be rooted out with good ideas. Banning opinions have never worked ever and it will never work. It is a pure waste of everything.
> Banning opinions have never worked ever and it will never work.
It absolutely works. There’s a reason Nazi propaganda is banned in Germany.
Edit: Before everyone just points to communist states as what happens when you have censorship, you also need to acknowledge the extreme violence that happens when speech is unrestricted in every case. For example Rohingya genocide was fueled by unrestricted “opinions” on the internet. https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
Besides, some form of restrictions on speech absolutely exist everywhere in the world. People look at censorship as either complete freedom or Soviet Russia, but in reality middle ground does exist.
Never anything as bad as the murder of tens of millions of their own citizens committed in countries with no free speech like Stalin's Russia and Mao's China.
>It absolutely works. There’s a reason Nazi propaganda is banned in Germany
If that's your metric for success it's absolutely failed, given the "Alternative for Deutschland" is now polling at over 20%.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
Or you've got a case of someone in country A filing suit over something happening in country A under the laws of country B. Now what is the company supposed to do if the laws in country A and country B conflict? Was following the laws in the country where they're operating (i.e. the country committing the atrocity) the outcome you wanted? What about leaving that country, so that people there have to use a service which is in that country?
"Everybody has free speech" doesn't solve every problem, but censorship doesn't solve any of those problems either, it just creates wicked new problems.
It does? Here's the full text of the First Amendment:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Which part of it says that? I don't see it anywhere.
The Supreme Court has ruled again and again that incitement is an exception to speech covered under first amendment.
No it doesn't. The First Amendment constrains the government from prohibiting most speech. It doesn't require any speech to be prohibited. If the US Congress wanted to be free speech absolutists, they wouldn't have to change the constitution.
> there are absolute cases when censorship is needed.
There are cases where most countries sanction it. That doesn't prove that it's needed.
Can you even name a case where it would be necessary as opposed to being possible to solve through e.g. vigorous enforcement of the laws against violence?
You're also avoiding the question. Sure, sometimes the same thing is illegal in both the US and China, but that's not the common case for free speech questions.
And putting aside the absolutist position, that's not even what you're arguing for here. The government can punish a direct speaker for imminent incitement of violence without imposing a prior restraint or putting intermediary liability on a third party who is merely a common carrier.
It does because I learned this in the law class I took in undergrad. A quick google search would’ve told you that there are limitations to first amendment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex...
> The constitution of United States, in the first Amendment prohibits certain speech
It does no such thing. It prohibits Congress from making laws that abridge the freedom of speech. Congress is not required to make any laws constraining speech, even if it is allowed to, and the First Amendment itself does not prohibit any speech.
Please tell me how?
They definitely straddle the line, but no court has judged them as Nazi yet. There were however other parties, like ANS, NO and FAP (amazing name) that were banned in Germany because of that. Perhaps that's why AfD has wised up.
Censorship does. Every time. Nazis, communists, every authoritarian or totaliatarian government, rely on censorship and restrict free speech heavily.
Bad ideas require censorship to survive the light of day.
- Joseph Goebbels
You can listen to this part at around 15:05 at this speech (if you speak German, of course): https://www.sr-mediathek.de/index.php?seite=7&id=37143
The take above is a classic well-meaning, but ill-informed opinion from an American with a lack of understanding of how the Nazis actually operated and how they could've been stopped.
- Joseph Goebbels
You can't know that for sure. If Nazi propaganda was not banned and the Nazi never took over again then free speech would work as well. We just don't know if banning speech has made less people pro Nazi.
Shortening “United States of America” to just “America” is not good. Brazil is part of America. USA is part of America. USA is not America.
https://popehat.substack.com/p/substack-has-a-nazi-opportuni...
It's a very American sense of "free speech" that allows for Nazis and forbids video that contains any topless people. (Which, if you've been to many parts of the world, is not at all obscene.)
They also ban this:
> You may not post or transmit any messages pertaining to charity requests, petitions for signatures, requesting donations, relating to pyramid schemes, or pertaining to the manipulation of the Rumble Service.
"Hey, can you sign my petition" sure seems like a cornerstone of free speech... surprised to see it considered against the rules by a supposed "principled" company.