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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

The internet is a global system that spans ~all jurisdictions, and most internet criminals live in jurisdictions that don't prosecute internet crimes as long as the bad actors leave citizens of their own country alone.

So they're criminals as far as the US and allies are concerned, but de facto not criminals where they live. If they're going to be locked out of the system, it has to be by the infrastructure, because their government has no interest in stopping them.

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I see. Perhaps there should be a legal framework to get the government to demand companies like cloudflare stop serving these international criminals, then. That way it wouldn't depend on a private entity making the judgement.

Do you ever think it's weird that we have gone through web 1.0, web 2.0, semantic web, intertubes clogged with spam bots, web 3.0: crypto edition, and the dawn of AI scraping, and we still haven't figured out these issues?

Which government do you mean when you say "the government"? Any national government? Only the US government? Only governments in which the US is friendly and/or has agreements with?

Would you want authoritarian governments to be able to demand Cloudflare stop serving those they consider criminals that are outside their borders?

International law is messy.

The rule of thumb is governments where Cloudflare has equipment, personel, or banking.

There is a procedure to get a foreign case recognized in the US, too, but it has to be serious, and it's not an easy process.

CloudFlare has equipment in 120+ countries, including China: https://www.cloudflare.com/network/

I again ask: is it desirable for any of those countries to be able to unilaterally force a company to enforce its laws regardless of where the individual in question is?

If the equipment is in country X, it seems reasonable to enforce the rules of country X. Plenty of companies refuse to operate in specific countries, including China, because they don't want to follow rules of that country.

If CloudFlare chooses to do business in China, that's a choice they're making and it comes with consequences.

Maybe they can offer service where customers will only be served from equipment outside of China, maybe that's not something they choose.

For starters, Cloudflare is a USA company so it has to do whatever the USA government tells it. See National Security Letters.

They can easily order it to reveal the origin server of a website, or the sign-up IP address of the account, or to stop providing services to one.

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