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Comment by echoangle | Hacker News Reader

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Compliance with what exactly? When you bring servers down to Brazil it gets weird, outside just not supporting that region, not much you can't do about it. We never did anything in Brazil because it was such a huge pain in the ass, it's hard to get stuff in and expensive to rack once you're there. imo Good for fly for doing the work, even if they did have to slip someone a 5 on the way in.

Compliance with ISO 37001 for example. As a big company, you can’t just go around and bribe random border guards to get your stuff through.

I’m also not sure if it is illegal to pay bribes in other countries when you’re an American company. So compliance with laws is another problem when paying bribes.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act

Looks like it is explicitly forbidden to bribe foreign officials as a US entity. Not very smart to suggest you’re bribing people in other countries in official communications.

It's not overt, as they mentioned in their post, mystical fees just show up on your invoice from the government. I do agree tho, it's a really silly detail to include. I'm a bit passionate about this because I ran a long disability study at DigitalOcean to see if we could do Brazil.

I suppose you meant "feasibility study" or is "disability" the actual word?

Oh, that makes a lot more sense lol

What does a "disability study" mean in the context of international server installs?

Look at the Exception section.

Grease payments are allowed. You can’t bribe border guards to sneak things through, but if they demand a bribe to do their job or your servers get mysteriously blocked from import, paying them off is allowed.

> Despite efforts to provide advice, the distinction between grease payments and bribes remains a source of contention in FCPA enforcement, with legal experts and practitioners continuing to argue and interpret it.

Talk to corporate council before "grease payment"-ing anyone.

To be fair, Brazil does have weird and expensive customs/import duties on technology products, which makes a lot of hardware expensive. Maybe fly.io just didn't know about it and that's why they say "suspicious"; But yeah, it definetely sounds like admitting to bribery, which as an American-registered company is illegal even in other countries.

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