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Comment by alexey-salmin | Hacker News Reader

> One cannot legally run a hosted, unmoderated content platform in the developed world, one will always be required to remove illegal materials and turn over materials in cooperation with law enforcement.

Should you remove e.g blasphemy which is illegal in many countries including some of what I assume you call "developed world"?

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If you are a multi-national with a legal presence in that country you likely have the resources to engage local counsel in answering that question and to assist in understanding the legal risks of various business decisions.

I don't ask for legal advice, I ask you how do you imagine the "always remove illegal content, easy" part of your plan to work? There's no common definition of what is legal. E.g do you suggest removing content if it's illegal anywhere in the world?

This really isn't a difficult question to answer: You remove the smallest subset of content such that you are allowed to operate in the markets in which you plan to operate/have a business presence in/plan to visit.

That's an imaginary simplicity since there is no such thing: determining a subset requires very high certainty in the rules (to be able to apply them and not run afoul), which doesn't exist in any real legal system

Hence why every company with sizeable operations in multiple jurisdictions has a huge team of lawyers…?

No HN comment is ever going into the same depth as the output of a hundred plus lawyers. But the parent points in the right general direction.

Never heard a joke about 2 lawyers = 3 opinions? That one points in the right general direction, which is the opposite of the parent's one

They just needed to remove the CP and none of this would be happening.

This doesn't even pass the smell test of their actual charges

The defendant in question is a French citizen, being arrested in France, so if I were similarly situated I would expect to follow French law at a minimum.

My answer wasn't intended to be dismissive, truly, the answer will be specific to ones legal situation and the jurisdictions they plan to operate in and are best answered specifically by competent counsel in those jurisdictions after considering ones specific facts. Asking if ones should comply with laws "anywhere in the world" is not a useful question by itself.

Why would you not ask for legal advice on potential legal issues when registering users from countries you do not operate in? That is the only way you can understand the definitions of what is and is not legal in those countries.

I've never ran a web service personally, but to me it seems blocking access from UK, FR, DE is going to be the real long-term solution. Direct user participation from those regions are irrelevant anyway. That's going to narrow the problems down into actually working with police agencies in good faith and bypassing payment processors moral policing.

You should certainly have a formal process to respond to those countries’ requests, and you might consider technical architectures that don’t leave you in direct custody and control of that content in the first place.

> You should certainly have a formal process to respond to those countries’ requests

Mere responding is evidently not enough, you need to cooperate.

> you might consider technical architectures that don’t leave you in direct custody and control of that content in the first place.

This rules out the "public channel" feature.

Essentially what you say boils down to a global publishing platform being impossible nowadays without random and contradictive censorship acts.

While this is probably true, I definitely don't share the "yeah throw him to jail" sentiment. On the contrary, I miss very much the truly global Internet of early 2000s. If this was possible back then, it must be, generally speaking, possible? Are we going to see anything like this again in our lifetimes?

> Mere responding is evidently not enough, you need to cooperate.

Only if the request is coming from a country with a lot of power to effect its judgments internationally, or from a country you plan to personally visit. Whether or not you agree with it, ignoring legal requests from the US, China, and the EU (and debatably some other countries), isn't really an option in this day and age.

> or from a country you plan to personally visit

Until you wanted to visit a small country on vacation and forgot you ignored their court order 4 years ago.

Or you visit some random country and didn't check the extradition treaties they have with some other country you thought you'd never visit.

Or maybe new extradition treaties (yay!)

The sad conclusion I'm seeing in this story is: If you make an internet service, it's safer to just block off all the countries except the specific ones you're planning to operate in.

We need forums in my town. Anyone can set one up in minutes if it has already been done. But even if the site is about engines, you can't be sure that some data is not what it seems. It could be a plot to burn down Parliament, or it could offend people from a peaceful country who humbly want to reconstruct the map of the world back to 100 BC.

You just don't know. And so we do not even have a single local forum.

I am pretty sure that aiding criminal activity or child pornography are illegal in more countries than not, which are on the list of charges, and can be expected to do against from anyone, and ontopic here. Unlike blasphemy.

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