There is utterly nothing the Swedish government can do to stop Signal except for pressuring app stores and/or ISP-level censorship. Preemptive surrender is extremely disappointing, especially for a non-profit - there isn’t even any revenue that can be ‘fined’ by the EU!
They can go after executives and employees of foreign companies, too. The charges may not mean much unless those employees travel through Sweden, but if the political winds change in the future then they may be able to convince other countries to enforce their charges against employees as well.
It’s reasonable for a company to avoid risking their employees becoming targets of detention for international travel.
It also more effectively highlights the political issue within Sweden if people there see the consequences of the laws of their elected officials rather than having those laws silently ignored by a company that takes the legal risk upon themselves.
https://www.google.com/search?q=apple%20eu%20alternative%20a...
The end result of which, if done at large scale, means that an EU government couldn't ban signal, short of forcing all its domestic ISPs to be downstream of a China type great firewall, or simply null route all the IP space where signal's servers are located.
Side-loading is harder to enforce any rules over, of course.
Blocking domains is well-established at this point, thanks to the copyright industry doing a 21.5-year whack-a-mole-waltz with The Pirate Bay. Of course, this also demonstrates the limited effectiveness of domain blocking.
Extremely limited effectiveness, when VPN operators like Mullvad are corporations based in Sweden and offer 5 euro a month service to bypass whatever local "mess with internet traffic" activity, whether government-caused or not, that someone's last mile ISP is up to...
There's also the game of whack a mole with taking ownership of domains at the registrar/ICANN level through court orders, such as with the various .com or similar things that get jacked and plastered with a "DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED" notice by the US feds.
Yes, Signal may be headquartered in the US, but that doesn't mean they can just ignore the laws of other countries, which is exactly what may happen here, depending on the outcome.
Sweden may propose a backdoor (a utterly shitty idea, I agree) which Signal may decline (which this submission is about). Then the next step is either Sweden giving up on the request, or placing fines on Signal until they comply or outright ban it, or Signal deciding it isn't worth it (prevent Swedish users from using Signal).
All within their capacities and rights, even though I again think it would very stupid approach.
My friend's medium size regional ISP is headquartered in the US and as a hosting company certainly has customers who violate any number of censorship, blasphemy, etc laws in Iran, Russia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Bangladesh, just to name a few.
Signal doesn't "operate" in Sweden any more or any less than any other internet based service which has zero servers, offices, bank accounts or other physical presence in the country.
Sweden can fine Signal all they want but if they can't enforce the collection, they weaken their power and foster disrespect.
Doing that would eliminate so many Swedes from Signal...
I haven't found a VPN solution for iPhone users in a couple of US states. It's like iphones are actively hostile to the very idea of a VPN. Or at least "self-hosted VPN", maybe the $20/month VPN work but that's... Sketchy.
How are they operating? It might as well be viewed as citizens of Sweden interacting with a foreign service out of their own volition.
In general, laws are backed up by the threat of violence. To the extent that Sweden's police can't confiscate Signal's assets in the US, they do not have to comply with anything. The only leverage Sweden's government may have is ISP level censorship, which is likely to cause unintended disruptions. Signal is in turn free to attempt to circumvent the censorship.
I would be surprised if Swedish law allowed for prosecuting a foreign company with not one bit of operations in the country.
Borrowing from how tax & law is usually applied for companies trading outside of their incorporated country, at least in many places including the EU: If you have users/customers in a certain country, even if your product is purely software, you can be considered to have operations in that country.
Couldn't users in pretty much every internet-connected country use VPNs and other methods of cross-borders indirection to access even those US services which explicitly block non-US IP ranges?
If this is the case, then is it not the case under the quoted reasoning above that any internet company should be expected to have operations in every other internet-connected country?
It's the same reason Australia and now South Africa demand payment from Meta and Google for revenues related to links going to local news sites and the like.
If no money is changing hands, good luck with that. (Or, rather, bad luck with that.)
(If money is changing hands, you might find your payments blocked by local payment providers, though even then that would take a while and might or might not happen.)
You're joining two things here which I think are important to keep separate--the demand and the enforcement.
The Province of Bumbinga can absolutely claim worldwide jurisdiction and fine Apple $1T. And they can fine them a further $1T for every day they're not paid and their waterslide is not built.
Hell, _I_ could send Apple a letter claiming they owe me a trillion dollars so I can build a waterslide.
But when Apple doesn't pay a trillion dollars... then what? Send them angry letters? Still doesn't get the waterslide built.
A legal system's power isn't the orders it's the enforcement mechanism behind it. With a local presence they have the option to seize local assets and bank accounts, forcefully close operations, arrest employees, etc.
When the company has no local presence, your only enforcement mechanism is gaining the cooperation of a foreign country, in which case the country they're headquartered in is very relevant. And they're only going to cooperate if your request aligns with their ideals and generally benefits them.
Except in the most extreme cases, it's generally not worth it to try and impose your rule outside your borders because you have no mechanism to make anyone comply. It's an empty threat. Jurisdiction in the international sense is descriptive not prescriptive. It's recognition of the limits of your authority. The outcome is the same with or without it.
Signal may have users in Sweden which Sweden sees as giving it jurisdiction. Sweden may see it being accessible at all as giving them jurisdiction. Sweden may say "screw it, we have jurisdiction over the whole world!". But their ability to enforce that more or less ends at requiring ISPs to block their traffic or asking the US government to enforce their orders within US borders, so it's kind of a moot point.