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Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

Preston talks about this in an earlier blog post. It's a matter of UK law and, I'd bet, many countries, that they have the sovereign right to legislate about matters in and outside their borders. "If Parliament says smoking in Paris is illegal, it is illegal." What's different today than when that doctrine was conceived of is: data goes everywhere, communications are decentralized, international cooperation around especially data allows nations to enforce their own rules outside their own borders by treaty.

What was known and not said when Parliament might have outlawed smoking in Paris is that there was literally nothing they could do to enforce such a law. Today the governments have options, hence the fight here. And many other places.

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> It's a matter of UK law and, I'd bet, many countries, that they have the sovereign right to legislate about matters in and outside their borders.

Basically all countries take that position legally. But there are norms and customs about how often you exercise it (as well as practical questions of power).

Extraterritorial regulation of Web sites is unfortunately in the process of being established as normal, but it's a bad norm. Not as bad as drone striking anybody who lights a cigarette in Paris (which could be made legal), but a bad norm nonetheless.

Interestingly, Ireland seems to be one of the few countries whose constitution explicitly limits the reach of its laws:

> It is the firm will of the Irish nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island. Until then, the laws enacted by the Parliament established by this Constitution shall have the like area and extent of application as the laws enacted by the Parliament that existed immediately before the coming into operation of this Constitution.

(Which means the territory of what is now called the Republic of Ireland, that is, explicitly excluding any claim to Northern Ireland in order to comply with the Good Friday agreement)

Some activists should start making lots of complaints demanding that country A’s government sites comply with government B’s laws. Maybe the laws will change to reflect reality when government A says to fuck off

"Extraterritorial regulation of Web sites is unfortunately in the process of being established as normal, but it's a bad norm."

Perhaps "Extraterritorial regulation" is bad wording. A country can regulate whether an extraterritorial website is distributed and or viewed within its borders but it has no legal authority force another country to close down a website that's operating legally within its jurisdiction.

The only remaining options are diplomatic action—request the site be taken down or war/by force. Whether we like it or not the only practical action is for a country to geoblock offensive websites at its borders.

Sadly, given the current state of world affairs, it seems to me geoblocking will become the norm almost everywhere.

> Perhaps "Extraterritorial regulation" is bad wording. A country can regulate whether an extraterritorial website is distributed and or viewed within its borders but it has no legal authority force another country to close down a website that's operating legally within its jurisdiction.

The issue is they're doing this through might makes right rather than jurisdictional authority.

You have a website in one country, 99% of the content is legal in another country but it also contains a post by a user which is legal in the first country and not the second.

The second country then demands that the website remove the post -- for everyone, they don't even want it accessible via VPN -- or they'll have their ISPs block not just the entire website but also the entire shared hosting provider the website uses. The site which is entirely in the other jurisdiction can't withstand that much pressure and removes the post.

You now have a country censoring a post world-wide because they leveraged every company within their jurisdiction to enforce a law against one that isn't. That's extraterritorial regulation.

> You now have a country censoring a post world-wide because they leveraged every company within their jurisdiction to enforce a law against one that isn't. That's extraterritorial regulation.

Hopefully this will break up the cartel of websites/distributors back into a decentralised web eventually.

It would have to do the ISPs and that's a tall hill.

What happens if two foreign countries try to impose mutually exclusive laws?

Then they kiss

For many years, Google solved this by saying the laws of country X only applied in the country specific domain of Google.

They now seem to have backtracked on that and are using either the country the request came from or the country the account was set up from (both using IP geolocation)

If they both are able to enforce their laws on you, you get to choose which prison you go to.

Ok, but I feel like the UK government hasn't thought this matter through. Think about what happens if the US decides it can enforce US law on UK soil against UK citizens. The main industry of the UK is questionable international finance using legal fictions on various islands. What happens when the US decides that that shouldn't be happening anymore? Its the same logic OfCom is using here. And unlike the UK government, the US could actually enforce this stuff in person. The US literally has military bases outside London with tanks and artillary and airstrips. This isn't a road to continue down.

PS The UK doesn't have free speech and never has. Free Speech was invented by the Dutch and the US was the first to put it in a founding document.

PPS I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. That is outside the definition of sovereignty and something the UK government seems to have invented lately.

> PPS I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners.

The USA does this quite regularly. Look at FATCA as one example.

That law only covers US citizens (that are living abroad). So no, that's not a counter example.

Um, no, it attempts to compel foreign banks, which may not even have a presence in the US, to disclose information about US citizens, using various threats. It doesn't threaten to throw foreigners in jail, but it does threaten to use US government "clout" against them... and the actors it's trying to put obligations on are absolutely not US citizens.

Funny how you make tax evasion and money laundering on par with political speech. Fighting for your rights to be corrupt is a pretty weird take. If we can talk someone into doing what we want, that's perfectly legal as long as we or they aren't violating any laws. And nobody complains because getting dirty banks to spill is in everyone's best interests. Remember how happy everyone was at all the FIFA corruption data we uncovered.

They didn't make anything on par, they gave an example of the US government enforcing US laws on foreign entities abroad.

Another example is that e.g. AWS Europe, even if every single one of its employees, board and what have it are all Germans, are still compelled to hand over their data if Amazon US is the parent company, under the likes of the CLOUD Act or FISA. That's a foreign entity comprised of foreign citizens and concerns the assets (data) of foreign citizens.

It's only a tax evasion concern in the first place because the US started the trend of hoovering up wealth generated in other countries, which in-context still sounds like US overreach.

They weren't arguing for anyone's right to be corrupt in the first place though. If US citizens really have to pay extra taxes and have arduous reporting requirements then so be it, but why is the rest of the world dragged into that mess? This isn't a "dirty banks" issue; it's nearly impossible to get a bank account at any reputable institution as a US citizen abroad just because of the PITA of the reporting requirements. It's a mediocre law from questionable authority.

Besides the extraterritoriality issue, the other problem with FATCA is that it makes Americans living overseas (99% of whom are just normal people not trying to evade taxes) radioactive to overseas financial institutions because of the potential consequences of failing to report on someone's accounts properly.

Sadly a lot of Americans hear "foreign bank account" and immediately think "tax evasion" without realizing there are a lot of ordinary Americans overseas who just want to pay the rent and save for retirement but can't because Uncle Sam follows us wherever we go for life.

Plenty of honest and law-abiding Americans living abroad have a hard time banking because of this law. Many banks simply won't accept American citizens as clients. Even those that will let you open a current account won't let you have anything more complex.

Just one example: https://help.revolut.com/help/wealth/stocks/licences-regulat...

No, it places requirements on all bankers worldwide regardless of whether they have any presence in the USA. This is enforced requiring compliance from all US banks, and then by making any bank that comes into compliance sever relationships with any peered bank that isn't in compliance, so via a sort of recursive graph walk it brings every bank globally under US law because every bank is ultimately connected to some US bank somewhere.

> The USA does this quite regularly. Look at FATCA as one example.

The problem here is that some twits did something like this once and since then everyone is saying "but look, they're doing it, why shouldn't we?" when they ought to be saying "we're all going to be imposing sanctions on that country until they stop doing that".

If someone is doing something, that's precedent -- but the precedent can either be "someone who does that can get away with it" or "someone who does that is not going to get away with it". And when making the decision, think through the consequences of everybody doing it to you if you allow it to be the first one.

> What happens when the US decides that that shouldn't be happening anymore?

Like the US did with Swiss banks?

“…the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” — Thucydides, 5.89 (trans. Rex Warner, Penguin Classics edition)

(half-remembered quote found using AI)

original source https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_...

Book 5, end of paragraph 89

The US government in that case was requesting information on US citizens and not foreign nationals. I put in those last two words ("against foreigners") for a reason. If the UK government was trying to enforce UK law on UK citizens in the US, that's one thing. That's not what is happening with Ofcom, they want to enforce these laws against US citizens in US territory. That is a very blatant violation of US national sovereignty.

> Think about what happens if the US decides it can enforce US law on UK soil against UK citizens.

Yeah about that …

Try looking up Gary McKinnon or Larry Love. The US has a history of this stuff, those are just a couple of examples. Hell, Kim Dotcom (NZ but same deal).

And that’s before we get into whatever the f*ck was happening at Guantanamo Bay.

> I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners.

Then you haven’t been paying attention.

The US is quite literally killing people outside its borders every day. It even ran a program of kidnapping and torturing people from foreign countries for years, and still maintains a network of prisions outside America. The US very much thinks it can enforce its laws however and in whatever twisted fashion it likes.

> it can enforce its laws however and in whatever twisted fashion it likes.

The whims of its god-emperor/president. A lot of the enforcement is against US law.

That would be an acceptable response if it was just the last one president doing it, but it's been ongoing since WW2 at the very least.

I hold Russia as a whole accountable for Russia's recent war in Ukraine, it's their Responsibility to get rid of their leader when he started an unjustified invasion.

I hold the U.S. as a whole responsible for their successive presidents antics.

> Think about what happens if the US decides it can enforce US law on UK soil against UK citizens.

The US has asserted that right globally for quite some time, and literally threatened force against other countries to get them to actively support (not merely tacitly permit) such enforcement, even when it directly violated the constitutions of the countries involved (as well as simply doing armed enforcement without consent of the government iinvolved in other cases.)

This has been particularly notable since the outset of the “Global War on Terror”, but didn’t start there (it was a big part of US counter-narcotics policy long before the GWoT.)

There's a clear directionality there though. It doesn't work in reverse!

> I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners.

Really, not a single one? Like, a really big obvious one? LOL!

> I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. That is outside the definition of sovereignty and something the UK government seems to have invented lately.

The USA has been doing this for a long time e.g. Wikileaks and Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom etc.

They have thought about it. They're betting on a global turn towards censorship and opinion control. "One hour before your time - no more!"

> It's a matter of UK law and, I'd bet, many countries, that they have the sovereign right to legislate about matters in and outside their borders.

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the entire founding political mythology of the United States is pretty much "The Parliament of the UK tried to regulate our freedom of speech without even giving us a vote, and that was intolerable." Specifically, the Stamp Act was seen as suppressing the right of the American colonies to engage in political speech. (This wasn't the only reason for the Revolutionary War, but it's one of the ones we still remember. We remember it in part because laws regulating the publishers of political pamphlets get complained about in political pamphlets.)

This isn't a political issue in the normal sense. It's more like Guy Fawkes and the "gunpowder treason and plot." The one thing that the "Tea Party" and the "No Kings" protestors can probably still agree about is that the Stamp Act was bad, because this issue is part of the fundamental political mythology of the country. "The British Parliament does not get to regulate our speech" is right up there with "The President does not get to wear a crown."

This is not a fight that the UK government can actually win, not in the long run. Any US politician who allows Parliament to regulate the speech of a US citizen will find themselves in the awkward position of British politician who proposed a national monument to Guy Fawkes. Allowing this is "Un-American" in these sense that it goes almost directly against our founding patriotic mythology and symbolism.

The UK should just accept the geo-IP block of the UK as a compromise, and walk away. This particular fight isn't worth it. Trust me on this.

Of course though, it is not just the governments that have force enabled by the internet and the modern age.

We need to re-imagine the Parisian as an individual with exceptionally long arms lighting the tip of their cigarette in London...

> "If Parliament says smoking in Paris is illegal, it is illegal."

I'm not entirely sure if you yourself understand the context or real meaning of that phrase, but for others at least, it was NOT meant to highlight that Parliament has a burning desire or real ability to legislate outside of its jurisdiction!

Just that it has the legal authority to create any such law, and that the legitimacy of a law is not dependent on its moral content. It's merely a paraphrasing/summary of H.L.A. Hart's legal positivism.

What did Hart say about comity?

Why don't you tell us?

I think I got us there, when I mentioned that they had no means of enforcement, and so the statement was meant as you say - to be absurdist in practice underscoring the national sovereignty at the heart of the discussion. Is that what you think it means, out of curiosity?

> nations to enforce their own rules outside their own borders by treaty

More democratically-elected legislatures ought to say, “We don't give a shit about what our predecessors agreed to.” when it comes to treaties requiring restrictions on their own citizens.

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