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Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

> Is anyone else as confused as I am about how common anti-openness and anti-freedom comments are becoming on HN?

In this specific case I don't think it's about being anti-open? It's that a business with only physical presence in one country selling a service that is only accessible physically inside the country.... doesn't.... have any need for selling compressed air to someone who isn't like 15 minutes away from one of their gas stations?

If we're being charitable to GP, that's my read at least.

If it was a digital services company, sure. Meatspace in only one region though, is a different thing?

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> In this specific case I don't think it's about being anti-open? It's that a business with only physical presence in one country selling a service that is only accessible physically inside the country.... doesn't.... have any need for selling compressed air to someone who isn't like 15 minutes away from one of their gas stations?

But that person might be physically further away at the time they want to order something or gather information etc. Maybe they are on holidays in Spain and want to access their account to pay a bill. Maybe they are in Mexico on a work trip and want to help their aunt back home to use some service for which they need to log in from abroad.

The other day I helped a neighbor (over here in Europe) prepare for a trip to Canada where he wanted to make adjustments to a car sharing account. The website always timed out. It was geofenced. I helped him set up a VPN. That illustrated how locked in this all has become, geofencing without thinking twice.

I guess GP didn't provide enough info, but to me it looked like it was the underlying infra that is networked

That is I'm assuming:

1. Customers are meatspace only, never use any computer interface 2. The network access is for administration only 3. That administration is exclusively in the US

That's the most obvious answer but if that's the case then restricting to "US" is way too wide in the general case and also too narrow if an employee takes a trip to another country and tries to check in. That simple task is fundamentally flawed to the point it's not worth worrying about.

> In this specific case I don't think it's about being anti-open?

The anti-open part was the mention of “allowed to become”, as if we needed to disallow something to achieve this unstated goal.

"only need US customers to be able to" vs "want non-US customers to be unable to"

you're being obtuse, GP clearly wants a locked down internet

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