Which country ?
Sometimes I set my VPN destination to the UK (my country of origin) to get around these. Then I find that I have other problems. For example, certain Reddit posts are unavailable to me because someone has posted a comment that some algorithm has decided is NSFW (and therefore triggers age verification under the UK Online Safety Act 2023).
The result is that I have to turn my VPN on and off depending on what I'm trying to do.
If you want to make gambling illegal, then make gambling illegal and then enforce that law. You don't need to resort to indirect measures that go beyond the law (e.g. by preventing me from merely viewing the odds on a gambling website).
How would you solve this.
US citizens living in states without legal gambling can often drive across state lines or to the nearest Native American reservation to gamble. There’s no way of preventing this nor does there need to be.
Indian society is unconcerned, if not outright supportive of this law.
Your counterpoint zeroes in on the specific example, but in addressing it avoids the spirit of the issue.
People want certain laws and restrictions. You are arguing that if people choose to circumvent those laws, tough beans.
Heck, you could just have nations destabilize neighbors by this lassiez faire approach.
Even China, who has probably the most sophisticated information controls in the world, can’t prevent leaks through the Great Firewall. They just rely on it being “good enough” to restrain the general public.
Put another way, your country can make all the laws it wants, but it can’t change the laws of another country or force them to change how their network behaves, at least not without a fight. And in a world of billions of people, the global network will always be doing something that you don’t approve of, somewhere!
Remember we started are working from here
> If you want to make gambling illegal, then make gambling illegal and then enforce that law. You don't need to resort to indirect measures that go beyond the law (e.g. by preventing me from merely viewing the odds on a gambling website).
From your argument the only option is to not make anything illegal that is legal in the nation of minimum laws.
Are you arguing that nations - voters - should have no say in what laws they want to live under ?
Do note that I am all for less government control. But our current regulatory and rights landscape is not resolving the questions our voters and infrastructure is throwing up.
Eventually, everything runs on some infrastructure. Control will be forced.
If we want to prevent it, we need to have answers to the issues being thrown up by users.
You can make certain digital behavior illegal for your citizens, but enforcement is always going to be difficult. If you invasively spy on them to try and force them into your model digital behavior, it will cause unrest. If you try to block specific sites at the border, you will take down unrelated sites and breed contempt for the law. By pushing people farther and farther underground, you eventually connect them with organized crime and foreign governments.
In the long run, your insistence that the network be controlled is going to lead to either civil breakdown or totalitarianism. Perhaps that’s the inevitable consequence of connecting humanity as we’ve done. But I suspect that countries who are more digitally permissive will not face the same dilemma.
(Note that people usually accept laws where a victim can be identified. A digital crime with a real victim is still a crime, and standard policing methods can often track down the perpetrator. No need to break the internet for these cases.)
local laws are local and not global. otherwise we could start obeying Iran's or North Korea's laws just to be safe of not breaching any local laws.
Got it
I might have changed my dns in the past
Websites deciding EU users are not valuable enough to comply with GDPR is, as you say, also not censorship. It is again the technical decision of some website owners to provide their content only in conjunction with illegal processing of your data.
I have not had issues accessing torrent indices from the EU. This too is usually handled domestically and has little to do with the EU.
There is legitimately dangerous (current and upcoming) EU legislation (Chat Control, eIDAS, age verification, previously the Data Retention Directive), so I don't think it necessary to weaken your argument by listing non-examples.