Hacker News Reader

Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

Is this something that cities can really enforce? Like I get that NYC is a bit of an exception but let's say a 5 person town in Wyoming decides that they want to make this practice illegal and they all vote to do so. It's not clear to me that would mean anything at all.

View on HN

NYC has ~2% of the US population, and it’s a relatively wealthy slice compared to the mean. NYC has roughly 13x as many people as the entire state of Wyoming. I could see a company writing off Wyoming entirely (not likely, but possible) but not NYC.

States like CA, FL, NY, and TX can pass state laws that create defacto national regulations through sheer size, but smaller than that and you’ll have trouble.

Sure but say some company based in Lousiana has a website that violates NYC law.

What exactly will NYC do about it? Is there some mechanism to for them to block the website inside of NYC? The company would presumably have no property they could seize or employees they could imprison.

If it were a state passing the law then they could sue for enforcement in federal court but I don't think a city could?

I think, in practice, they'll only spend effort enforcing against service companies in the city, he announced the policy at a gym. As a bonus, a bunch of web companies happen to have NYC presence.

Surprise! They can imprison the employees

It ultimately depends on if there is overriding state or federal law. But yeah, it's something a city can enforce.

A small town in Wyoming could do the same and could sue (and probably win) against businesses that do business in that small town and break the law. What most likely happens in that case is that small Wyoming town ends up blacklisted by that business.

Your question answers exactly how enforceable it is. It’s directly linked to your population size and how much it can hurt the wallet of the company.

Edit: but also, who cares? Literally no solution to anything on earth works for EVERYONE

This is one way how "states rights" types of policies will favor large corporations at our expense. We need strong advocates for regular people at the highest level of law/enforcement. Having advocates at all levels is good, of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com