Re:Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at Chi...
by tsimionescu on Saturday June 13, 2020 @10:19AM
(#23509508)
> That doesn't change if "flies with an international flight" changes to "travels virtually via an international TCP connection".
That is not at all clear. In general, the place where I physically stand is the place whoze laws I expect to be affected by, in any transaction. Of course, this is also true of you sitting near your server, so there is a conflict.
Also, I suspect international commerce is more complex than that, and that if there were a conflict between German laws and US laws on the consumer's rights in your example, the German laws might have some power against you (well, probably not with the US specifically).
I disagree with this. I have an open port at 80 and 443 and whoever wants to connect to it can do so. If my server is physically in the US, it only needs to obey US laws. If someone is violating their country's (weird) laws by visiting the server, that's that person's problem.
It's not my job as a developer, website host, or business owner, to for example ink out photos of women because Saudi law requires that. It's not my job to remove references to the Tiananmen incident. Those countries can, if they would like to, censor my website at their borders with a firewall, I don't care. It's not even my job to track down where your IP address is physically located. I couldn't care less about your IP. You could be using a VPN, for all I know.
Iran or China has issues with my website? They'll block it. Problem solved. I don't have to think about it too much. They do the work for me.
EU has beef with my website? Go ahead, you block it too, I don't care. I'll grab some popcorn and sit back and watch how your citizens react. (hee hee)
> And much more uncontroversially, if you are accepting payments from someone in another country, then you are definitely doing business in that country.
I disagree with this, as well, if those payments are coming from individuals and not businesses. If an individual in Germany flies over to the US and buys something from me, they are subject to US laws in that transaction. They are subject to German laws when they take that thing back. But in NO part of the entire process am I subject to German laws.
That doesn't change if "flies with an international flight" changes to "travels virtually via an international TCP connection".