Should a company be expected to obey the local 
  government and local laws, even if they seem unjust?

The best example I can think of, in my life time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement

The consensus then was 'boycott the nation.' I get the impression that, lately, it doesn't occur to people that a business walking away from money is even an option.

It was controversial at the time, and required shaming ("cancelling") companies that didn't boycott South Africa.

Similar tactics against Israel resulted in laws against boycotts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Anti-Boycott_Act

It's not clear that a boycott is a meaningful response in the context of these kinds of disputes. If Facebook gets an improper censorship demand from the Tunisian government and responds by cutting off Tunisia's Facebook access, aren't they just doing what the government wanted?

I think the idea is that if Facebook cut off all access, more people would be aware of what was happening and push the government to reinstate it. It could be construed as “bullying but through the populous” depending on who you ask.

The big problem with the “cutting them off” strategy is: if it’s a dictatorship, the people may not push back for fear of death

Why should Facebook cut off access, instead of simply ignoring the local laws? As a US citizen I honestly couldn't care less if the content of my website is criminal in Iran or Saudi Arabia.

As long as Facebook doesn't have employees or servers in that jurisdiction, it should ignore the laws of that jurisdiction. Let that country put up its own firewall.

What's probably happening here is that Twitter/FB/etc are afraid of that firewall threat. That's just spineless.

> As a US citizen I honestly couldn't care less if the content of my website is criminal in Iran or Saudi Arabia.

Doesn't need to be criminal, inconvenient is enough. Jamal Khashoggi's family should know.

Or pretty much anyone who puts up pictures of a certain Prophet.

> It's not clear that a boycott is a meaningful response in the context of these kinds of disputes.

I think the idea isn't so much a boycott specifically, but some kind of civil disobedience that specifically opposed to the improper law or regime.

> If Facebook gets an improper censorship demand from the Tunisian government and responds by cutting off Tunisia's Facebook access, aren't they just doing what the government wanted?

I agree. A more appropriate response would be to not comply, and make it clear that was intentional. That could even be amplified by taking deliberate steps to oppose such improper censorship.

* A more appropriate response would be to not comply, and make it clear that was intentional.*

Under WTO rules, Government of Tunisia would be able to ban FB at this point. I think the issue is that with every conceivable route, the process ends in GoT getting what GoT wants. Which is for Facebook to be gone.

Such is the nature of sovereignty. There's no clever techie hack around the ability of a government to enforce the rule of law in its own territory.

Depends on the law and the government. Encryption has a pretty good track record in lots of places. The whole Arab spring (and presumably many other political movements) was made possible by technology. Lots of people all over the world use technology to subvert authoritarian restrictions in their countries. Ultimately of course if a government has the means and the will, they can probably break a given encryption scheme, but it's quite asymmetric and in practice only the highest-profile violations are pursued and even then this is mostly concentrated to the wealthiest countries.

> around the ability of a government to enforce the rule of law in its own territory

Nitpick: "rule of law" doesn't mean "having laws" or "enforcing laws," it means everyone being subject to the same set of laws, including elites and the government itself.

Some countries without the rule of law, like the PRC, like to go on and on about the "rule of law" but mean something less:

https://www.justsecurity.org/58544/china-rule-law-cautionary...:

> Despite the Party’s current encouragement of “rule of law” and its celebration of the Constitution, Chinese rule of law—officially called “socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics”—differs fundamentally from rule of law as internationally understood. To begin with, all aspiring Chinese lawyers—at least according to the study material for one bar exam preparation course—must commit to the belief that law is subject to the “leadership of the Party.” The same bar review material further states that the fundamental principle of Chinese rule of law is to “maintain the rule of the Party.” Meanwhile, a recent bar exam question affirmed that “Western Capitalist Rule of Law Thought” is not an “origin” of Chinese rule of law. Accordingly, rather than promote basic principles such as the supremacy of law, legal accountability, judicial independence, and fair treatment before the law, fazhi is instead used as a rhetorical tool to legitimize the Party’s rule. It is the Party’s will restated in seemingly neutral and distinctly legal language, which draws on a long imperial tradition of legal discourse while rejecting norms of transparency and impartiality. By evoking fazhi, the Party seeks to attain greater credibility, and in turn inspire greater compliance, by drawing on both the high prestige accorded to rule of law and the Chinese tradition of obedience to edicts of the ruler and the precedents of the dynasty (qianli 前例).

This behaviour is not unique to the PRC, and, for an example, you see it all the time in political law-and-order rhetoric in the US. The law is sacred, the law must be obeyed, people are rightly punished for breaking the law, yet the law is enforced incredibly inconsistently, and for what are often quite political goals.

It comes to a particularly poignant moment at the top of the political structure, in the form of presidential pardons, many of them self-serving. (How their existence can be reconciled with claims about all men being equal under the law is mind-boggling.)

Rule of law is a sliding scale. Some countries have more of it, some have less of it, but from having lived in four of them, my observation is that none of them have enough of it. Violations of it simply manifest in different ways.

The post you reply to states that PRC sits on top law and that the law is designed to prop up its political power. When the two conflict the law is changed accordingly to the benefit of the PRC, although I'm sure they are nuanced enough to keep sea-changes to a minimum. Nevertheless it's there.

In the US that is not the case. Even in today's climate the Federal system does not have infinite reach into States ex. certification of 2020 vote. And there's yet broad independence and some institutional credibility e.g. Supreme court left.

However, it is applied inconsistently. The only recent decision out of SCOTUS that I think was seriously flawed was ACA: the imposition of a fee to have no health insurance was a tax. The court should have referred it back to the legislative branch for correction at its control. But even here, due process is broadly a real thing. I've also seen questionable court decisions in my personal life. I'm not enthused by the Citizen's United ruling either. However, the Congress has allowed and preferred less oversight on political speech.

In the large US corporations and the top 1% are not held accountable to the extent they should. (I am American). This broad trend started in the 2000s combined with Congress' lack of institutional credibility over the last 30 years to make a power vacuum. At the 1 million foot level, a person once argued power comes from tradition, or institutions, or personal. That vacuum that was filled by Trump's personal brand of power. Correct: his brand is no Steve Jobs, Buffet's, MLKs, or anything good. But it is power. Trump further eroded Washington's institutional power bringing it to a new low.

Wells Fargo opened up credit cards in client's names. After years of festering, the old CEO left because of this. But no criminal charges were filed. If you or I did that, I don't think we could run and hide or use shareholder cash for corporate lawyers to blunt the AG. Ditto the 2008 financial crisis: corporations got bailouts and did not face jail time under criminal convictions. These are examples of a widely complex systemic failure that probably shares blame in Congressional lobbying, corporation power, SEC failure to exact anything much more than lukewarm fines, and DOJ and State's failure to get the goods and bust the wrong doers. On top of this Congress has been no help. Another facet to this problem is the Stiglitz's observation that by defining corporation's mission as maximizing shareholder value, they have perversely come up with rhetoric that really serves to enrich themselves going a good way to explain the stupid difference between the bottom and top income rates. Further much their income is not W2 taxable, where it's hard to hide from the tax man.

Human law is not exact. Even in the most controlled, most precise, most repeatable processes e.g. statistically controlled manufacturing processes mainly in the realm of the electro-magnetic force ala condensed matter physics, there is standard deviation. And it's random. So we cannot bust the entire American system as fatally flawed because of a few bad outcomes at the personal, corporate, or country level.

Nevertheless the number of unjust outcomes where the law is more equitable to some, is a trend that's been notable, sustained, long, and extensively commented on. We know it stinks. And it's made worse socially and civilly with outsourcing to the far east and the two major political parties siding more and more with corporations. Rising healthcare costs, university costs hasn't helped either. Rising home costs associated with better K-12 schools is another big problem. Here we Americans need and deserve friendly fire: it would not kill us to rein in the excesses of money and lack of action against those with money to bring the pendulum back in the middle. And here we are stuck, flailing. It's pathetic.

Getting this back in the middle is not socialism, a repudiation of capitalism and the other variations on the same which are buttressed by vapid emotional outrage, and crap talking.

We know better: unlike the PRC there's plenty of outcry although true enough it's not translating into action. Unlike mathematics where the law of the excluded middle makes sense, we need the middle in human affairs. Perhaps the largest damage Trump has done and has further inflamed is removing the reasonable middle leaving two dumb options left over:

- go way left

- go way right

Both suck. It takes more brains, more backbone, a smarter mind, and better communication skills to keep things in balance than the bomb throwing, crap talking, lying that Trump is an expert in but which both political parties here are increasingly succumbing to. The middle in the vapid environment now looks like a cop-out to both sides. It's most definitely not.

In today's world of no pragmatic American common sense the only going currency is outrage, and talking about what we'll do in the next election e.g. in the perpetual future broad admission our institutions are lost. Do we really need to argue about who controls the paperwork for health insurance? Maybe one day. But what in the hell is the government doing today to get first and second derivative negative on health care costs? Does Congress need a balanced budget? No. We don't need a balanced budget amendment either. Running a 20-35% of GDP debt is OK. We're way north of 20% BTW ... But you can't get the morons in DC to see that closing the gap requires both MORE tax income and LESS expenditures. That requires competent management to set better priorities and a 15yr plan to right the ship. And for all the MBA's around here, we don't have it today.

Well stated. Thank you.

On some level it's not about should or shouldn't. The local government has the power to force a company to comply via a variety of enforcement tactics. There's no practical way for a company, on its own, to refuse orders from a government, unless they are willing to do as Google did in China so long ago and exit the country.

One question that I do think bears inspection is whether governments should offer assistance to companies mostly owned domestically that do business abroad. The US government could enter the fight on Facebook's behalf and force a better result. But that would require the USG to spend international political capital on behalf of the oppressed citizens of arbitrary foreign countries. It might be a better world if we did, but historically this has not been something we spend many resources on unless there is a geopolitical end that benefits us.

> There's no practical way for a company, on its own, to refuse orders from a government

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

Not confirming nor refuting, and it's worth noting that the CenturyLink lines are now more than likely under bulk surveillance... but one wonders what things would be like if there were more people like Mark Klein and Joseph Nacchio and Ed Snowden.

Some blame must be assigned to thinking creatures who succumb to learned helplessness in the face of illegal orders.

I think this is a little different. Demanding legal authority is all well and good. In a country where there is strong rule of law, like the U.S., then you should be in good shape as long as your nose is squeaky clean. This guy would not likely have gone to jail if he didn't do crime.

It's another story in a country where there is weak rule of law, or where legal authority gives the government powers that we in the U.S. consider oppressive.

We also have a not great reputation as Team America: World Police where were already perceived to be sticking our fingers where they don't belong.

A last thought is that involving the USG is going to create a vastly unequal amount of pressure. Were going to have a lot of leverage over poor countries that depend on the US directly or indirectly for humanitarian aid, trade or military protection.

Just take a look at what has happened to Cuba since we tried to change them. Still Communist, but now they also have tons of humanitarian issues because they lack access to a close first world trading partner. The regimes also don't seem any less brutal.

I also hate that the USG leaning on a country usually makes the citizens miserable, not the government. Just as an example, dictator in Blahland says Facebook has to ban these 15 journalists. Facebook refuses, dictator blocks Facebook. USG steps in and demands that they unblock Facebook, or we withold humanitarian aid. The dictator says fine, it's not like he/she is going to starve. We withold aid, causing famine and instability in the region. At the end of that, are we really the good guys? The journalists still have no access, Facebook is still blocked, and now there's an escalating humanitarian crisis.

I'm not well versed in politics though, perhaps there are more surgical means to apply pressure.

You're absolutely right, our reputation right now is not great, because of the purposes for which we've deployed our power. You could imagine a world where we actually deploy it selflessly, but I don't know if that can really happen at an international level. It certainly hasn't yet.

> but I don't know if that can really happen at an international level

It already happens, look at all the countries with peacekeeper forces such as Uruguay

The U.S. has peacekeeper forces with the UN too. Unfortunately, I don't think the mere existence of these forces is enough to outweigh other issues in the mind of the international community. Uruguay might gain international standing by sending peacekeepers to the UN, but if so, it's only because they don't do anything adverse to offset that goodwill.

>Perhaps there are more surgical means to apply pressure.

What happened when a leader tried to move off the US Dollar and onto the gold standard for international trade? 4th generation warfare using social media to organize a civil war resulting in the execution of the leader.

What happened when a dictator tried to move off the US Dollar and onto the Euro for oil trade? Invaded in 2003 using a false pretense to delude the public in favor of supporting the initiative.

Surgical enough?

This is a great question. One could say that you obviously not censor content if a classical dictator asks you to.

But what about more subtle cases like when IKEA removed all images in their Saudi version of their catalogue? That obviously didn't sit well with even IKEA.*

When does something become 'unjust' enough to not comply with local laws?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/02/ikea-apologise...

As a concrete example in this case; Facebook does not have an office (or any legal entity) in Tunisia.

Besides informal relationships with the authorities, I don't see why they "have" to abide by any local law?

PS: Tunisia has internet transparency laws, so they can't go blocking Facebook (or any other website) at a whim.

I have no office or legal entity in the United States, yet there are US laws which, if I broke them, would cause the United States to attempt to extradite me. For example, see Kim Dotcom.

I strongly agree with you on the idea that companies and people should only need to obey the laws of the countries they operate in, but you must recognize that this idea is not currently the status quo, is actually fairly radical, and is strongly opposed by a lot of very powerful governments, including the United States.

Extradition typically relies on an action being a crime in both nations. Refusing to disable accounts critical of a government would not be against the law in America, and we also have no extradition treaty with Tunisia. She couldn't do squat.

They could try to extradite FB employees when they travel to countries they do have an agreement with.

Arguably it would be much, much harder if you had formal separation.

Kim Dotcom had servers in the US - in fact, nearly their entire server fleet if not entirely was in Virginia, vendors in the US, collected payment for illegal downloads and uploads in the US, in USD. Their primary domain was a .com, which is owned by Verisign, a US company.

This would likely not be the case if you were running on a ccTLD in your own country, hosted in your own country, at least.

>I have no office or legal entity in the United States, yet there are US laws which, if I broke them, would cause the United States to attempt to extradite me.

If you are in Canada and hire somebody to rob a bank in the US, you have violated American law and can be extradited. This works in reverse too. If you are in the US and hire somebody to rob a bank in Canada, you have violated Canadian law and can be extradited.

>For example, see Kim Dotcom.

Poor example because Megaupload had a US nexus.

> Should a company be expected to obey the local government and local laws, even if they seem unjust?

Should people be expected to object the local government and local laws, even if they seem unjust? Besides the fallacy of composition, what makes companies different from people?

> Should people be expected to object the local government and local laws, even if they seem unjust?

People are expected (though not necessarily predicted) to do the moral thing.

> Besides the fallacy of composition, what makes companies different from people?

In their purest form, companies are basically AI entities made of people engineered to replace the human conscience with bare minimum legal compliance, in order to sociopathically pursue maximum shareholder value.

I don't see where justice comes in. That's between friends. Companies expand and governments adjust them.

Banana republics are born from broken governments, which brings negative outcomes to the people. Governments that close off to the corporate world lack capital growth.

Companies don't spread values into other countries anymore than invading armies of yesteryear. The life and death that comes with corporate money is what it is. They may reveal underlying values and profit off them. Corps may discover certain business is not desired, but corporation values won't change the country.

The only values companies need to care about is the ones that will get them kicked out of their host country, or are shared worldwide.

No, they should respect the laws from they’re internal regulations, not to an external state where the company doesn’t have offices/HQ. The company can go out from these states like in China. I can’t find the point in offering a place to talk/discute in critical states and after censorship they’re users. It’s pointless.

Mass news media have always suppressed or ignored critics that were not congruent with domestic political regimes. Why should digital platforms be any different?

The vaunted Arab Spring in this plea had a pretty mixed outcome. Libya is a messs, Egypt ended up with another dictator after overthrowing a democratically elected organization (which the west didnt want, but was the only viable party after the same said west pushed for quick elections), and Syria ended up with a civil war, ISIS and same regime after every western and digital platform insisted for years that the regime was on its last legs.

The only platform that didn’t restrict Trump was twitter. Even (most of) Fox opposed him until it was clear he was going to mop up the primaries. He may be mainstream now, but the states and platforms have closed that loophole for now.

Tunisia seems to be the only country that had at least one thing positive out of the arab spring, which is a better level of democracy (already had 3 democratic elections in the past decade). Perhaps Tunisia isn't as diverse as Egypt, Libya or worse, Syria in terms of tribes or religious sects and I'd attribute that to its success.

How about companies operate in their local markets and we abolish multinationals?

Your laws, which seem right to you, are only right to you because of your cultural values.

So, ideally, companies should follow laws of governments they operate in.

But we have seen over and over through history that companies bring their values and disrupt the local culture.