> That changes when the "wholly USA" website is being used by German citizens, who are under jurisdiction.

Then block the website in your country. If I have no physical, legal, or economic presence in your country, I shouldn't expect to have to follow your laws. Do I need to start enforcing Thai lèse majesté laws too, now?

Well you don't. Telegram blocked the channel in germany. So I don't get what your anger is all about then. Telegram Operators were given the choice of leaving germany entirely and blocking users there, be blocked by germany or remove the channel. They choose their favorite option.

Germany forced Project Gutenberg to block them for a time as well.

This should not be the responsibility of the website owner to comply with the laws of a country they don't have a presence in, presumably under threat of either extradition or arrest if they one day happen to enter the borders of the country.

If the website doesn't comply with the laws of the country, that country should block it, and that should be the extent to the action they can reasonably take. Unless you think Belarus should be able to arrest somebody passing through their airspace because, say, some other individual made a comment critical of Lukashenko on their blog?

So you also think that website owners should not be allowed to block content if they think a particular country is worth their business? Because that is what is actually happening, not made up fantasies about "forcing them". Either you block or they block, and it's not a crime for one side to do it first (what should I bet that if Germany blocked Telegram it would be a similar outrage in the comment section???)

No, I think countries should not be allowed to bully people who have no presence in their country under threat of extradition or arrest if they ever happen to step foot in their country.

Project Gutenberg ended up complying with German copyright law even though they have zero presence in Germany precisely because they were bullied in this fashion.

They complied to german copyright law in germany. They didn't block anything in outside countries so I wouldn't call that bullying. The other option is being blocked in or blocking germany.

PG initially blocked Germany in order to appease the court (defying a court order may have affected their case). They repeatedly asserted, however, that the German courts did not have jurisdiction over them since they had zero presence in Germany, and only fought the case because of the various punishments the German government could have meted out otherwise. Germany blocking PG was not something the court had presented as in the cards, and obviously PG would have found that acceptable since they blocked Germany themselves.

The onus should have entirely been on Germany to block PG if they didn't comply with German laws, not on PG to block Germany so that users in Germany couldn't violate German law.

Liking it or not you do have legal or economic presence when you accept people in Germany to visit your site (e.g at first more than a few American websites simply blocked all EU traffic after GDPR was approved), and if you keep violating the local law after being requested to cooperate, they will fine, emit arrest requests and sure enough if deemed necessary also block your website temporarily/permanently, in other words they will do what they would do in any other case even if the full application of the law is less effective because you are not physically there (or have any interest to be) to personally see a big difference in your quality of life.

Then block the website. It's not my responsibility to bring my website into compliance with the laws of all 200 countries in the world and the laws of the jurisdictions within them. Because of VPNs, it's impossible to tell which users belong to which countries (and even without it, geo IP isn't that reliable).

> e.g at first more than a few American websites simply blocked all EU traffic after GDPR was approved

Those websites have parent companies who have an economic presence in the EU.

Or they didn't have a parent company with even more economic presence than just them (serving American-centric news with ads), but they would like to have that path still easily open in the future, after all its a big market and... that's the point. Off course you can literally ignore all legal requests for compliance from all foregein countries until they do the worst that they can legally do to you which isn't much if you truly have no particularly strong personal or business related interest in them (lose users that you didn't care to have in the first place, cut a travel destination off your list because if you show up you can be held in prison for not paying a fine... Or whatever), but telegram is not you and apparently they care about being able to continue do business there (allowing people in Germany to use the chat app), so not complying is not a option.

Should Belarus be allowed to arrest a blogger who enters their airspace because somebody else made a critical comment about Lukashenko on their blog?

"Should" has no place in what I'm trying to explain to you. I have never said laws are always fair or anything like it. The point is that you can't have your cake and eat it too, by saying "but my servers are in the usa, just like the physical office", "but it is truly impossible to stop every German user to use my site" and stuff like that you will only sound extremely naive, what they (you or anybody) can do is ignore the request to comply with foregein law and suffer the consequences (be blocked there and/or several others) or comply with the foreign law and that doesn't mean necessarily removing the content (focusing in this case), they can opt to make a honest attempt at blocking Germany users from using the app (leave the German market).

If the consequence is blocking, that's completely acceptable. If the consequence is that I have to comply with the laws of 200 jurisdictions and probably more or otherwise get arrested if I step foot on their soil (or pass through their airspace), that's completely unacceptable.

Well you always have the option of not doing business in 200 countries, just because the internet made that easier it doesn't mean you must... About consequences for completely ignoring the courts that will depend on what exactly you are being accused of facilitating/doing, who's accusing you... Just as usual.

That is asinine. It's not 'doing business' in 200 countries just because I haven't blocked my website everywhere outside of America.

If somebody breaks German law, that's their problem, and this is the convention for matters outside of the Internet, too. US CBP, for instance, doesn't hold the seller responsible for complying with import laws and duties, that's the responsibility of the importer. That's because it would be enormously complex to figure out the laws of every place someone is meant to sell to, whereas the buyer only needs to know the laws of where they live.

Really? I don't think so, your example doesn't even seem particularly good, the importer is the one operating in two countries and that should know what he can legally buy in one and bring to the other, this is not a particularly new concept, in the same way I don't believe telegram itself would get in trouble if someone from another country entered Germany with the app installed in their phone.

Yes, this is really so. I can even confirm this is the case in Europe, as I once lived in the EU and paid import duties myself on something I imported from America.

In the case of Project Gutenberg and Telegram, the German side is the consumer, so it's entirely comparable. If the app or website is illegal in Germany, Germans who use it are the ones breaking the law here.

If I sell chocolates in America, and somebody in Germany where I have zero presence buys them, I should not expect to get arrested if I step foot on German soil because I used an ingredient banned in Germany. If I run a blog in America, and somebody in Germany comments 'Heil Hitler', I should not expect to get arrested if I have a layover flight in Berlin because I didn't delete that comment. To say otherwise is absolutely deranged. Germany can sieze my chocolates in customs - that's fine. They can block my blog - that's also fine. Your implications here are in utter contradiction to existing international law concerning the import and export of goods.

I challenge you to consider how it could be any other way - if the onus is on the other side, why stop at the website operator for not blocking Germans from their site? Is the host not also responsible? The ISP? Should FedEx be responsible for not inspecting their packages for illegal chocolates?

You you didn't understand and I would like to try again, put bluntly: things don't teleport or cross borders by themselves, so someone is always operating in mutiple jurisdictions and can be prosecuted in more the one, traditionally for physical goods it's usually the importer who buys stuff in a place (and can be prosecuted for that if it's something illegal to buy in the origin country), and sell it in another (and can be prosecuted for that if it's something illegal to sell/own/eat/whatever in the destination country), off course the original seller in the origin country or the final buyer in the destination country can also be prosecuted in theirs respectively jurisdictions as well... Now for some online services like chat apps and whatnot there's no such middle man, people in Germany are only able to use telegram because telegram is directly providing the service for them, so if keeping some text online/acessible to people in Germany is illegal the government will go after the person/group responsible for that, in this case telegram to fine/whatever, they even usually provide guidance in cases like this (like "hey providing this kinda stuff over here is illegal, fix your service - delete the content, make it not available to people here/etc - before we have to go to court"), if writing such text is also illegal whoever did it is also in trouble.

> Now for some online services like chat apps and whatnot there's no such middle man

There are plenty of middlemen. There are the hosting services. There are the ISPs. There are the CDNs. If you're going to make Telegram legally liable for these matters, then why not AWS, ISPs, and CDNs?

I can't reply the other one but you truly are grasping for straws, in your exemple you coud get convicted in the origin country if buying was illegal, for importing and for owing/using it in the destination country if those were offences. That's exactly what is going on here, there's no middle man providing the telegram service for people in Germany so if hosting/providing that service is illegal (because telegram allows pro-nazi stuff or whatever) who else but telegram will be held responsible? They are the ones operating in Germany providing the chat/group message thing, if there were a middleman (like it happens with games in some cases) the court would be talking to them, just like happens (traditionally) with importers.

If Telegram is illegal to use in Germany and it has no presence in Germany, its users in Germany are the ones breaking the law. To act as if Telegram faces criminal liability for simply not blocking Germany is as asinine as acting as if an exporter faces criminal liability in the destination country when they have zero presence there.

The middle man I'm talking about is the one operating in mutiple jurisdictions, so that the "true" seller or buyer doesn't have to (like a importer usually works, buy stuff in a place and brings it to another), what you are talking about is like the shipping company, storage facility owner that rents it out to the importer and stuff like that and those people do get in trouble if they try to get in the middle of the investigation (it would be the same if eg aws did not comply with a judge order of providing the name of who is operating a site so they can get a notice about the illegal stuff they are hosting/providing to users in Germany).

I wasn't the middleman when I imported the product. I was the end user. I have also imported products into the US where I was the end user. Complying with American law and European law was my responsibility in both cases, not that of the seller.

And that's the thing by definition it is literally impossible to be an exporter to country X without operating there. In the same way it is literally impossible to claim that telegram is not providing a service for people in Germany if people in Germany a literally using the service as provided by telegram. You want to have our cake and eat it too, the world simply doesn't work like that.

The way import/export laws work, it's the onus of the importer to comply with the law. I don't understand why you expect a completely different set of rules to be reasonable just because the Internet is involved.

It seems to me there are three possible ways law on the internet can work, to include ill-defined hybrids between them. Please let me know if I've missed any:

1. The law where a service is hosted applies. Entities in other legal jurisdictions may not be allowed to do business with the service (e.g. run ads on it) if it doesn't follow the law where they're located. Cost: people may be able to access content that's illegal where they live.

2. The law where the user is located applies. Anyone putting up a website must familiarize themselves with the laws of 195 countries where users could be and comply with all of them, or at least the ones that have a friendly relationship to the host's country. Service operators must block users from jurisdictions with laws they can't obey. Cost: this is a nightmarish compliance landscape only large companies can deal with; the internet becomes much less global.

3. Countries put up a Great Firewall of X. Cost: the hacker community has traditionally considered censorship bad; the internet becomes much less global.

If you do business in a country, laws of that country apply to you. Selling apps in that country would count I presume. Part of the threat from the german government was to have GPlay and Apple delete the app from german storefronts.

I don't see how that is much of an issue.

In the case of Telegram, no selling takes place; the app is free.

I can get the Android version from Google's store, which is uncontroversially subject to German law because Google has physical offices and a financial presence in Germany. I can also download it from telegram.org, which to my knowledge does not have a physical or financial presence in Germany.

Germany probably has the legal authority to order Google to stop distributing the Telegram app and can use that authority to pressure Telegram. What remains unresolved is the degree to which Germany can act against Telegram directly.

Well, it seems very much like Telegram wants to continue being on the German Play Store. And yes, Telegram is very much selling things, even if the price, at the moment is 0$. They're also going into the ad business, if you check their business web presence.

The German government has a broader view than just this. See the Project Gutenberg case. PGLAF has zero presence in Germany, yet the German government claimed jurisdiction simply because the website had German-language content.

Two things:

1) If the site is run as a tor endpoint, and says "no German users allowed", I wonder how the jurisdiction thing plays out. (Yes, I'm asking HN for legal advice!)

2) The US recently had Mein Kampf toting neo-nazis working in the white house (Trump's PR team didn't even bother hiding this, and publicly praise Hitler's propaganda machine.) So, the US is pretty far down the Paradox of Tolerance rathole. At some point we'll need to flip the "Nazis must die!" bit like we did in WWII, unless the GOP corrects it's own course.

Apparently Pence publicly disagreed with our deposed dictator about the VP's ability to unilaterally overthrow elections. Trump didn't resort to name calling like he usually does. (Over 70% of Trump voters and 75% of Americans agree with Pence on this, for what it's worth.)

Maybe there's still reason to hope the US isn't headed to some sort of Apartheid-style "democracy", where idiots run everything and just ignore election results. Maybe?

>1) If the site is run as a tor endpoint, and says "no German users allowed", I wonder how the jurisdiction thing plays out. (Yes, I'm asking HN for legal advice!)

Ask your lawyer. Not any lawyer but yours. Anyone else answering is likely to give you bad answers, especially on HN.

> That changes when the "wholly USA" website is being used by German citizens, who are under jurisdiction.

Then Germans will have to prosecute those going to the website and using it or remove it from German DNS servers. Germany has no right to try and limit the rights of US citizens by extension of limiting those of Germans.

> I's not about "disparaging things about the <country>", it's about running a website or service and not reacting to the fact that actual nazis are using the service. (You know with the eugenics and everything!)

As much as I hate the Nazis, Nazi sentiment is not illegal in the USA as long as they stay within the law. The German government has no right to push their ideology and laws here. Again block Germans from the site or sue to have Parler block German user IP addresses (good luck with that, it won't last 5 minutes before the judge laughs and says "next case")

>Then Germans will have to prosecute those going to the website and using it or remove it from German DNS servers. Germany has no right to try and limit the rights of US citizens by extension of limiting those of Germans.

And? That's exactly what happened. The Telegram Operators were given a choice and they picked. If a US operator is given the same choice, they can pick no business with German users or remove the content the germans don't like. If they pick the later, you have no business to complain about that, really, since it doesn't affect you as US citizen.

>As much as I hate the Nazis, Nazi sentiment is not illegal in the USA as long as they stay within the law. The German government has no right to push their ideology and laws here. Again block Germans from the site or sue to have Parler block German user IP addresses (good luck with that, it won't last 5 minutes before the judge laughs and says "next case")

Nazis have no right to push their ideology here. Nor should they have anywhere. "They ought to be hammered back into the holes they crawled out of" to cite a recently popular music single in germany. All their ideology leads to is authoritarianism, oppression, violence and war.

I'm not sure if you're a US citizen or not but if you are then you know regardless of your opinion then there is nothing you can do about Naziism as long as they stay within parameters of the law. From a legal standpoint you're wrong, they absolutely can and do operate in the USA up and until the point they break the law. That's why there is a 1st amendment to protect our opinions from government intervention as long as it falls under protected speech. You can preach all the naziism that you want but the first time you attack someone because of the hate filled racism that it inspires or you collude to overthrow the government, then you're going to jail.

I think the USA Standpoint on allowing Nazis is wrong. Plain and simple. It should be illegal to have publicly expressed opinions like "the holocaust never happened" and "jews ought to be exterminated".

I would also point out that Nazis didn't "collude to overthrow the government" until they were well in control of the police, the courts and the military. So don't think your 1st amendment rights or any rights protect you from them.

Again, I respect that is your opinion. I am glad you have the freedom to say it openly. I'll err on the side of freedom every time over government telling me how to think. Have a great day, I am through here.