I don't think that's what's happening here. This is about a French company being disallowed by France from selling French citizens' data to a US Company.

Maybe this decision makes France toxic/favorable to certain kinds of business--much like how many privacy companies operate in Switzerland because the Swiss government is less likely to snoop than certain others, or how advertising companies operate in the US because they'll let you do whatever you want to their citizens. So yeah, fragments.

But you as a user are free to opt-into any fragment of the internet that will have you. If your government wants to stop you from doing so you should either take it up with your government or circumvent those limitations.

I don't particularly like the kind of fragment that France is creating here, the notion that data has a physical location in space strikes me as a rather shaky one, and I think policies following therefrom are likely to create convoluted architecture that exfiltrates the benefits of access without exfiltrating database instances (I've written enough code that tap-dances around the GPDR to know). Since I'm not trying to start an ad supported business in France, though, I'm happy to respect their right to come up with whatever weird policies they want.

Do you think it would be difficult to allow the different HN servers to federate their content across regions?

Would it be impossible? No. But would it be, say, 5x the amount of effort to build and maintain a federated system with no data stored across boundaries? Probably.

In what way is a French resident protected if their data is stored on a server in France but can be federated to other countries?

Difficult? Not so much. Demanding a yet another great firewall on the other hand sounds absolutely atrocious to me.

To be clear, you are underestimating the population size of European countries, as if would be a drama to lose HN or simply fork it.

I love hackernews, but there’s way more world out there to discover.

This is protecting EU citizens from EEUU companies having a free lunch on their data.

How on Earth did you conclude that I am underestimating the population size of European countries?

I enjoy communicating with all HN users, across the world.

If we each had to use only our own country's fork of HN, we wouldn't communicate with each other, and that would be a bad thing.

At last someone admits it outright - you want the EU to be an island, walled off from the rest of civilization, and perhaps also reality