Staff the company there? Is this really how the internet has EVER worked?

Government wants a throat to choke that is subject to their jurisdiction.

If you have laws governing businesses that operate in your country it seems like a giant loophole if those businesses can avoid them simply having their servers/staff in another country. And in practice this shutting them out of the market is the stick they have to encourage compliance.

Having the company put an office there does not give you anything to choke, unless you did it like Brazil did and threaten lawyers with jail. Even then... that's just a Brazilian lawyer the company hired.

In order to do it right you have to be like a recent SEA nation that demanded the full investment from Apple in their national infra.

What does that have to do with anything? Brazilian law is quite clear. Whatever someone thinks the internet "was" or was not is immaterial.

Well if we agree that it's reasonable that a company needs to have staff in a country it operates in, then you'd need to have staff in every country to operate. That seems unreasonable to me.

Why is that unreasonable?

Within my lifetime that wasn't even physically possible.

> Why is that unreasonable?

I'd argue that if applied as a universal principle, then:

* It would make it even harder specifically for smaller companies, who don't have ~200 employees to position one in each country, to get started online. If for instance you're an independent designer based in Luxembourg, maybe making fonts or website templates, would you only be allowed to sell to other people in Luxembourg?

* It would likely segment the Internet, and render much of it inaccessible to anyone living in smaller countries, because realistically most websites aren't going to bother with all countries.

* The intended goal, that websites would more likely bend to local law because they have employees there to be imprisoned/punished if they don't, seems questionable to me in the first place. In many cases the demands they'd be caving to would be "remove anti-government content" or "give us the IP and phone number of this journalist".

> Within my lifetime that wasn't even physically possible.

The world is not as it was before the takeoff of the Internet, and trying to revert back would be "unreasonable" to many.

In this case Rumble is a business model that didn't exist pre-Internet, and has to compete with Amazon/Google which have global availability (or close to it). Just because brick-and-mortar stores used to manage does not make it feasible for businesses like Rumble.

It was rhetorical, but is a nice page of text to cleverly never provide any meaningful answer to the question.

A government - elected by its people - should not allow a foreign corporation to flout their laws. "If you want to operate in our country you have to actually operate in our country, where you cannot evade responsibility and the law." is not in any way an unreasonable requirement.

Why should an American/Canadian company care what the law is in some third world country?

Exactly, and why would they care if they’re banned in that country.

So don’t. And don’t operate in that country. It’s that simple

If people in Brazil want to access Rumble, and Rumble wants to allow them access, why should Rumble defer to the regime? Facebook used to run a hidden service for users in China, this is the example to follow.

You could say the same about Silkroad in the US, or Google in China, or online casinos in specific states. It’s simply the law of the land. The people voted for it so that’s what it is.

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Censorship is wrong in every case, even more wrong when the motivation is extortion. History has taught us this.

Ok, are you ascribing a motive of extortion here? You seem to be repeating an awfully simple principle but not making clear what you think the context is. Could you explain what your perspective is here?

This kind of law (if there's actually a law in the first place) is called a hostage-taking law for obvious reasons:

https://restofworld.org/2021/social-media-laws-twitter-faceb...

https://restofworld.org/2022/twitters-censorship-india/

Calling it hostage-taking is just a coping mechanism. Every country has sovereignty over speech within its own borders. Otherwise, in the US for example, we could have Russian propaganda blasting us non-stop through social media and engaging in electioneering here, and we'd be powerless to do anything about it.

The reason they don't is that staffing their company in Brazil would jeopardize the freedom and security of their employees. And why should they staff anyone there anyway? There are nearly 200 companies in the world, should every website have to open an office in each one of them?

> The reason they don't is that staffing their company in Brazil would jeopardize the freedom and security of their employees.

If they intend to commit break laws in Brazil, then yeah obviously they shouldn't have employees there. Brazil would be wise to lock them out like they would any would-be criminal organization.

> There are nearly 200 companies in the world, should every website have to open an office in each one of them?

Brazil is an economy the size of Italy (and unlike Italy, growing). Rumble is free to stay out of a 2+ trillion economy. Nobody's forcing them.

>If they intend to commit break laws in Brazil, then yeah obviously they shouldn't have employees there.

Let's not pretend Brazil is a serious country with due process and anything approaching legitimate rule of law like we have in the US. A legitimate legal system does not censor free information, does not jail people without trial, does not empower a court system to launch "investigations" according to the whims of judges, and does not make demand on outside organizations with no operations in the country (lack or jurisdiction). The situation is this: Like other regimes (China, India, etc), the government of Brazil has enacted a hostage-taking law so they can threaten and intimidate foreign companies into getting what they want. Instead of complying with this law, companies would be wise to protect themselves and their employees by ignoring it.

>Brazil is an economy the size of Italy (and unlike Italy, growing). Rumble is free to stay out of a 2+ trillion economy. Nobody's forcing them.

Brazil has a TFR of ~1.5 and is rapidly aging. It's just a bigger Italy, and another country that will never be wealthy.

> Let's not pretend Brazil is a serious country with due process and anything approaching legitimate rule of law like we have in the US

They are throwing their coup plotters in prison, I don't know if the US compares favorably lately.

I can't comment on whatever went down in Brazil, but hey, at least those American prisoners you vaguely alluded to are free - except for the minuscule, practically microscopic handful who, you know, actually did something violent.

Or maybe you were alluding to a certain president? Hard to say because he wasn't there, or involved.

Banning political posts or commentary or users based on the content of the messaging is almost always authoritarian and against every basic liberal principle. It is one thing to have privacy laws or laws around ownership or transparency on algorithms or whatever. It’s another thing to ban thoughts the state doesn’t like.