- Domain Name Seizures via ICANN and registrars
- Political/legal pressure on CDNs, SSL certificate providers, bandwidth providers.
- Propaganda and legal labeling ("malicious actor", "foreign agent", "terrorist")
- There are technical workarounds to keep the page up within Russia's sovereign internet (Runet).
> This blocking regulation requires network providers, including CDNs, to comply with blocking notices within 30 minutes.
> orders that go beyond regular Internet providers, requiring DNS resolvers and VPN services to take action as well.
Or tap the fiber lines at the border and inject RST packets from off-path, which is something the Great Firewall of China does, and is ironically much more transparent than what they actually are doing.
Or cut the cables between the USA and Russia, or between the USA and any country that doesn't cut their own cables to Russia. The USA did this to Iran with the banking system and it worked: the USA cuts money transfers with any country that doesn't cut money transfers with Iran. I don't think it would necessarily go their way if they did it right now with the internet.
It does, however, provide evidence that doing that is dumb.
KYC/AML have an effectiveness that rounds to zero while causing trouble for innocent people as the government pressures the banks to do something about problems the banks aren't in a position to actually solve, so instead the banks suspend the accounts of more innocent people because the government is pressuring them to suspend more accounts.
That's factually inaccurate.
It isn't:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
"It finds that the anti-money laundering policy intervention has less than 0.1 percent impact on criminal finances, compliance costs exceed recovered criminal funds more than a hundred times over, and banks, taxpayers and ordinary citizens are penalized more than criminal enterprises."
This has more or less been the default position of most internet users and developers since the beginning, until fairly recently. I’d even contend that it’s what drew many of us to the internet in the first place. If the internet ever becomes cable TV, fully regulated, controlled, and managed, it will have lost its purpose as a place for free and open exchange of information.
(Zero control is an exaggeration—the worst lawbreakers still face justice under the current system, and that seems ok. I just don’t think we should be tightening the screws any further.)
Doesn’t scale.
This is a new idea for me. How is optimality measured here? Aggregate utility for society? What's the independent variable? Is this from the perspective of law-makers? If I was on a desert island, should I do some crime to ensure optimality?
This is just another form of Blackstone’s ratio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_ratio
The problem itself is an ancient one and you can find a number of texts that explore the idea from various angles.
However from a different perspective, it's those policies that are an immutable force of nature. "Non-zero fraud is optimal" might sound like there could be a population who wasn't committing enough fraud. I haven't done any fraud this year, but I'm trying to be a good person. But that's not the Blackstone perspective. In Blackstone, the populace are thought of as reacting only to policy and basically having no autonomy.
I'm not arguing anything, but just noting how the sound-bite can be (and was) misconstrued.
In the West we are typically less tolerant of enforcement-driven hardship. This goes back to our Enlightenment ideals about freedom and justice, which are less strong than they once were but are still present.
You can, of course, pass a law making it illegal for your citizens to communicate with that service, but I think it's really important to understand that that's what's happening. You are passing a law which applies to your citizens and their right to communicate with people in other countries; it's their freedoms you are placing limits on, not the freedoms of the foreign website. Sometimes when you frame things that way, such restrictions stop making sense. (Though perhaps not always.)
I guess if the USPS/Fedex knew for a fact (such as your website request) that you were communicating CP, the. they should do something about it?
This is an honest question.
That is often the case, but it's also not the relevant part, because consider what happens if you do that. I mean it's the same thing that happens with parcel carriers -- everybody's package ends up in an opaque brown box and the carrier has no means to determine if it's contraband. They just weigh it and deliver it, which is what they're supposed to do, because they're not the police.
And so it is with ISPs. What happens if you make them block stuff people actually want? TLS, third party DNS, VPNs, etc.
At that point you have to answer a different question: Should they be obligated to open and censor your mail?
No. The answer is no.
they are. they're not obligated to go through every package but they are absolutely obligated to turn over packages to law enforcement, and they do, and law enforcement will one hundred percent open and go through your mail. and if they find something you shouldn't have they will dress up as a mail carrier to deliver it to you and then detain you!
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make exactly but this is a losing battle
The idea of outright banning VPNs seems to be along these lines imo.
What about name suppression for criminal cases? If somebody is charged with a crime but hasn't yet had their trial, or is the victim of a crime such as sexual abuse, some countries will allow judges to forbid publication of their name (in case they turn out to be innocent) so local media can't say who it is but foreign media does and local people all know who it is anyway, defeating the purpose of name suppression. Perhaps we shouldn't have name suppression?
All three prongs (ban hosting, ban access, ban revenue) can be used to keep foreign interference out of your country.
We're in the electronic age, 'stuff' includes electricity, media, and remote-provided services. For a concrete example - if you're buying legal advice from a lawyer, it doesn't matter if he's down the street from you, or on another continent - the exchange of money for 'stuff' is the same.
How is this not a trade barrier against foreign payment providers?
It's just a foreign company being upset that it isn't getting special treatment that would allow it to operate with an illegal advantage over local vendors.
Countries do a thing where they call something "neutral rules" while crafting them such that only the domestic incumbents can satisfy them or they can be selectively enforced against anyone the regulators don't like or who actually does or is deemed likely to refuse to comply with extralegal requests that the law doesn't or couldn't require. The US financial regulators do exactly that and you can see it in the outcomes.
Why is it weird? All other aspects being equal, why would you want to put your money into a bank that's accountable to another government first, and your market second?
Banking involves a ton of (unverifiable from the retail end) trust. There are a lot of risks to it. Going with a local institution mitigates some of them, and going with a foreign one adds very few benefits (Unless you're doing a lot of business in their home country).
You can absolutely bank with a foreign bank. HSBC is a giant international bank. TD and RBC are Canadian banks with branches in the US (RBC's are whitelabeled as City National Bank). If you want to do some tax evasion, or deal with the fallout of rogue traders, or bank with someone who has the rotting corpse of Credit Suisse anchored around its neck, you're free to do your retail (or investment) banking with UBS.
Why aren't you using them?
I assure you, you'll find the experience largely interchangeable with the same level of service you'd expect from any of the Big Four.
Because if they were operating in the US then they'd be FDIC insured and subject to US courts like any US bank, and because all else isn't equal. They could be offering better interest rates, or lower fees, or better customer service, or anything else that could make customers want to use them. And since they want business, they'd do those things to exactly the extent it would take for them to get market share. Unless something is preventing that.
It's not! I've given you four examples of large foreign banks that you - you can walk into your nearest US branch of and open an account with, today.
For some strange reason, you'll find the service, interest rates, and everything else about them to be essentially the same damn thing as you'll get from the big four. Retail banking is a commodity at this point.
Trade barriers generally aren't when something is fully impossible or illegal, they're when it's impeded in some way to sustain an advantage for domestic companies. There are an infinite number of ways to do that and it's often layering them on top of each other rather than any one individual thing, but strong evidence of that happening is if it's achieving the intended result, i.e. that domestic companies have the large majority of the domestic market, whereas the same companies competing for the same class of customers in a different country have a lower share. When the only difference is the law, "a law that creates an advantage for domestic companies" is what a trade barrier is.
> Retail banking is a commodity at this point.
Except where it isn't.
For example, suppose you want a specific service: We don't freeze your account without a court order. A foreign bank would nominally be in a strong position to do this, because they could keep the money somewhere else and then you could get to it in Ireland or wherever even if the US subsidiary was under extralegal pressure to cut you off. It would force the US to use official process that gives you legal recourse instead of strong arming in the back room.
Unless the strong arming takes the form of keeping them out of the market or assuring that they have negligible market share, which is the trade barrier.
> For example, suppose you want a specific service: We don't freeze your account without a court order.
And this, exactly is why your cow is spherical. The small number of people for whom this would be a legitimate differentiator aren't a market large enough for anyone to give a crap about. You're of course free to try to start a fintech startup for "People who are likely be the targets of extrajudicial account freezes", but I don't think you'll have the greatest... or the greatest customer base. Which country your parent company is incorporated in will be the least of your problems in running that business successfully.
You're also starting from the mistaken assumption that a court order is the only legitimate reason that this country's legal system believes an account should be frozen (it's not[1]), or the only legitimate reason that you would want your account frozen (it's not). But you can abstract anything away in hypotheticals - that's the beauty of them.
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In none of this you have demonstrated how consistent, country-of-origin agnostic regulation is a trade barrier that unfairly advantages domestic firms. But you have introduced a lot of complexity (and much misunderstanding) by picking a subject as complicated as banking.
Let me make it simple - Is Quebec putting up unfair trade barriers because it requires products sold in it to be labeled in French? What stops foreign vendors from meeting that same requirement?
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[1] And when you discover that assumption was incorrect, the relevant enforcement agencies won't give a crap if your head office is in Chicago or Timbuktu[2] - because you need to have a local presence (and an account at the Fed) to operate which is the same bar that all the domestic banks also have to meet, they'll have plenty of people to haul off to court.
[2] If this mattered, then this would provide an unfair advantage to the foreign company which is an utterly asinine way to run your country.
There are 340 million people in the US and significantly more people who would want that service than some credit unions have total members. And you don't have to offer only that, but now who is offering that at all? One of the hallmarks of a competitive market is that there is someone trying to fill every niche.
> You're of course free to try to start a fintech startup for "People who are likely be the targets of extrajudicial account freezes", but I don't think you'll have the greatest... or the greatest customer base. Which country your parent company is incorporated in will be the least of your problems in running that business successfully.
This is the issue. You're willing to provide service to sex workers etc., but your problem isn't them, it's what the government does to you if they don't like what you're doing.
And it's not about how many people want that in particular, it's a demonstration that the government has the capacity to suppress things it doesn't like without formally having a rule against them.
> You're also starting from the mistaken assumption that a court order is the only legitimate reason that this country's legal system believes an account should be frozen (it's not[1]), or the only legitimate reason that you would want your account frozen (it's not).
I'm starting from the assumption that promising not to freeze your account means without your permission or ability to undo.
> In none of this you have demonstrated how consistent, country-of-origin agnostic regulation is a trade barrier that unfairly advantages domestic firms.
This one's the easy one. It's when they're subjective or rely on prosecutorial discretion rather than actual compliance with unambiguous rules. Because then the rules aren't actually the rules, they're just the book they flip through to find a violation when they want to put their thumb on the scale.
And to be clear, the US has both. There are rules that, if you violate them, you get punished. These are even the majority of what actual prosecutions are about. But then there are the ones they can threaten you with when they want you to do something or not do something that isn't written down, or they just don't like you and want to frustrate you.
> Let me make it simple - Is Quebec putting up unfair trade barriers because it requires products sold in it to be labeled in French? What stops foreign vendors from meeting that same requirement?
In a technical sense it is, because it's a requirement that makes it easier for domestic sellers who are focused on the local market and would be paying the cost of labeling in French already, whereas small foreign sellers might be able to enter the market by putting their existing products on a truck but having to run a separate production line with a different product label would exclude them.
But it's also probably a very small one, so then is it enough to have a significant effect? And we're back to market share being evidence.
For any country which cares about the freedom of its citizens, I feel the latter framing ought to make them significantly more hesitant to enact such measures.
There is a middle way that can kind of muddle along but it can be attacked by both sides for being both to strict and not being strict enough.
If you can forget that a position is extreme, doesn't that imply that it's a relatively unoffensive and reasonable position? For actual extreme positions like "reduce housing scarcity by murdering some category of people" or "mitigate climate change by prohibiting human reproduction", does anyone need to be reminded that they're extreme?
> the idea that once something is on the internet, national law simply ceases to apply and governments should have absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so on - simply because it's hosted in a different country.
Is this any different than the premise of sovereignty to begin with?
If you live somewhere gambling is illegal you can get on a flight to Las Vegas. If you want to buy a gun and go to the range to shoot it, or buy a piece of land where you can keep your gun, you can go to Texas, even though there are countries where guns and private land ownership by non-citizens are illegal. If you want to use certain drugs you can go to certain other countries.
Isn't the extreme position that a country should be able to control what you do even when you're willingly choosing to do it in another jurisdiction? Do the people own the government or does the government own the people?
Well, which jurisdiction applies to Spanish Internet users in Spain and Spanish ISPs?
Doesn't the US claim global tax jurisdiction on its nationals?
The Spanish Internet users are attempting to leave the jurisdiction and come back with only information. The ISPs are the equivalent of train operators. How is prohibiting them from taking you to the border not an attempt to prevent you from doing something in another jurisdiction which is legal there?
> Doesn't the US claim global tax jurisdiction on its nationals?
It's one of the most astounding and outrageous things the US does and it ought to stop immediately, not least because people keep citing it as precedent to justify other bad choices.
For that analogy to hold, I would need something equivalent to a US visa to post this comment that you are currently reading.
Only if the US required it.
A country you're not a citizen of preventing you from coming in isn't the same thing as a country you are a citizen of preventing you from leaving.
Consider it like this: Suppose you're in Europe and you want to communicate with someone in the US. You could do it in person by you going there, or by them coming to you, or both of you going to some third place to meet. Your country could prevent them from coming to you but not either of the other ones, and you can communicate with them if you can do any of the three. The internet only makes it more efficient.
People might even have assumed it was sarcastic, and that you didn't actually want site blocking, if you defended it that way.
I think people have forgotten how extreme that position used to be.
(Money laundering and anything involving payment and debts are also independent of site blocking - it's neither sufficient or necessary to block sites to do that.
Even in incredibly recent times what do you think the position was regarding the monthly magazine Al-Qaeda published was? It certainly wasn’t the “marketplace of ideas” I’ll tell you that much.
I wasn't suggesting that authoritarians hadn't suggested (or succeeded at) suppressing "foreign propaganda" in the past, but then people still knew they were authoritarians, if they found out. You imagine you're not.
I think people have forgotten how extreme a position this is: the idea that once something is on the internet, national law simply ceases to apply and governments should have absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so on - simply because it's hosted in a different country.
Not even the US really believes that domestically .. or even when it comes to overseas enforcement, such as sending the FBI to New Zealand to get Kim Dotcom. Or the Pokerstars case.
Not to mention I am really skeptical of the magic invocation of "trade" to overrule national sovereignty. That leads you to stupid places such as Philip Morris trying to use the ISDS process to force Australia to accept an inherently poisonous product (fortunately they eventually lost). https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/arbitrationlinks/2...