I don't agree with either of those things, but there is a point at which globalisation comes into conflict with sovereign nations.
The status of a company is one that is granted to it by a sovereign country, and sovereign countries establish through their legal and government systems how companies can act within their borders.
Once you're there... yes, Google should comply to any legal request. And in fact, they do... as requests for data issued under legal order are in fact complied with.
Companies are not above the law (and laws tend to exist at country level or through treaty across many countries). And if the law of a country says pay, then Google need to pay unless another law can trump it and says not to pay.
There's no two ways about it, companies must comply with the laws of whatever land they operate in.
There exist laws so hideous and offensive to human dignity, that they should never be obeyed.
EDITED: I am not talking about the google privacy case specifically, previous posts in this thread had widened the scope beyond this point.
The problem that is that companies are not above the law, but they are even less above ethics. The primary reason that we argue that companies should follow the law is ethics and when ethics and the law are in conflict ethics always trumps the law.
Let's worry about the morals and ethics of operating that munitions factory before we get concerned with "unjust" laws.
I'm not even saying this necessarily applies to this exact situation - maybe the laws in France that Google was in violation of are good laws, in which case hopefully Google loses its appeal.
It's just ridiculous to say that companies should always just do whatever government tells them to do without question.
Since "just stop doing business there" often isn't a realistic option for most businesses, big or small, you do what you can to work within the law while attempting to retain what seems to you a reasonable standard of ethics. That's a very gray position, but that's how the world is.
When politics and legislation are ideal and unchanging, then you can expect corporations to consistently comply with all laws in all places. Until then, it's unreasonable to make statements like this. It is, of course, your right to do so; just don't make the mistake of believing it reflects how business and government actually work.
In this case, having google comply to the most restrictive law of the countries they are operating in would benefit the rest of the world. They are not asked to come to work naked. They are asked to explain their users who will be able to know of their secret homosexuality or the brand of their car.
[1] http://www.euractiv.com/specialreport-eu-us-trade-talks/liti...
Google are suing France because they conform to EU Law rather than French law, and would like European courts to resolve the issue.
The EU can issue Directive, that laws that represent the strict minimum to comply. Then the individual state has to actually pass a national law that implements the directive.
Three options here. The state does not want to implement the law and get fined. The state implements the law following closely the Directive. Or it can go further than the directive, like, in the case of the French privacy law, add more requirements.
Our system as flaws but I'm not to kind on Google messing around it. It could very well set an unfortunate precedent. EU Directive are sometimes quite weak so it would be a problem to me that instead of representing the min they end up representing the max requirement.
Google is suing because they want EU to invalidate the French law. But I don't see how it could happen since AFAIK the French privacy laws predate the Directive by a quite large amount. Right now I think EU can only overrule a state law if it does not offer minimal citizen protection or if there are contradictions with the Directive. Not if they offer more protection.
As for a treaty allowing US corps to invalid EU Directives ... well, good for you but we still have national laws. I don't see how the invalidation of a Directive would invalidate automatically national law.
I might be wrong though. Would love input from someone more knowledgeable on the matter.
And more importantly goes further than the directive in protecting citizen's rights. By comparison the french "garde à vue" — a form of police custody — is also ancient but it restricts citizen's defence rights far below the mandatory minimum and has gotten repeatedly hammered by the ECHR both indirectly (via similar turkic cases e.g. Salduz v Turkey and Dayanan v Turkey) and directly (e.g. Brusco v France, Vassis v France) as France (incorrectly) refused to consider the turkic cases applicable.
These days, I'm rather afraid that we've already reached that point - at least in the western world, most governments seem to have just become the corporations, infiltrated to the point of indistinguishability. I hope there's a way back, but I'm not particularly optimistic about it.
I sure hope it doesn't go well for Google either. It seems quite brazen, even arrogant, for Google to refuse paying a fine when it arguably tracks and records the behaviour of online users to an unprecedented degree. And Google does not tell users what they do with their data beyond the generic "we collect this information to improve services". What they do with your data and how they use it is different from simply stating what is collected (which is all that their privacy policies actually say).
Just to be clear, I don't believe Google does sinister things with the data it collects, but that doesn't mean it's ok for a company to collect informaion about users unfettered. And no other company has such a voracious appetite to track and record users online.
The thought of anonymising your data is clearly too much for Google: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/google-keeps-your...