If you run a business, and decide to do business with people in another country, it's your responsibility to figure out if the business you're doing is legal for that country. This is only a strange idea to a certain segment of internet commenters. The rest of the world has just treated this as the way things are for a long, long, long time. The new, strange, radical idea out of step with established norms is the notion that "on the internet" is some magical lawless, stateless, jurisdictionless place where anything is fair game since nobody could ever prosecute for something that happened in this magical fairyland.
It really is time to stop being surprised that you can be arrested and prosecuted for your interactions and business relationship with people, property or other entities in a country of which you aren't a citizen.
Also, don't look now, but large tech companies headquartered in the US routinely make changes to their products/services to comply with other countries' laws. If Facebook wants to operate in Thailand, Facebook has to be prepared to comply with Thai law, for example. "We're on the internet" doesn't work as an out.
> If you run a business, and decide to do business with people in another country
I understand this to an extent if specific technical work was done to make a system function in a particular nation (e.g. if the betting site did technical work to accept USD as a payment).
But, it's very possible to build a website and not decide to do business with people in another country. It's possible to be running an online business and not need to know what country a user is from. If I never decided to do business with people from a particular country, am I still subject to its laws?
In the example, what if Facebook didn't specifically want to operate in Thailand? What if Facebook simple hadn't taken specific technical steps to block Thai users?
If Facebook doesn't want to account for a country's laws, Facebook needs to make sure it never hires employees in that country, never has any key personnel visit that country even briefly, etc.
Again: this is not a bizarre new unprecedented never-before-considered hypothetical.
In the gambling case, it's actually even easier, by the way, to create jurisdiction since the gambling site needs a way to actually pay out to its customers, which makes it very hard to avoid certain countries' financial rules. I don't particularly care for the US' stance on online betting (but let's face it, those folks aren't caught up in some kind of "how could I have known" situation -- they're like the people who ran the original p2p file-sharing networks saying they were shocked, shocked! to discover that what must have been a tiny, insignificant, sub-microscopic fraction of their users were openly violating laws), but the legal framework around being able to arrest/extradite people and prosecute for crimes which involve people on multiple sides of a border is pretty well-understood and I know of no way in which this is some sort of unprecedented abuse of it.
Again, look to the auction sites which got notice from Germany to either stop being accessible at all there, or start filtering out the Nazi stuff so Germans couldn't purchase it.
>If Facebook doesn't want to account for a country's laws, Facebook needs to make sure it never hires employees in that country, never has any key personnel visit that country even briefly, etc.
In practice, that means that nobody can ever travel internationally. It's impossible for anyone to know for sure that they've never broken the laws of another country. It's barely possible to know if you're abiding by the laws of your own country[1].
Facebook might filter out lèse–majesté comments to Thai users, but how can they be sure that the filters caught everything? How can they be sure that a user didn't circumvent their filtering? How can they be sure that the Thai judiciary will accept their defence that "we did everything we could to stop it, but something slipped through the net"? Even if Facebook employees never travel to Thailand, how can they be sure that they won't be extradited from a country that's sympathetic to Thailand's lèse–majesté laws?
I don't know what the solution is, but there are clearly immense risks here. America's habitual snatch-and-grab arrests of foreign nationals has legitimised all manner of human rights abuses.
So let's say a country enacts the two hypothetical laws:
- Any operating website which renders services to the greater internet must make its service available to traffic originating from this hypothetical country.
- Pornographic materials fall under obscenity laws
Now any website offering pornographic materials ends up in a catch 22; the only way to avoid violating a law of that country is to comply with the latter law, and not serve pornographic materials (even if one's own country has no laws outlawing it).
You see how this can be problematic given the global nature of the internet, with hundreds of countries each enacting their own laws? You shouldn't need to be able to solve the world's most complex constraint satisfiability problem to operate a website; you should only be required to comply with the laws in your own country, while making no active attempts to violate laws in other countries.
You see how this can be problematic given the global nature of the internet
You seem to be thinking that there's some sort of old sci-fi robot here that if you present it with a logical contradiction it will start yelling DOES NOT COMPUTE and its head will explode.
I suggest you stop thinking in those terms; laws don't work like computer programs, and the sooner you understand that, the better off you'll be. Legal frameworks can deal just fine with contradictions. And, yes, a sufficiently-malicious government could pass combinations of laws designed to force someone to commit a crime.
Yet somehow the world continues to work. And if there's a foreign jurisdiction with laws sufficiently odious to your business, well, you just stay home. Typical extradition treaties require that the alleged act be criminal in both countries in order to extradite for it, so as long as you stay in a country whose laws match what you want to do, or which has no extradition, you're good (this also is why so many criminal hacking cases are dead ends trailing off into countries that won't extradite to wherever the victims were, but this appears to be the outcome you want).
> If you run a business, and decide to do business with people in another country, it's your responsibility to figure out if the business you're doing is legal for that country.
I'd say it's the responsibility of the people in the other country to know their own laws. It's not reasonable for the business to know the laws of every country in the world, which is the only other option.
This is how it has traditionally worked. If it's illegal to possess a particular item in country A but not country B, and someone living in country A places a mail order from country B for one, one would normally expect that person in country to be held culpable under his or her own laws, not the business in country B legitimately selling it.
If there is an item that is illegal to possess, typically both the buyer and seller can be prosecuted. That's nothing new. You're just continuing to push the idea that "it is legal in my country" as a defense that's already been established as not a valid defense. This type of prosecution has been established way before the internet even existed.
Well, the legal system's that state that buying and/or selling a restricted or illegal item is punishable by law. I'm not familiar with the laws of every jurisdiction on the planet in this particular manner.
I'll admit I'm assuming that in cases where it is illegal to possess the item it is also likely illegal to sell said item. But I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule.
The owner is not in the US, has never been to the US the servers are not in the US and what they are doing is not illegal in their home nation but they are being sued in US courts
It really is time to stop being surprised that you can be arrested and prosecuted for your interactions and business relationship with people, property or other entities in a country of which you aren't a citizen.
Also, don't look now, but large tech companies headquartered in the US routinely make changes to their products/services to comply with other countries' laws. If Facebook wants to operate in Thailand, Facebook has to be prepared to comply with Thai law, for example. "We're on the internet" doesn't work as an out.