EU law is world law

And accessibility of the data. France is saying it shouldn’t be accessible. regardless of location (of the data or the access-or).

Concur on this. As the article states, this goes beyond that, and also touches on other developing issues in the same vein (Canada and the US for example). My prediction on this specific France driven issue is that the other EU Member states lean on France. Or Germany (if it was them, next time, on a different issue, but the same concept…extraterritoriality).

It’s not symmetrical though. There is no law in the US that a search engine can’t remove links if they want to, while there are laws in the EU that require removing them in some cases. Removing the links will have no impact, not removing them will lead to ever-escalating fines in Europe. So if the ECJ decides that the right to be forgotten applies globally, it’s going to be a pretty damn easy choice.

There was a similar case in Canada last year, where the supreme court ruled that Google had to remove some piracy-related links globally rather than just in Canada. Google then got a US court to issue an injunction forbidding the removal of the links, Google went back to Canada saying “look, we’re not allowed to remove these links in the US”. And Canadian courts said, “tough luck”. I think there’s still one round of appeals left there.

Agree. I am merely saying that a collision is coming. Extraterritoriality as a legal concept is completely unsustainable. The tail wags the dog.

BTW, this is as far into P & R as I will wade. “Nosebleed seat” John Stuart Mill versus Edmund Burke stuff. :) Usually people don’t go full asshole on their friends on those issues.

Eventually the EU is going to have it’s own internet like fucking China.

Maybe, but I just don’t think it’s going to happen over this issue. It’s hard to see what kind of content would be considered mandatory for delisting in one country but mandatory for listing in another. (I’m not sure the latter category exists at all. Maybe there could be a handful of antitrust related cases?).

To get a conflict that can’t be easily resolved, you’d need a country to legislate that nobody publishing information was allowed to consider foreign laws at all in the decision of whether to publish something or not. That seems pretty unlikely to me.

And in a world of international web services it becomes unavoidable.

I mean take the personal data instance. Even if you make it not possible to recover said data from within the EU, it is trivial to bypass this even from within the EU.

And, fundamentally, having different web services for different markets isn’t inherently bad, but we don’t know how that would shake out. There would be positive upshots for this, breaking the back of multinationals capable of overturning national governments has a nice pleasing ring to it. But there are costs, and it would certainly lead to some nasty knock on effects. You like Netflix as the global service? Too bad American. In the wake of this, now their leverage has vanished and now the cable companies are ascendant again.

You like being able to store your data in the cloud and access it while traveling internationally? Tough luck, no more browsing family photos while traversing the Alps.

I’m a bit conflicted. On the one hand I really like the idea of forcing companies to be responsible for the data they demand. Sheer laziness has allowed them to get away with exceeding amounts of garbage, to behave negligently and expose most people to huge risks of identity fraud, simply because nobody really understood the risks of what would happen when the local grocery store wanted your e-mail address and some personal details when you signed up for their spam programI mean rewards program. And now that there is a cost attached, perhaps it would force companies to behave more responsibily and actually consider whether they really need that data. Instead of now where they ask for everything because ‘fuck it, why not. Maybe we can sell it to an advertising partner’.

On the other, this could have huge negative impacts and create a Balkanization of web services that has delegitimization effects to the innovation, usability, and global nature of web services.

I’m in the same camp for the same reasons.

Companies need to be held financially responsible for the information they collect. Half the time they do it for no fucking reason and their security amounts to a bread tie on a door latch. But there are probable consequences for all of this that shouldn’t be handwaved.

Yeah, I am thinking more of the example I used earlier. Everyone is talking about the Personal Data example. I am talking above that (You coders!!! j/k folks :) ). About Extraterritoriality. Which is the larger point that the WSJ is dealing with in the above article.
Can France say, “Yeah US Company, violate US law”.

From earlier in-thread: "What if it was a website of, of, “Shitty companies that cheat you”, and the CEO of French Company demanded to be “forgotten”, and so Google ordered a takedown of that data from their services run by a guy in Chicago (where the data was hosted)? This stuff gets tricky. "

Demanding that things on the internet be disappeared seems a non-starter to me.

I get why people want it, but yeah, no.

That’s what happened as a fallout of Snowden revealing PRISM. I don’t know if anything of consequence came of it, though.

It goes even a level higher than that.

Companies are playing this shell game of where they domicile. Wanting their cake and eating it too. Operating in this legal murk where they exist in a country where it benefits them, but avoiding the costs. ‘I’m an American company (when it comes to contracts, or selling services) but I’m also Dutch (when it comes to tax sheltering)’

At some point the chicken comes home to roost. If you want to claim immunity to foreign laws as a company of X national designation? Well that’s fine, but that comes with costs and responsibilities. Im not down with the game many play where they exploit legal differences to get all the benefits of sovereign protection without the consumate responsibility.

So you want to use US law to claim US jurisdiction from such legal force? That’s fine. Let’s talk about your subsidiary company licensing payments used to shelter profits in foreign nations Google, Apple, Uber, and the whole lot of you.

Ha, that’s a good one!

Well, not in the short term, but the goal is to drvie everyone out of business, and then be. The only game in town. Or close to it.

Good read thanks folks. I will drop this in here.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2001rank.html#ch

    COUNTRY	GDP (PURCHASING POWER PARITY)  2017 EST.
1	CHINA	$23,160,000,000,000	                    
2	EU	    $20,850,000,000,000	
3	USA	    $19,390,000,000,000	
4	INDIA	$9,459,000,000,000	
5	JAPAN	$5,429,000,000,000	

Although next year if the madness of Brexit goes ahead the EU will drop down to number 3 I assume.

More complicated than GDP parity. Check out this:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Purchasing_power_parities_in_Europe_and_the_world

Actual (not estimated) data from 2014. Takes into account price levels and actual consumption (not potential).

This is god too, discusses taxes and consumption power. GDP per capita is a much more powerful number:

Oh thanks! Thats much better context cheers!

Np. everyone chases the mighty dollar in global markets for a reason. ;). That dang per capita is second only to Singapore and Switzerland. Juice must be squeezed. But numbers are always chimeras. The best numbers are results. Like Alphabet’s, where they do like 50% of their business in the US and 1/3 in the EU. Can’t argue with that .

Agreed! Although in games we chase parity between the two. Except in sports & sims where the majority of sales com from the EU. As you would expect from a bloc that has a bigger population than the USA and more into those kinds of games.

Parliament has passed its version of the Copyright Directive.

Could’ve been worse.