
Top Canadian Court Permits Worldwide Internet Censorship - spurlock
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/top-canadian-court-permits-worldwide-internet-censorship
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Nomentatus
IANAL

The title is false as stated, two ways - the courts aren't permitting, they're
insisting; and they aren't insisting on a worldwide ban, only that companies
who want to do business in Canada can't facilitate websites/information being
read in Canada that's banned in Canada. Practically, of course, this may mean
companies choosing either worldwide bans or not doing business in Canada.

Funny thing is, this isn't actually new. There are (or were) already Canadian
laws that don't allow the publication of Federal election results in time
zones where voting is still happening, and frequent court-imposed bans on
publication. These laws would also not be satisfied by Google's admittedly
feeble solution of scrubbing their official Canadian portal, but not their
other portals, also easily accessed in Canada. But nobody pressed the issue so
far in those previous non-commercial cases.

Canada doesn't have jurisdiction over the world and isn't pretending it does.
It does have jurisdiction in Canada and is saying to Google et al: "If you
want to serve ads here or have your Playstore sell digital goods here, then
you can't also serve up websites we've ordered blocked, period. Choose one."
This permits further, future actions to block Google in Canada if it can't
comply or doesn't wish to.

Which brings up international comity, of course. Canada isn't the only country
that can play this game. Given the international nature of webformation,
Google would have to descend to the lowest common denominator, blocking
everywhere anything legally blocked anywhere (that it wants to do business.)
(Or maybe creating a Chinese firewall everywhere, with unique filters in every
country, which would be hella expensive.) Such a trend may not be in the
common interest of course; in other words it may pose a prisoner's dilemma.
Probably does. So it's likely time to go back to the treaty table, or perhaps
to rewrite-Canadian-laws-again. Still, as the law stands it's hard for the
courts to decide anything other than what they just decided. Information is
either banned within Canada or it isn't - symbolic changes that still allow
Canadians to be referred to a banned website don't fulfill the law.

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fosco
I am interested in how could this be enforced worldwide? I do not understand
how they could enforce this anywhere but on other countries going to servers
within Canada or Canadian residents going to servers outside of their country?

~~~
dragonwriter
> I am interested in how could this be enforced worldwide?

It's an order against Google. To the extent Google relies on ability to do
business in Canada, it can be enforced against Google. Talking about enforcing
it against anyone else is irrelevant, since it doesn't apply to anyone else.

