
American companies should say No to Saudi demands to geoblock content - smokielad
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/silicon-valley-should-just-say-no-saudi
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TheAceOfHearts
I've been wondering about something similar recently. What can other countries
do to an American webmaster if their laws are being ignored?

If you allow non-US IPs, does that mean you're implicitly accepting that
you're serving other countries and thus you're expected to comply with any of
their laws? What if you're selling an online service and a foreign user has a
US credit card and billing address?

As for the linked topic... Saudi Arabia is a pretty horrible country in many
aspects. I'd go one step further and say that American companies shouldn't be
doing any business with them. This is a country where women are regarded as
second-class citizens. It's fine if some people want to continue with their
ultra-traditional gender roles, but you shouldn't impose it on everyone else.

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einarfd
A good start would be to ban defence companies from doing business with them.

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confounded
And politically oppose the arms deals that western politicians routinely lend
their time and personal capital to supporting.

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Eridrus
These countries will just block Medium, Snap, etc, if they don't comply. I
don't see how fighting them on this is actually any better except that you get
to pat yourself on the back.

To me, the more worrying cases are when governments demand removal of content
worldwide, and that's being done by Western governments in the EU and Canada.
Why is the EFF not demanding companies pull out of those countries?

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loceng
Is withholding the best technology - that otherwise presumably would increase
the quality of life of a nation's citizens if they had access to it - a good
method of protest, or will it simply lead to other actors who are okay to
support censorship and such to fill the gaps? I'm not sure of the answer.

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SomeStupidPoint
I try to take a lesson from supermarkets: what blew the mind of many Russians
during the Cold War was the existence of supermarkets. Many assumed they were
either propaganda or only available to wealthy Westerners, and it had an
extremely corrosive effect on the beliefs of Russians who understood how
generally available such stores were in the US. The existence of supermarkets
turned out to be one of our most powerful propaganda tools!

At a practical level, one of the most important things we can do if we really
believe in Western society is simply live it and let other people be exposed
to it. Time and time again, simply living well is infectious and does more to
undermine totalitarian regimes than pretty much anything else. Most people (on
any side of an issue) really want the same thing -- to live a nice life.
Fighting stems from different visions of how to do that (or an inability to do
that because of poverty, oppression, etc), but in a competition between
ideals, the winner is generally the one that lets people live "better".

So as a method of protest, I'd argue it's a complete failure: it removes our
most powerful tools, which are primarily exposure based, while leaving a power
vacuum behind and getting virtually nothing in return.

The flow of culture from sharing messaging platforms is simply too powerful a
tool to abandon as mere "protest".

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dredmorbius
Supermarkets weren't 1) being made directly available within the Soviet Bloc
and 2) weren't being utilised for propaganda or censorship against Soviet and
Communist dissidents.

The existence of the WWW is known. The existence of sites such as Medium or
Snap are known. If those exist, but are blocked either by the Saudi regime, or
with very clear "this content has been censored at the request of your
government" then the abject political control is revealed.

Power often is most effective where it can act covertly. Forcing the hand, or
even showing it, can weaken it.

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SomeStupidPoint
My point wasn't that Snap (et al) were supermarkets; my point was that the US
and Saudi Arabia sharing Snap allowed the Saudi Arabians to see metaphorical
supermarkets inside of the US by easing communication.

I believe that this is significantly more powerful than the other thing,
precisely because revealing a failure of providing a standard of living is
more motivational than revealing the use of power in a regime like Saudi
Arabia.

"Everyone knows the government filters X, but who cares, we can just use Y!"
vs "Why do Americans all seem to have Z, but we don't?"

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dredmorbius
I suspect there are plenty of channels through which supermarkets may be
observed....

Though this raises the question of how, across multiple cultures, regimes, and
times since the early 20th century, government censorship _has_ been
perceived.

My understanding is that Pravda and Isvestia were poorly regarded in the
Soviet Union. The old joke: "There is no information in Izvestia, there is no
truth in Pravda".

Elsewhere? More recently?

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cinquemb
> _As we’ve argued in the past, companies should limit their compliance with
> foreign governments which are not democratic and where they do not have
> employees or other assets on the ground._

Should a company also limit their compliance to a foreign government even if
they are "democratic" and where they do not have employees or other assets on
the ground?

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erdle
Saudis are LPs in a lot of funds and funds of funds.

So are most not super human rights friendly sovereign wealth funds like
Singapore... where it's technically illegal to be publicly gay and I know they
use to ban WSJ but not sure if they still do.

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Overtonwindow
Could we improve the title to be less clickbait sounding?

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Overtonwindow
Thank you!!

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cholantesh
>Now, in the midst of Saudi Arabia’s sustained attack on Al Jazeera

If anyone at the EFF is reading this, the link tied to 'sustained attack' is
behind a paywall; is there an alternative source that could be used?

