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Ultimately one company can't do business in, and be subject to the jurisdiction of, two countries whose laws require them to do opposite things.

If push really came to shove Google would leave Canada--no offices, no ad sales, no shipping physical product there. Maybe even put a clause in their ToS saying that their products couldn't be used from Canada. If they did all that and Canadian courts still tried to fine it or award damages against it then other countries' courts would refuse to enforce those rulings.




I consider this the nuclear option and one that is unlikely for a large corp if we're just talking about fines (as opposed to purely opposing laws as in my hypothetical). For a normal company if the ROI of their presence > the negative ROI of complying with orders, they will remain. My question was more targeting the public and whether they accept that more restrictive regional rulings will win out.

This also comes into play w/ recent EU rulings. With a large company, fragmenting features in location-specific ways is reasonable. But for other smaller companies, they have to weigh whether the loss of customers costs less than location-specific feature implementations.

In general, with the internet, we should err on the side of lesser regulation IMO (which can appear to favor businesses over consumers). But this has been a political discussion for ages, predating globalism.


if that (the ROI of their presence > the negative ROI of complying with orders) were true, would not Google keep their business going in China?

In reality, it is not easy to measure such RoIs positive or negative.


the reason is that refusing to comply with chinese censorship laws is not a fine, it is a prison sentence.




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