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).
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.