I think people have forgotten how extreme a position this is: the idea that once something is on the internet, national law simply ceases to apply and governments should have absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so on - simply because it's hosted in a different country.

Not even the US really believes that domestically .. or even when it comes to overseas enforcement, such as sending the FBI to New Zealand to get Kim Dotcom. Or the Pokerstars case.

Not to mention I am really skeptical of the magic invocation of "trade" to overrule national sovereignty. That leads you to stupid places such as Philip Morris trying to use the ISDS process to force Australia to accept an inherently poisonous product (fortunately they eventually lost). https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/arbitrationlinks/2...

blocking that interferes with access to legitimate sites that i might use to buy or sell products and communicate with potential customers should be a violation of these agreements.

Some countries simply disconnect themselves from the global internet on occasion to prevent content from being delivered.

You can, of course, pass a law making it illegal for your citizens to communicate with that service, but I think it's really important to understand that that's what's happening. You are passing a law which applies to your citizens and their right to communicate with people in other countries; it's their freedoms you are placing limits on, not the freedoms of the foreign website. Sometimes when you frame things that way, such restrictions stop making sense. (Though perhaps not always.)

So by implication you're actually completely fine with other countries pursuing their own objectives for businesses that choose to trade in their country.

Because you cannot, possibly, in 2025, be making an argument that the USA's interpretation of the way of things is unimpeachable. That would be absurd and laughable.

I look forward to you explaining to Germans and Israelis why Nazi symbols and Nazi websites should be legal because banning them hurts a US tech company's interests.

I'm pretty sure you will receive a variety of opinions, some of them in large fonts with an invitation to print them and roll them up for storage.

Isn't that exactly what Cloudflare is, in part? They happily block "malicious" traffic

illegal gambling sites in country X must be allowed if they are legal in country Y - Y being America I guess.

>it ends up subsumed by political and corporate interests I believe the term for this is legislated by the laws of particular lands and regions.

Essentially Cloudflare tells U.S Government to set the rules for rest of world please.

There is a middle way that can kind of muddle along but it can be attacked by both sides for being both to strict and not being strict enough.

What about name suppression for criminal cases? If somebody is charged with a crime but hasn't yet had their trial, or is the victim of a crime such as sexual abuse, some countries will allow judges to forbid publication of their name (in case they turn out to be innocent) so local media can't say who it is but foreign media does and local people all know who it is anyway, defeating the purpose of name suppression. Perhaps we shouldn't have name suppression?

This has more or less been the default position of most internet users and developers since the beginning, until fairly recently. I’d even contend that it’s what drew many of us to the internet in the first place. If the internet ever becomes cable TV, fully regulated, controlled, and managed, it will have lost its purpose as a place for free and open exchange of information.

(Zero control is an exaggeration—the worst lawbreakers still face justice under the current system, and that seems ok. I just don’t think we should be tightening the screws any further.)

People might even have assumed it was sarcastic, and that you didn't actually want site blocking, if you defended it that way.

I think people have forgotten how extreme that position used to be.

(Money laundering and anything involving payment and debts are also independent of site blocking - it's neither sufficient or necessary to block sites to do that.

If you can forget that a position is extreme, doesn't that imply that it's a relatively unoffensive and reasonable position? For actual extreme positions like "reduce housing scarcity by murdering some category of people" or "mitigate climate change by prohibiting human reproduction", does anyone need to be reminded that they're extreme?

> the idea that once something is on the internet, national law simply ceases to apply and governments should have absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so on - simply because it's hosted in a different country.

Is this any different than the premise of sovereignty to begin with?

If you live somewhere gambling is illegal you can get on a flight to Las Vegas. If you want to buy a gun and go to the range to shoot it, or buy a piece of land where you can keep your gun, you can go to Texas, even though there are countries where guns and private land ownership by non-citizens are illegal. If you want to use certain drugs you can go to certain other countries.

Isn't the extreme position that a country should be able to control what you do even when you're willingly choosing to do it in another jurisdiction? Do the people own the government or does the government own the people?

Likely, the country that wanted to do this finds themselves isolated on their own network, not their target isolated from the internet. Even if that country as is large and powerful as the United States. Perhaps the answer might have been different, 20 years ago or even 15, but everything has changed and there's no going back.

Moderation is when you block information from me, because I don't want to see that information.

Censorship is when you block information from me, because you don't want me to see that information.

Cloudflare is the former. Or at least, that's what they want to do. Or say that they want to do. If you let someone or something do moderation on your behalf, there's always a good deal of trust involved, that they're not manipulating you by also blocking information you would have wanted to see. Moderation is not a trivial matter. But it's also not censorship.

Other way around, actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigua#Online_gambling

The first part is GFW, with which people outside of China is more familiar. It operates at every international internet cable, analyzing and dynamically blocks traffic in realtime. China only have few sites that connects to international internet, with very limited bandwidth (few Tbps in total), so it's more feasible. But overall speaking, this is the easy part.

The second part of walling a garden is about controlling what's inside the garden. Every website running in China mainland needs an ICP license from the government, which can take weeks. ISPs must be state-owned (there are 4 of them in total, no local small ISPs whatsoever). Residential IPs cannot be used for serving websites because the inbound traffic of well-known ports are blocked, which is required by the law. VPN apps are illegal. etc. These are things that are much harder to do in other countries.

You mean like that nasty EU law called the DMCA?

</s> (just in case)

EU is literally about removing protections for established interests: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...

I guess if the USPS/Fedex knew for a fact (such as your website request) that you were communicating CP, the. they should do something about it?

This is an honest question.

Countries like Russia or China spend billions on controlling the flow of information on their own land. Countries like Iran go out of their way to blackhole the traffic whenever any disruptions or political violence happens in the country, and for every Nepal, where this backfired terribly, there's a dozen cases of countries doing that and getting away with it. And you're proposing we just help the authoritarians out by doing their dirty work for them.

Sure, let's do that! Give their propagandists a win, leave everyone who's in those countries now hang out to dry in an information black hole! Let the abuses perpetuated by their own governments go unseen and unheard! All to preserve the Good Web, For Good People Only.

The rub comes in that nations, including the U.S., have laws about what they seem illegal content or services and reserve the right to force those to be blocked.

In Thailand that might be criticism of the king; in the U.S., pirated TV streams; in another country, that could be gambling sites.

Cloudflare seems to be trying to stop blocking that is trade protectionism, but is blocking overseas gambling sites trade protection or a legit state interest in protecting its citizens?

lol, ok, I'll bite. Other than one side might try to change the rules; why should I believe is free trade is no longer universally good? What is the specific argument?

Because if the argument is that one side might impose taxes, duh? But that's no longer free trade is it?

If both sides were willing to play fair, why wouldn't that be better? And why shouldn't we all be trying to "encourage" everyone to play fair?

I'd argue it's already been flipped on. Our system just works a little bit differently. Nothing is strictly prohibited via some grand theatrical firewall. Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should. We've got mountains of tools like DMCA that can precision strike anything naughty while still preserving an illusion of freedom.

Data hoarders are the American version of climbing over the GFW. The strategy of relying on entropy to kill off bad narratives seems to be quite effective. Social media platforms, cloud storage, et. al., are dramatically accelerating this pressure.

And it wasn't a Spanish government policy, but rather a single judge's order.

I assume you must be American. I always find it funny that there is that US belief that Europe is "old-fashioned" with "old tech" and "old progress". I never encountered anyone yet to tell me what progress wasn't in Europe that was in the US.

I actually think this is a bit backward, with US lack of transportation funding, more people struggling with poverty, backward ecological measures, and missing health care with lower life expectancy.

It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit) is mentioned, people find a way of pinning it on the European Union. The article has literally nothing to do with EU, and everything to do with individual European countries, yet you somehow found a way of blaming EU for it :)

Sincerely, Spanish internet user who gets blocked from half the internet every time a semi-popular football match is played in this country.

The root problem of course is their de facto monopoly status, as gatekeepers of the internet (if they aren't secretly an NSA run company, the NSA is probably very jealous of what they've done), but this would be so much worse if they decided to play internet editor.

All three prongs (ban hosting, ban access, ban revenue) can be used to keep foreign interference out of your country.

If I can have that feature with an on-prem firewall or load balancer, why can't I ask the in-cloud equivalent to also have it?

I get what you're saying (they're affording access to info, not access for people) but you can't have one without the other.

Even in incredibly recent times what do you think the position was regarding the monthly magazine Al-Qaeda published was? It certainly wasn’t the “marketplace of ideas” I’ll tell you that much.

Doesn’t scale.

Well, which jurisdiction applies to Spanish Internet users in Spain and Spanish ISPs?

Doesn't the US claim global tax jurisdiction on its nationals?

That is often the case, but it's also not the relevant part, because consider what happens if you do that. I mean it's the same thing that happens with parcel carriers -- everybody's package ends up in an opaque brown box and the carrier has no means to determine if it's contraband. They just weigh it and deliver it, which is what they're supposed to do, because they're not the police.

And so it is with ISPs. What happens if you make them block stuff people actually want? TLS, third party DNS, VPNs, etc.

At that point you have to answer a different question: Should they be obligated to open and censor your mail?

No. The answer is no.

Cloudflare has a significant enough marketshare it doesn’t seem to make a meaningful difference whether it’s blocked at this or that level, for the vast majority of end users.

The centralization of power is the problem, and as I say near the end:

> …I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization.

Or tap the fiber lines at the border and inject RST packets from off-path, which is something the Great Firewall of China does, and is ironically much more transparent than what they actually are doing.

Or cut the cables between the USA and Russia, or between the USA and any country that doesn't cut their own cables to Russia. The USA did this to Iran with the banking system and it worked: the USA cuts money transfers with any country that doesn't cut money transfers with Iran. I don't think it would necessarily go their way if they did it right now with the internet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Omar_case

Don't use that brain to cross the road

The idea of outright banning VPNs seems to be along these lines imo.

Japan closed itself off from the world for centuries during the Edo period. One could say that they suffered economically due to that, but on the other hand, they ended up creating one of the more unique cultures in the world, developing in ways very different from others. It's an interesting kind of diversity.

A good example is how payment processors (mainly the major credit card companies) police adult sites, forcing them to ban certain keywords. It's a weird situation in which the role of morality police is played at the point where control can naturally be exercised in a capitalist economy.

As we'd expect, that same pattern is repeated elsewhere, e.g. in social networks that censor in all sorts of ways, many of them explicitly intended to reinforce the status quo and neutralize or undermine dissent.

When you have an authoritarian government, all of this tends to happen more centrally. But democracies tend to distribute this function throughout the economy and society.

Cloudflare does provide APIs to look up security threats by IP addresses that could help with DDOS, and I wouldn't consider that hosting: https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/intel/subres...

I wasn't suggesting that authoritarians hadn't suggested (or succeeded at) suppressing "foreign propaganda" in the past, but then people still knew they were authoritarians, if they found out. You imagine you're not.

- Domain Name Seizures via ICANN and registrars

- Political/legal pressure on CDNs, SSL certificate providers, bandwidth providers.

- Propaganda and legal labeling ("malicious actor", "foreign agent", "terrorist")

- There are technical workarounds to keep the page up within Russia's sovereign internet (Runet).

The Spanish Internet users are attempting to leave the jurisdiction and come back with only information. The ISPs are the equivalent of train operators. How is prohibiting them from taking you to the border not an attempt to prevent you from doing something in another jurisdiction which is legal there?

> Doesn't the US claim global tax jurisdiction on its nationals?

It's one of the most astounding and outrageous things the US does and it ought to stop immediately, not least because people keep citing it as precedent to justify other bad choices.

It’s why I staunchly refuse to touch Cloudflare for fucking anything. When your company defends a group whose ethos is genocide, you’ve lost me forever, free speech be damned.

And when other countries don't play ball? Then we shut down those backbones, and it's the United States that is isolate, not Russia (though please feel free to pick another target if you don't like Russia). No one's cutting off China, not without their economy dropping dead. Sure, maybe there's some country that you could do this to... but that country is so unimportant that they're probably already almost-cut-off anyway. You don't even get to to do this to a Brazil or Indonesia, let alone any country that matters.

they are. they're not obligated to go through every package but they are absolutely obligated to turn over packages to law enforcement, and they do, and law enforcement will one hundred percent open and go through your mail. and if they find something you shouldn't have they will dress up as a mail carrier to deliver it to you and then detain you!

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make exactly but this is a losing battle

The Great Firewall is, among various other things, an attempt to create a single historical narrative for the PRC by blocking out reference to things like Tiananmen, discussions of early twentieth-century China suggesting that China could have gone a different way than the Communist Party and prospered, etc. The USA has absolutely nothing like that, people can readily find open-web and social-media content taking every possible position on American history, both staid academic content and wacko conspiracy theory stuff.

When it all comes down to it, the USA just isn’t as hung up on social harmony and narrative control as the PRC. That’s why there isn’t a comparable system in place, and claiming that the odious DMCA is anywhere close, is hyperbole.

1. They have a moderately generous free tier, which they'll aggressively try to upsell you out of the moment they smell money in your wallet.

2. They have an anti-censorship policy that is indistinguishable from the policies of a "bulletproof" hosting company, which means all the DDoS vendors they protect you from are also paying Cloudflare.

This leads me to believe that Cloudflare's protection is less "stringent defense of free speech" and more "you wouldn't want something to happen to that precious website of yours, right?" Like, there's no free speech argument for keeping DDoS vendors online - it's a patently obvious own goal. If someone is selling censorship as a service, then it's obvious, at least to me, that silencing them and them alone would actually make others more free to speak.

the other side will never push enough at once to make bazooka style retaliation the correct strategy

How cheap, I wonder, does a government have to be to sell itself out over ball game broadcasting rights? Could someone like Elon Musk just fly in there and acquire the entire government with some pocket change?

Living in the US, I've noticed many Americans don't really make distinctions like that. They see "EU" as a kind of shorthand for "Europe", or something along those lines. Even the fact that the UK is no longer in the EU doesn't affect this - it's still part of what Americans think of as "the EU".

If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play' it makes plenty of sense.

And you’re covering the ground I already laid in the original comment:

> …the only way to effectively punish an operator like Cloudflare is to block its entire IP range, despite the harms innocent customers and users will incur. And I can’t quite figure out a way past that under the current piecemeal system of the internet and the financial incentives for consolidation and centralization.

I don’t need eSplaining of my own argument.

> This blocking regulation requires network providers, including CDNs, to comply with blocking notices within 30 minutes.

> orders that go beyond regular Internet providers, requiring DNS resolvers and VPN services to take action as well.

https://time.com/7015026/meta-facebook-zuckerberg-covid-bide...

Misinformation or not, I like form my opinions myself, rather than have the government do it for me. There was absolutely a lot of nonsense[1] going around during covid, but constantly being told what to believe felt extremely irksome.

[1] https://youtu.be/sSkFyNVtNh8

Read up on the motivations behind the TikTok acquisition, or the attempts to legislatively censor certain topics on Wikipedia, or the myriad of knobs used by social media “content review” teams etc, or Chat Control in the EU, or going back further, the surveillance systems detailed in the Snowden leaks (why surveil if censorship isn’t the goal?).

It’s ultimately exactly the same reasoning as that used by the CCP, but in a more subtle and gradual manner. Yes, right now, the GFW is a different beast, but if we do nothing, I would wager that the solutions will converge.

That's an argument for capitulation in general: it's not an argument specifically against extending the field of scope to include services.

This is a new idea for me. How is optimality measured here? Aggregate utility for society? What's the independent variable? Is this from the perspective of law-makers? If I was on a desert island, should I do some crime to ensure optimality?

Also, just for folks seemingly confused by my words in the original post: I got no beef with digital piracy myself, just more pointing out that if your company is willfully protecting hate speech (like Nazis) and piracy sites, well, you’re courting a very specific kind of response, and whining about receiving that response after the fact is not exactly sympathetic.

For that analogy to hold, I would need something equivalent to a US visa to post this comment that you are currently reading.

Or .. lets say due to weather, your farmers can not grow enough oranges or some fruit which drives up local prices. Should only the richest people in your country get to eat fruits ?

Or you discover lithium deposits that your national industry can not use . Should you let that just sit there knowing it could make your province prosperous if traded.

See the gears grind to a halt when they are reeducated on the concepts of "Central AMERICA" and "South AMERICA".

Want to avoid confusion? Call it something like "United Nations", 'UN'. Confusion solved, Americans happy, call off the tariffs, peace, etc.

> If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play' it makes plenty of sense.

Not sure even this makes sense, it's not something that is happening Europe wide, and it seems like there is only two countries so far that been engaging in this, with another one thinking about it. For something to be a "pretty typical European play" I'd probably say it has to have happened more times than "twice".

For any country which cares about the freedom of its citizens, I feel the latter framing ought to make them significantly more hesitant to enact such measures.

You run a bar. You let anyone in, and some of your customers are a bit edgy.

But one day, Nazis start using your bar for their regular gathering and you don't kick them out.

Congratulations: now you have a Nazi bar.

How is this not a trade barrier against foreign payment providers?

It does, however, provide evidence that doing that is dumb.

KYC/AML have an effectiveness that rounds to zero while causing trouble for innocent people as the government pressures the banks to do something about problems the banks aren't in a position to actually solve, so instead the banks suspend the accounts of more innocent people because the government is pressuring them to suspend more accounts.

This is just another form of Blackstone’s ratio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_ratio

The problem itself is an ancient one and you can find a number of texts that explore the idea from various angles.

Only if the US required it.

A country you're not a citizen of preventing you from coming in isn't the same thing as a country you are a citizen of preventing you from leaving.

Consider it like this: Suppose you're in Europe and you want to communicate with someone in the US. You could do it in person by you going there, or by them coming to you, or both of you going to some third place to meet. Your country could prevent them from coming to you but not either of the other ones, and you can communicate with them if you can do any of the three. The internet only makes it more efficient.

People often get confused by divisions like this because they feel like they should be real in an objective sense, but continents are almost entirely social constructs. (There is a North American tectonic plate, and that's real, but it doesn't quite line up with the continent)

We're in the electronic age, 'stuff' includes electricity, media, and remote-provided services. For a concrete example - if you're buying legal advice from a lawyer, it doesn't matter if he's down the street from you, or on another continent - the exchange of money for 'stuff' is the same.

It is, at least that's the most common definition.

If you want to refer to North and South America together, one generally says "the Americas".

It's certainly not the case that "most adults in the US grew up and were educated at a time..." The EU exceeded $3 trillion in GDP by 1980. The original EU countries included Germany, France, and Italy, so were hardly insignificant.

It's just a foreign company being upset that it isn't getting special treatment that would allow it to operate with an illegal advantage over local vendors.

That's factually inaccurate.

However from a different perspective, it's those policies that are an immutable force of nature. "Non-zero fraud is optimal" might sound like there could be a population who wasn't committing enough fraud. I haven't done any fraud this year, but I'm trying to be a good person. But that's not the Blackstone perspective. In Blackstone, the populace are thought of as reacting only to policy and basically having no autonomy.

I'm not arguing anything, but just noting how the sound-bite can be (and was) misconstrued.

I don't think anyone (outside the US at least) use "The Americas" in daily language, while "America" certainly is.

It isn't:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...

"It finds that the anti-money laundering policy intervention has less than 0.1 percent impact on criminal finances, compliance costs exceed recovered criminal funds more than a hundred times over, and banks, taxpayers and ordinary citizens are penalized more than criminal enterprises."

Countries do a thing where they call something "neutral rules" while crafting them such that only the domestic incumbents can satisfy them or they can be selectively enforced against anyone the regulators don't like or who actually does or is deemed likely to refuse to comply with extralegal requests that the law doesn't or couldn't require. The US financial regulators do exactly that and you can see it in the outcomes.

In the West we are typically less tolerant of enforcement-driven hardship. This goes back to our Enlightenment ideals about freedom and justice, which are less strong than they once were but are still present.

I guess the Organization of American States exists. But usually it's pretty unambiguous which sense is being used; like, I guess you could call Mark Carney an American head of government but it's basically just being obtuse, unless it was in the context of, say, a meeting of Carney with other heads of government in the hemisphere, and then it'd be unambiguous what was meant.

Even "United States of America" is not unambiguous in the most pathological case; Mexico is also a country consisting of united states existing in the Americas.

Probably because of its closer association with the adjective "American".

If someone with limited English asks where I'm from, they're more likely to understand if I say "America" than "United States". And no one has ever asked "oh but which country in America?".

Moreover, Cloudflare is the CDN being blocked by foreign ISPs because their laws require ISPs to do blocking on the basis of IP address even though Cloudflare's IP addresses are shared by huge numbers of other customers. It's effectively an attempt to punish international companies for having customers who do something which is illegal in one country even if it's legal in their own country, e.g. some content is in the public domain in one country but not another. It's an attempt to apply one country's laws to another country.

Which is a trade barrier because it prevents a company from serving the customers in both jurisdictions, creating a preference for domestic companies that don't operate in the jurisdictions with less restrictive laws.

Why is it weird? All other aspects being equal, why would you want to put your money into a bank that's accountable to another government first, and your market second?

Banking involves a ton of (unverifiable from the retail end) trust. There are a lot of risks to it. Going with a local institution mitigates some of them, and going with a foreign one adds very few benefits (Unless you're doing a lot of business in their home country).

You can absolutely bank with a foreign bank. HSBC is a giant international bank. TD and RBC are Canadian banks with branches in the US (RBC's are whitelabeled as City National Bank). If you want to do some tax evasion, or deal with the fallout of rogue traders, or bank with someone who has the rotting corpse of Credit Suisse anchored around its neck, you're free to do your retail (or investment) banking with UBS.

Why aren't you using them?

I assure you, you'll find the experience largely interchangeable with the same level of service you'd expect from any of the Big Four.

That's interesting! In my experience, meeting people from the US outside of the US mostly, when you ask where they are from, they tend to always say the city or the state, but never actually specify either "United States" or "America". If you don't happen to know that that state/city is in the US, and they never specified the country, you're usually safe to assume they're from the US :)

Because if they were operating in the US then they'd be FDIC insured and subject to US courts like any US bank, and because all else isn't equal. They could be offering better interest rates, or lower fees, or better customer service, or anything else that could make customers want to use them. And since they want business, they'd do those things to exactly the extent it would take for them to get market share. Unless something is preventing that.

It's not! I've given you four examples of large foreign banks that you - you can walk into your nearest US branch of and open an account with, today.

For some strange reason, you'll find the service, interest rates, and everything else about them to be essentially the same damn thing as you'll get from the big four. Retail banking is a commodity at this point.

Trade barriers generally aren't when something is fully impossible or illegal, they're when it's impeded in some way to sustain an advantage for domestic companies. There are an infinite number of ways to do that and it's often layering them on top of each other rather than any one individual thing, but strong evidence of that happening is if it's achieving the intended result, i.e. that domestic companies have the large majority of the domestic market, whereas the same companies competing for the same class of customers in a different country have a lower share. When the only difference is the law, "a law that creates an advantage for domestic companies" is what a trade barrier is.

> Retail banking is a commodity at this point.

Except where it isn't.

For example, suppose you want a specific service: We don't freeze your account without a court order. A foreign bank would nominally be in a strong position to do this, because they could keep the money somewhere else and then you could get to it in Ireland or wherever even if the US subsidiary was under extralegal pressure to cut you off. It would force the US to use official process that gives you legal recourse instead of strong arming in the back room.

Unless the strong arming takes the form of keeping them out of the market or assuring that they have negligible market share, which is the trade barrier.

> For example, suppose you want a specific service: We don't freeze your account without a court order.

And this, exactly is why your cow is spherical. The small number of people for whom this would be a legitimate differentiator aren't a market large enough for anyone to give a crap about. You're of course free to try to start a fintech startup for "People who are likely be the targets of extrajudicial account freezes", but I don't think you'll have the greatest... or the greatest customer base. Which country your parent company is incorporated in will be the least of your problems in running that business successfully.

You're also starting from the mistaken assumption that a court order is the only legitimate reason that this country's legal system believes an account should be frozen (it's not[1]), or the only legitimate reason that you would want your account frozen (it's not). But you can abstract anything away in hypotheticals - that's the beauty of them.

---

In none of this you have demonstrated how consistent, country-of-origin agnostic regulation is a trade barrier that unfairly advantages domestic firms. But you have introduced a lot of complexity (and much misunderstanding) by picking a subject as complicated as banking.

Let me make it simple - Is Quebec putting up unfair trade barriers because it requires products sold in it to be labeled in French? What stops foreign vendors from meeting that same requirement?

---

[1] And when you discover that assumption was incorrect, the relevant enforcement agencies won't give a crap if your head office is in Chicago or Timbuktu[2] - because you need to have a local presence (and an account at the Fed) to operate which is the same bar that all the domestic banks also have to meet, they'll have plenty of people to haul off to court.

[2] If this mattered, then this would provide an unfair advantage to the foreign company which is an utterly asinine way to run your country.

There are 340 million people in the US and significantly more people who would want that service than some credit unions have total members. And you don't have to offer only that, but now who is offering that at all? One of the hallmarks of a competitive market is that there is someone trying to fill every niche.

> You're of course free to try to start a fintech startup for "People who are likely be the targets of extrajudicial account freezes", but I don't think you'll have the greatest... or the greatest customer base. Which country your parent company is incorporated in will be the least of your problems in running that business successfully.

This is the issue. You're willing to provide service to sex workers etc., but your problem isn't them, it's what the government does to you if they don't like what you're doing.

And it's not about how many people want that in particular, it's a demonstration that the government has the capacity to suppress things it doesn't like without formally having a rule against them.

> You're also starting from the mistaken assumption that a court order is the only legitimate reason that this country's legal system believes an account should be frozen (it's not[1]), or the only legitimate reason that you would want your account frozen (it's not).

I'm starting from the assumption that promising not to freeze your account means without your permission or ability to undo.

> In none of this you have demonstrated how consistent, country-of-origin agnostic regulation is a trade barrier that unfairly advantages domestic firms.

This one's the easy one. It's when they're subjective or rely on prosecutorial discretion rather than actual compliance with unambiguous rules. Because then the rules aren't actually the rules, they're just the book they flip through to find a violation when they want to put their thumb on the scale.

And to be clear, the US has both. There are rules that, if you violate them, you get punished. These are even the majority of what actual prosecutions are about. But then there are the ones they can threaten you with when they want you to do something or not do something that isn't written down, or they just don't like you and want to frustrate you.

> Let me make it simple - Is Quebec putting up unfair trade barriers because it requires products sold in it to be labeled in French? What stops foreign vendors from meeting that same requirement?

In a technical sense it is, because it's a requirement that makes it easier for domestic sellers who are focused on the local market and would be paying the cost of labeling in French already, whereas small foreign sellers might be able to enter the market by putting their existing products on a truck but having to run a separate production line with a different product label would exclude them.

But it's also probably a very small one, so then is it enough to have a significant effect? And we're back to market share being evidence.