I'm no fan of Cloudflare, but they're completely in the right on that. Infrastructure for blocking websites simply shouldn't exist.
Because if it's allowed to exist, it ends up subsumed by political and corporate interests, and becomes a tool of overreach and abuse. We've seen that happen over and over again.
If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.
> Infrastructure for blocking websites simply shouldn't exist.
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...
I think if something is hosted in a different country, the laws of that country apply to that service. It's not under your jurisdiction, so you have no say in whether it's allowed to exist, nor should you.
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.)
> 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?
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?
> Should they be obligated to open and censor your mail?
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
If the government wants to read your mail, they need a warrant. And then it's the government doing it, not a private company, and you have a right to a trial and to see the evidence presented against you etc. etc., which is why it shouldn't be put on a private company who isn't going to do any of that.
It's not. It's just a different (and in my opinion, more accurate) way of framing what the status quo is. Governments aren't really "blocking websites"; they're blocking their citizens ability to communicate with those websites.
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.
"your citizens" includes your ISPs so you can forbid them from delivering that content to their customers in your country, which is just site blocking. The law could allow consumption of the material but not redistribution within your country so it's not the end user's responsibility but is the ISP's.
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?
You're missing one further step - you can also sanction a foreign business from doing business in your country. So, you can allow it to serve your citizens packets, but if you block it from collecting revenue, it will have little incentive to (unless it's a state-sponsored bad actor, then you can only lean on the two mechanisms you described).
All three prongs (ban hosting, ban access, ban revenue) can be used to keep foreign interference out of your country.
True, but I would still frame that as a restriction on your own citizen's freedom to buy services from foreign countries. Unless they're physically shipping stuff across your borders, a foreign website that accepts payment from your citizens isn't "doing business in your country" anymore than a hot dog vendor is by serving foreign tourists in my opinion.
> Unless they're physically shipping stuff across your borders, a foreign website that accepts payment from your citizens isn't "doing business in your country" anymore than a hot dog vendor is by serving foreign tourists in my opinion.
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.
If it's nation-of-origin-agnostic (All vendors, domestic or foreign have to follow the same rules, and the foreigners have chosen to not follow those rules, and are being sanctioned for it), it's not a trade barrier.
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.
Is that what it is though? It seems weird that such an overwhelming majority of US retail banking customers are using a domestic institution if the foreign ones are getting a fair shake, doesn't it?
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.
> It seems weird that such an overwhelming majority of US retail banking customers are using a domestic institution if the foreign ones are getting a fair shake, doesn't it?
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
Your argument is one of spherical cows. I'm giving specifics. You can walk into a TD branch today, and get the same shitty service as you will from Wells Fargo. TD is a large, but not a dominant bank in the US. If anything, this is proof that there isn't a significant regulatory trade barrier to banking. Here's a foreign bank, it meets all the rules for banking in this country, it's service offerings are ~the same as the local ones. It's proof that banking is commoditized, and only people with very special requirements would choose a foreign bank over a domestic one (In this case, Canadians living in the US have reasons to use it).
> 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.
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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?
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[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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
You are right, but I was referring to the fact that their ideas are not necessarily the best ones.
Edit: because they were too optimistic, they left the security problems behind. Same with this kind of problem.
Authenticated TCP wouldn’t have been feasible on early networks due to hardware limitations. But here in the present, you could certainly build it. As long as it works on top of IP, nothing is stopping you.
Doesn’t need to. The optimum amount of lawbreaking is non-zero. As long as we are catching the worst criminals and creating reasonable incentives to avoid crime, we are doing enough. Some amount of lawbreaking is to be expected in a free society; it’s literally the price of freedom.
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?
This is from a policy-maker's perspective. It treats the human inclination toward fraud as an immutable force of nature (which may well be reasonable). But it seems the general idea is that policies required to achieve zero fraud would cost too much in enforcement. They would not be purely rational benefits for the organization whose policy is being written.
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 can see how you might have misunderstood. Yes, I was looking at it from the perspective of policy. Any policy designed to reduce crime is going to create some hardship for the innocent, and the question is how much enforcement-driven hardship is the public willing to tolerate in order to reduce crime-driven hardship. In a business context (as in the first article) your customers are not obliged to do business with you; in a democracy they are not obliged to vote for you.
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 think people have forgotten how extreme a position this is
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?
> 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?
Well, which jurisdiction applies to Spanish Internet users in Spain and Spanish ISPs?
Doesn't the US claim global tax jurisdiction on its nationals?
> Well, which jurisdiction applies to Spanish Internet users in Spain and Spanish ISPs?
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.
> 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?
For that analogy to hold, I would need something equivalent to a US visa to post this comment that you are currently reading.
> For that analogy to hold, I would need something equivalent to a US visa to post this comment that you are currently reading.
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.
It is a tough predicament we find our selves in. A totally free and open network is prone to exploitation by rampant abuse. A controlled and monitored network is prone to excessive restrictions.
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.
I notice foreign propaganda has sneaked in there. It wouldn't have been there 20 years ago. Then defending site blocking with the need to stop foreign propaganda would be seen as a huge self-goal.
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.
I think you’re actually just incredibly unfamiliar with history to be honest and might be mixing up a Reagan quote about border control and extrapolating that into something very different.
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.
No Reagan quote here, I don't know what you're talking about.
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.
Just checking a real basic assumption here. Is there a scenario in your mind where a government says that legally its citizens can not consume certain material that ISN’T authoritarian? Because I don’t even know where to start with a premise like that to be honest with you.
It is kind of stupid when you think about what this stuff fundamentally is: digital files on someone's computer that you connected to. The analog, well, analog would be if the FBI had cctv into everyone's bookshelf and desk drawer. Some real Orwellian thought policing we hand wave away because the nature of the technology makes such surveillance logistically trivial in comparison.
Nobody's saying the government shouldn't be able to go after the owner of the site and force them to shut it down. It definitely shouldn't be done by third parties though.
It shouldn't be able to, clearly. Not any more than Russia should be able to shut down a US website, hosted in the US, for US people, following US laws.
Same thing they do to every country, Pinky. Have a small team invade the country and disappear the people they don't like[1].
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.
The US already deputizes third parties to enforce its laws. Banks are responsible for KYC / AML. Grocery stores must check ID when selling alcohol. This is nothing special.
I wouldn't call legal force to be deputizing anybody. If those entities don't do as the law says they will be in trouble themselves. Deputies have authority. Banks and stores are just following the rules and report to authority when required.
You're picking a pretty fine semantic distinction, and IMO if you're going to be a pedant, you should try to be correct. Deputization isn't my invented description for this model; it's more broadly used. E.g., https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/money-laundering-and-...
It's accurate that the US already does it, but that doesn't tell you if we should be doing it.
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.
"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."
On the contrary, if you don’t have business in a country and they just spam you or try to hack you why not block the whole IP range. China, India, Russia, Subsaharan Africa, SEA
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.
They block traffic reaching your website, not the other way around. For a poor, nitpickable analogy: they keep the bad guys out of your home, but they don't want to take away homes from the bad guys.
With your analogy, they aim to keep the "bad guys" out of all homes, which is the same thing as saying those guys can't have homes. Also the "bad guys" group you're referring to includes, like, my cousin Jake because he accidentally crashed his pushbike into a car once when he was 6, but doesn't include Adolf Hitler for some reason.
it's not so much the US Trade Office, but this needs to be considered in any international trade agreements.
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.
If content can be delivered over the internet, then content can also not be delivered over the internet. The only question is how surgical the ban hammer is.
Some countries simply disconnect themselves from the global internet on occasion to prevent content from being delivered.
That's a bit rich coming from Cloudflare, a company that routinely blocks access to important and legitimate websites to huge parts of the world. A huge part of Cloudflare's customers use them specifically to block users' access to websites.
There's a big difference between a company making that decision (an edge provider) vs a country doing that at the network level.
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?
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.
As someone who has had to implement these blocks, it’s not generally done because anyone wants to, it’s because someone passed a law that requires us to do it. I don’t get to override the ITAR or Entities list just because I don’t feel it’s fair someone is on it.
Didn't CF CEO post in March 2019 that they were going to start working with govts on suggestions for how to implement laws that would get them to block things people didn't like?
> If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.
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.
Different countries have different laws regarding what falls under freedom of speech. The CDN providers say they take a net-neutrality stance. If a court order from a specific country tells them to block certain sites, I'm pretty sure they will comply, but only for clients coming from within that country.
An obvious problem with this analogy is that the percentage of Cloudflare's traffic which could be Nazis even if they were hosting all the Nazis in the world would still start with a 0 followed by a decimal point.
There is no threat of any particular service being overrun with any particular ideology. That isn't how this works. If the same host is hosting the websites of both Israeli and Muslim groups, neither of them would even be aware of the other being on the same servers unless somebody told them.
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.
Facebook is a single website. Other websites can host it just fine.
This is the same as blocking content on your own forum or comment section on your blog. Yes fb is huge, but still just a website, and one with fading popularity.
I see the comparison you're trying to draw, and I don't agree.
People use FB because other people use it. There's a lot more complexity, and algorithm fuled habits. But in the end, FB provides the service of communication and content recommendations. Using that attention, it can sell ads. Without that willingness to give attention, they can't sell ads. There are no significant hurdles to starting a social media site.
Credit card processors facilitate payments from one group to a different group. They aren't an endpoint, they are middle men. They don't need to court the attention of users, they are in a position of power it where they can interfere with the lives of others, and have formed a coalition with a total monopoly over the digital trade of money. Good luck starting a competitor while attempting to shun PCI compliance.
If I never use FB, I can still interact with friends, family, buy and sell ads. If I never use a credit card... I've been cut off from the vast majority of the things that I would buy.
It's reasonable for different rules to apply to groups with vastly different powers. I wouldn't expect Google to be held to the same standard that I hold PG&E. Nor would I hold PG&E to the same restrictions I'd place on Google.
Yet I just found an article that said that MAU was 3.065 in 2023 and 2024 and 3.07 in 2025 (i.e. MAU is flat not decreasing). Did you drop a zero?
AFAIK there is no consensus that Facebook usage is declining - however that narritive gets told by people. Of course, it might depend on which country you look at.
There is no win in using this administration to strong-arm other countries into giving tech corps some sort of extraterritoriality.
Yes, Spain is screwing up. But it is the responsibility of Spanish electors to fix the mess. Any alternative involving the US department of State should be fought.
Because if it's allowed to exist, it ends up subsumed by political and corporate interests, and becomes a tool of overreach and abuse. We've seen that happen over and over again.
If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.