So there's a post about the Switter/Cloudflare thing on HN, with 41 points and only 1h old, but it's missing from the frontpage 🤔 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16876040
@gargron It's kinda weird though that the post mistakes Austria from Australia... switter.at is an Austrian domain.
@natanji Switter is from Australia but the domain is Austrian
@gargron Oh, interesting, I got fooled there
@0x1C3B00DA @natanji @Gargron They serve a purpose in that they are formally controlled by a given country. Generally speaking, US laws can't be used to seize a foreign country's domain.
Which is why Switter lost it's CDN, not it's domain.
I wonder how respected that is, though. The U.S. govt sued Microsoft to access data on an Irish server. And the E.U. claims it's GDRP laws apply to any site that is used by European users. Most govts seem to think their laws supersede country boundaries when applied to the internet. And I don't know if the U.S. govt seized domains often. I thought they just had the content taken offline.
@0x1C3B00DA @Gargron @natanji Domains are frequently seized. Check out recent news regarding Backpage or Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub's actually a great example because they've been trying to evade the judgment by jumping to different country code domains.
The Microsoft data question involved data about a US user, that just happened to be stored in Ireland. Cloud providers can't evade the law by holding data in other countries.
But if a given entity both lives in, and operates using services in, a country where their activity is legal, there should be nothing that the US can do about it.
I was a bit surprised Cloudflare pulled Switter so easily/quickly, they've put up much more of a fight against these things before, but expecting a US company not to obey US law was a mistake, Switter should never have gone with them.
