this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
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How does this even work? This is among the stupidest arguments I've ever heard on the internet, at about the same level of flat-earthism.
Are you saying if I am in Italy, selling Italian good on an Italian shop set in an Italian street, and an Australian tourist sends an agent to walk the Italian street and buy a thing for them from my Italian stand, I am somehow beholden to Australian law? This but "oN tHE iNtErNeT"?
A better analogy would be ‘Australian buys Italian goods from online store in Australia’. Under your analogy no, because nothing at all is done in Australia, where your online shop would be, therefore it’d be subject to Australian law.
It’s still not a very effective law, though.
The entire point of the analogy is that we are eschewing "online" stuff so that we can see how "bUt On tHE iNTeRnEt" applies, so "but make it an online store" is literally missing the point.
Better analogy in that sense would be still "Australian sends an agent to buy something from a physical store in Italy after finding a printed catalog that a third party imported into Australia from Italy".
So it looks as if you’ve added ‘this but on the internet’ afterward, is that correct?
Taking that away, no, because my point with using an online store was that some interaction is done in Australia, as is the case with social media sites overseas that Australians interact on, in Australia. Replace online store for ‘mailed catalogue’.
Yeah but the interaction that is done in Australia is not part of the business chain. The catalogue was not mailed by my store. Someone else (an ISP, in this exercise) took it from an available stand in Italy and imported it (on their own) to Australia. (The closest I can think of to the material representation of "mailed catalogue" in this exercise is if I intentionally uploaded a copy of my .it website to an .au hosting)
For another analogy: if I were to post an Italian job offer in Italy, not only I am not subject to Malaysian (or Australian) labour law, but a third party in Malaysia reproducing the job offer there does not change that fact either. It's their copy, and act-of-copy, of the job offer that is subject to Malaysian law, at best. And this should hold true regardless of the nature of the message: mere emission of the message can not be constituted as consecration of a legal responsibility towards any potential listener. If that was the case, it would be impossible to make any political, religious or scientific speech lawfully, as surely a law is being broken sometime, somewhere and a message can by its nature outlast the act of emission.
Then it’s not subject to our laws, which is why an Australian walking up to an Italian vendor in Italy is a bad analogy…no interaction is done in Australia. It doesn’t matter if it’s an Australian buying something in Italy, our laws don’t apply to your original analogy.
As for your last paragraph I agree and that’s probably one area where it will fail.
This is a complex issue and both of the comments above are way oversimplifying it...
Lots of governments around the world are nowadays claiming that their laws apply to all or many websites that can be accessed in their borders. Whether they can enforce this if the website has no physical assets in the country is a very different question. They could arrest their operators when they enter their countries (as happened to Pavel Durov), or they could geoblock websites, or... here are some starting points for further research: