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How will Australia's ban on youth access to social media affect instances hosted in Australia? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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Do they have any rule that says you need a minimum number of users on a site to fall under the law?

If servers of someinstance.co.au fine if they move to hosting in Finland?

It just feels like a nightmare.

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[–] -2 points 11 months ago (19 children)

IIRC moving the instance won't be helpful - the issue is the servicing of minors, not where the service is. And while the server being in a different country might be a bit of a roadblock for legalities, the general consensus is, like with GDPR - if you make your service available in Australia you must comply with Australian laws, therefore need to make your instance unavailable to children.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (11 children)

    So how is Australia going to make other sites with no footprint in Australia do it then?

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  • [–] -3 points 11 months ago (10 children)

    National level site blocking, suspension on any future operations, international courts... Corporations are much easier to persecute over borders than private persons.

    Why do you think American companies, even ones with no legal presence in Europe, still went along with GDPR? Same principle applies here.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Australia blocking 4chan in Australia doesn't compel 4chan to do anything.

    Why do you think American companies, even ones with no legal presence in Europe, still went along with GDPR? Same principle applies here.

    They didn't want to lose custom in Europe.

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  • [–] -2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    They didn't want to lose custom in Europe.

    Yeah sure that's why major news sites "complied" with GDPR by blocking European visitors...

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Some didn't mind the loss of service in Europe and just cut Europe off. Some did. Bottom line is that the EU wouldn't have been able to sue them because they had no assets in Europe.

    What is it you imagine Australia could do to 4chan, other than blocking 4chan in Australia?

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  • [–] -2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    My point is that the threat of legal action was enough that major sites decided not to risk it, and blocked Europe et al.

    4chan is hardly a financial/corporate entity (though they do seem to profit off traffic with ads), therefore much harder to go against, but blocking the service is still effective. It will be up to 4chan to see if they want to comply with the law and get unblocked or if they can live without Australian traffic.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago*

    My point is that the threat of legal action was enough that major sites decided not to risk it, and blocked Europe et al.

    And has 4chan done the same to UK after Ofcom sent them any messages? No, they haven't. There's no meaningful difference between being blocked by a country and blocking them yourself. If we eventually block 4chan, then we do that - but no way would the current US administration accept any attempted fines against them.

    4chan is hardly a financial/corporate entity (though they do seem to profit off traffic with ads), therefore much harder to go against, but blocking the service is still effective. It will be up to 4chan to see if they want to comply with the law and get unblocked or if they can live without Australian traffic.

    Right, but that's all I mean. They can't do anything to 4chan otherwise.

    (And this law, comically enough - doesn't really apply to them in the first place because they don't have account signups).

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    National level site blocking, suspension on any future operations, international courts

    Easily circumvented by changing your DNS settings or using TOR or other VPN services

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  • [–] -4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Not when the specific IP addresses of services are blocked on IPS level - which would be mandated by the state.

    VPN/Tor, sure, but at that point the service itself can't confirm where the visitor is from, therefore Australian laws wouldn't apply.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    The second half of your comment is redundant. Not knowing where the user is from is THE WHOLE POINT of TOR and VPNs in general. It just proves that this whole internet censorship thing is doomed to fail. It just forces people to find a work-around that the government doesn't control.

    But hey, if the government wants to waste time and money pissing into the wind they can go for it, let's see where that gets them.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Except they're wasting tax payer money, which is shitty.

    I hope at least it helps reduce pressure on kids that they need social media from their peers, it can be a pretty bad place to be (regardless of age really).

    Thats about all the good from it, my fear is everything else that comes after. Mainly that they'll force devices to be linked to a person, which means you'll need a way to have approved devices that can access sites etc, which means you can only use a browser that has device attestation, which means no more free and open ecosystems of applications or operating systems (LineageOS, GrapheneOS, etc)...

    Fuck all this.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    if you make your service available in Australia you must comply with Australian laws,

    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"?

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    selling Italian goods…

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (3 children)

    A better analogy would be ‘Australian buys Italian goods from online store in Australia’.

    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".

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    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’.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    the interaction that is done in Australia is not part of the business chain.

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    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:

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