Government wants a throat to choke that is subject to their jurisdiction.
If you have laws governing businesses that operate in your country it seems like a giant loophole if those businesses can avoid them simply having their servers/staff in another country. And in practice this shutting them out of the market is the stick they have to encourage compliance.
Having the company put an office there does not give you anything to choke, unless you did it like Brazil did and threaten lawyers with jail. Even then... that's just a Brazilian lawyer the company hired.
In order to do it right you have to be like a recent SEA nation that demanded the full investment from Apple in their national infra.
Well if we agree that it's reasonable that a company needs to have staff in a country it operates in, then you'd need to have staff in every country to operate. That seems unreasonable to me.
I'd argue that if applied as a universal principle, then:
* It would make it even harder specifically for smaller companies, who don't have ~200 employees to position one in each country, to get started online. If for instance you're an independent designer based in Luxembourg, maybe making fonts or website templates, would you only be allowed to sell to other people in Luxembourg?
* It would likely segment the Internet, and render much of it inaccessible to anyone living in smaller countries, because realistically most websites aren't going to bother with all countries.
* The intended goal, that websites would more likely bend to local law because they have employees there to be imprisoned/punished if they don't, seems questionable to me in the first place. In many cases the demands they'd be caving to would be "remove anti-government content" or "give us the IP and phone number of this journalist".
> Within my lifetime that wasn't even physically possible.
The world is not as it was before the takeoff of the Internet, and trying to revert back would be "unreasonable" to many.
In this case Rumble is a business model that didn't exist pre-Internet, and has to compete with Amazon/Google which have global availability (or close to it). Just because brick-and-mortar stores used to manage does not make it feasible for businesses like Rumble.
It was rhetorical, but is a nice page of text to cleverly never provide any meaningful answer to the question.
A government - elected by its people - should not allow a foreign corporation to flout their laws. "If you want to operate in our country you have to actually operate in our country, where you cannot evade responsibility and the law." is not in any way an unreasonable requirement.
If people in Brazil want to access Rumble, and Rumble wants to allow them access, why should Rumble defer to the regime? Facebook used to run a hidden service for users in China, this is the example to follow.
You could say the same about Silkroad in the US, or Google in China, or online casinos in specific states. It’s simply the law of the land. The people voted for it so that’s what it is.
It has everything to do with everything how a free and open Internet works. I'm sorry you do not know your history. The Internet is not brick and mortar businesses and never has been.
If Brazil doesn't play ball then all other peering countries should drop all their routes and they can run their own Internet.
You are not very familiar with this Internet we are on, are you? There are geoblocks everywhere for so many things. For reasons from fraud prevention to politics to every reason in between (e g. do you think that middle east governments didn't scan all emails for objectionable content in early Internet days? Do you think anyone realistically suggested cutting off the links they paid for because of this?)
Ok, are you ascribing a motive of extortion here? You seem to be repeating an awfully simple principle but not making clear what you think the context is. Could you explain what your perspective is here?
