Belgium Tries to Fine Yahoo for Protecting US User Privacy

Techdirt is reporting that Belgium is trying to extract fines from Yahoo for not producing user data that was recently demanded of the US company. Instead of following normal diplomatic channels Belgian officials apparently made the data demands directly to Yahoo's US headquarters and then took the company to criminal court, where a judge issued the fine. "The implications of this ruling are profound and far-reaching. Following the court's logic would subject user data associated with any service generally available online to the jurisdiction of all countries. It would also subject all companies that offer services generally available on the global Internet to the laws of all jurisdictions, potentially exposing individual employees to a variety of criminal sanctions."

Comments

Catch 22

[SirFozzie]

If this was true, then talk about your dammed if you do, dammed if you don't moment. Some countries require this data to only be kept for a small amount of time, others require it for a long amount of time. They demand data.. do you face trouble for not turning over the data that the foreign folks require, or fufill the data request and take it in the shorts from your home nation?

Re:Catch 22

[socrplayr813]

Until we (people) get our act together, I'd rather have the option to move to a place where things are run differently. That way, I'm stuck if and when system in my home country goes completely crazy.

One bloated and mismanaged government is not better than lots of smaller bloated and mismanaged governments. They might all suck, but at least they suck in different ways, giving us choices. Hey, it's kind of like Linux.

Okay, so I'll get modded down for that last sentence, but the rest needs to be said. It's worth the karma hit.

Re:Let's Put Belgium To Sleep

[geekoid]

What about the beer?
Won't anyone think of the beer?

How do they enforce the ruling?

[javacowboy]

This is about as laughable as a Brazilian judge ordering YouTube shut down because a incriminating video of two Brazilian celebrities kept getting posted on that site. Needless to say, YouTube is still up and running.

This isn't the first strange internet ruling coming out of Belgium. There was the row between Copiepresse and Google over Google linking to Copiepresse's newspapers. Google was fined and promptly stopped linking to the newspaper's sites.

Re:If Bush were still President

[Em Emalb]

twice. Once in English, once in tortured "Belgish".

This will, naturally, piss of the Gremans, who will then be forced to bomb Pearl Harbor.

Oh, wonderful internet, horrible internet

[girlintraining]

Why is it that only our generation understands the truly public and universal nature of the internet? Nobody owns the internet, and nobody ever will. You can claim to own the wires, the equipment, the computers, the software, and every other component, but you still won't own the internet. The internet has given birth to an idea -- that we're all interconnected and nobody owns the spaces in between. This idea recurs generation after generation, only to die because society can't find a place for it.

Oh, but they'll try. They will cast their books down on our heads, scream a million epitaths of criminal, deviant, terrorists, and invent new terms to express their disgust. They'll arrest us, punish us, and wage massive campaigns of fear. But they'll never get the idea out of our heads that maybe, just maybe, we don't have to pay their tax to touch the life of another person.

if the usa never existed

[circletimessquare]

all of the horrible crimes you ascribe to the usa would still go on

please stop ascribing to american behavior that which is basically human behavior. its better to have an ideology that is based on some sort of principles, rather than mindless kneejerk anti-americanism

then you can still find america guilty of plenty of crimes, and rightfully so. but then you can extend that to find other countries guilty of many of those same crimes, without sounding like an idiot because you want to put forth the idea that the usa is somehow magically the originator of a crime someone else committed

example: the usa meddled in central america... therefore the usa is guilty of absolutely every crime committed there by every player ever since. the usa meddled in the middle east... therefore the usa is responsible for absolutely every crime committed there by every player ever since. etc., ad nauseum, and other such retarded thinking

dude: belgium is not "following the example of the United States". belgium is being retarded all by itself, all on its own. really

i now await the typical and retarded response: i'm a neocon imperialist dick cheney cocksucker, i'm from the lunatic right wing fringe. all because i ask for some logical coherence. can you tell the difference between a moderate opinion and a far right opinion?

please, go right on criticizing the usa. you may hate the usa all you want. go on with your bad self, be my guest, keep the venom flowing and the high holy moral outrage and indignation fresh. i fully support all the anti-american tirades you can muster. zzz

just try to notice at some point all of the other crimes committed by all the other countries in the world

k thx

Re:Let's Put the USA to sleep

[whoever57]

Let's not forget the USA's actions against foreign based gambling operations. The USA started this type of action!

Individuals affected already

[sugarmotor]

I am getting the suspicion that this story pretends this to be a bigger issue because it affects an American company.

However, this kind of "which laws are affecting what I do" has already got individuals. See for example the case of Hew Raymond Griffiths,

  * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hew_Raymond_Griffiths
  * http://www.ibls.com/internet_law_news_portal_view.aspx?id=1778&s=latestnews

Griffiths was extradited from Australia to the U.S., a country he had never visited, for some "Intellectual Property" crimes.

For a company it is a mere money issue, but when individuals are extradited it becomes extremely problematic.

Stephan

Re:Let's Put the USA to sleep

[whoever57]

Hmmm. And here I thought that the US merely forbid US-based credit card companies from paying to on-line casinos. That'd be entirely legal

Then you haven't been paying attention. The USA has pursued actions against foreign-based Internet gambling sites, including Partypoker.com. Also, forbidding credit card payments is against WTO treaties, which are (per the constitution), the law of the land.

Re:Let's Put Belgium To Sleep

[johannesg]

For all I care Belgium can disintegrate. If wallonia wants to join France, so be it. If Eupen want to join Germany, so be it. If both want to stay independent, so be it. I don't care.
But Flanders will become an independent republic. It would never join the Netherlands. You would have to pry Brussel from our cold dead hands, before we would let it join Wallonia. Or it could go to the EU as the DC capital of europe, which is also fine. Fighting over Brussel costs too much money, and we are a peaceful people anyway. But sending billions of euros to wallonia, while they spit on our culture and threaten our territorial integrity, has to stop.

Bonus point if you guess which side I am from.

Oh, come on! The Netherlands really isn't that bad. We love our southern neighbours, their chocolate, their beer, their friendly demeanor... And you might enjoy our liberal drug-policies and cheap, fast internet. When you join, we will (as a bonus) finally get around to fixing the access to the Antwerp harbor, as well as the railway to Germany that you have been craving for such a long time.

On the other hand, we wouldn't want to share a border with France, so I'm in favor of keeping at least something of a buffer zone...

How can you own land?

[gillbates]

The native Americans used to ask. To them, the land was so fundamentally free that to own a piece of it seemed a sacrilege (sp?) against nature.

But then, along came Europeans, and land the Indians had used for centuries was suddenly denied them. You see, Europeans had this notion of property rights extending to the very stuff you put your feet on. You might think it's absurd to lay claim to the internet, but believe me, someone is already thinking about ways of divvying it up and making ordinary people pay for what they used to get for free. You'll pay to transmit, and your recipient will pay to receive. And somewhere, somehow, if the telecoms can manage it, you'll pay a monthly fee to them to *store* the content you received from the internet. Let's not forget Time Warner, who wanted to triple bill YouTube - once for the priviledge of connecting to the Net, a second time for the priviledge of providing *premium* content, and the third time is the user who pays for the bandwidth of downloading it from YouTube.

Freedom isn't free, after all - as the saying goes. If you think the internet can't be owned, you've obviously never met a US legislator.

Quid pro quo, or something along those lines?

[RobVB]

Not too long ago a number of European countries (Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Andorra and Belgium, possibly more) at least partially gave up their banking secrecy after being pressured by the US, because the US wanted that information to fight fraud. Now Belgium is asking for information and suddenly privacy becomes an insurmountable issue.

I'm not defending the way this requesting and sharing of information is going, and I'm not defending Belgium for trying to bypass privacy laws, but I do think it's awfully hypocritical of the United States to quickly hide behind their privacy laws after making us change ours.

And another thing - why do people immediately suggest to "Put Belgium to Sleep" when it causes a problem in the international community? Instead of focusing on the issue at hand, they think dividing this country among its neighbors will fix everything? In a discussion about American sovereignty on a very important issue, don't forget to respect Belgian sovereignty on an even more important one. The continued existence of the Belgian state is something its citizens, and its citizens alone, should decide about.