I suppose this would be similar to thinking of an experiment that would prove or disprove that some same particular species of spider lives in the rainforest.
The experiment is "look for the spider", and if you find it, then it exists, and if you don't, then you don't really know, but it makes sense to tentatively assume the null hypothesis (that it doesn't exist).
Also, to be more complete, when you've searched the whole forest, several times over, and had a hundred cases of believers saying "there, that's the spider!" and then you caught it and it turned out to be... not the spider, then you can a) put more confidence on the null hypothesis and b) ignore the next time the believers say "but this time, over there, certainly!".
There is a good argument to be made that the existence of God is also not falsifiable in principle. You could have a super powerful alien capable of destroying entire worlds and causing us to hallucinate in anyway it desires. You could never really trust that an entity claiming to be the creator of the whole universe was telling the truth. Any beings significantly more technologically advanced than us would be practically indistinguishable from a God.
There are two excellent arguments that disprove creator-of-the-universe type gods quite thoroughly. The first is by extrapolation, like above: Everywhere we have looked and thought we'd find godly influence, it turned out to be not so. This has been going on for hundreds of years, so it's safe to assume it's not a fluke. If we can assume that it will continue, then god will retreat further and further the more closely we can look. In the end we will end up with something that a few religious people are already postulating: A being that supposedly created everything and is allmighty, but can never be found because it's actually a total hands-off guy. But then, Nietzsche really killed him, because the argument becomes really simple: A thing can be defined completely by the effects it has upon other things. If it has no effect on anything, then it does not exist. From this follows a) there is no such thing as a thing-in-itself and b) there is no such thing as a no-touching-the-universe-god.
The second is that we know entropy to increase over time. God, however, is a highly ordered state and explaining how the universe went from a high entropy state to a low entropy state, and from high complexity to low complexity turns out to not make the claims more likely or simpler, but the opposite.
I remember fondly the days when we couldn't buy computers, hairdryers, video recorders and even luggage containers in a supermarket, because those needed 'special' vendors with 'secret' knowledge.
As a matter of fact, yes I do fondly remember my first computer dealer because they actually knew shit and helped me put together as well as upgrade several of my first PCs. I spent a ton of my money there and didn't regret one cent of it.
Dealers absolutely can add value to the system. It's just that most don't, and sadly too many consumers shoot for the cheapest price so aggressively that good dealers go out of business and the scum survives, and it's getting ridiculous. Have you bought crap online recently? Same scummy behaviour showing up there now. I was taken aback when I wanted to buy a plane ticket and at the very end of the deal a "payment processor fee" showed up - except that no matter which payment option I picked, there was always this fee, so it should've been figured into the real price, but of course that wouldn't have placed the site so highly in the price-search engines... (yes, I bought elsewhere, even though the final price was the same).
Dealers are scum, but part of the reason is that market evolution strongly selects for the scumbags.
It might be, if it wasn't so dead easy to undo any damage.
If the one spreading it is an idiot.
If you do this professionally, you spend time to get a good reputation, you create some secondary sources you can then link to, then hide your actual change in a bigger edit. Then you have a few sockpuppets starting an edit war so that your change gets buried in the history and a second admin account you or a collaborator control swoops in to save the day, restores back to the last "good" edit before the edit war (yours) and locks the page for protection.
I trust hundreds of thousands of eyes working in a transparent manner a lot more than a handful working in a completely proprietary, opaque manner.
We already know from several disasters in the Open Source world, that it's largely an illusion.
If Canada can force Google to remove a link from it's global index, so can China, and a wide variety of other countries. How you miss that is beyond me, and the rest of the sane people.
The part you miss is the difference between a court order against one particular company and the filtering and censorship of all Internet traffic for all citizens.
Because once you have the filtering/censorship infrastructure in place, it can be easily abused for every other purpose, with no transparency or oversight.
And that you dont realize that, and that you dont realize it is a FEMALE judge makes me come to the conclusion that you really did not read this all that thoroughly.
I was just waiting for that to come up, because it was so obvious and clear in your initial response. As if the gender of the judge matters at all to the argument at hand, but I guess when you run out, you grasp at straws.:-)
Dude, the whole "did you read the decision" is nonsense, I read it, and it IS stupid. It showed that she lacked an understanding of the internet.. You dont seem to understand, this is not about "You must not make this content available to Canadians", her order, as she stated is remove it completely from the internet everywhere, regardless of if your business can block it only locally...
Yeah, $19 billion won't pay for the Internet, agreed.
I do still think you underestimate advertisement. I've consulted for a tracking company, for example, and their database is gigantic. The traffic they generate is comperatively small, but we were talking about infrastructure, right? There's a good part of a datacenter right there, used for nothing but tracking. And that's just one company, there's a dozen of those in my city alone.
Of course the Internet as we know it today is heavily commercialized. I never doubted that. My argument is that quite some of that "commerce" is basically incest with no actual value production, thus it doesn't help paying for the maintenance.
What's astounding is how valuable and reliable a resource Wikipedia has become.
Which makes it more dangerous, not less.
I've written a paper on information warfare years ago, and in my research everything points towards generally reliable mediums being the best attack vectors, because you don't fact-check them as carefully as if you know that you can't rely on it.
Small but important changes in an otherwise reliable article are the best way to spread misinformation. If you can do it in an otherwise reliable encyclopedia - perfect.
If I were being paid by someone to distort a specific fact in the public consciousness, Wikipedia is such a perfect vehicle to do just that, it's almost as if it were designed for that purpose.
I think Google (or somebody) recently built a datacenter in Europe that cost some 85 billion Euros alone; far outpacing your 19 billion figure.
I think you mis-remember. I did a quick Googling and by that figure, Google spent 7.2 billion on all of its datacenters, globally, in 2013. I would be very surprised if they'd spend 12 times their annual budget on one datacenter all of a sudden. All the news I could find at a glance about datacenter construction was on expanding existing ones and it was usually in the range of 100-250 million.
"Emeral Express" is said to cost 300m, according to this article, not 1 billion.
Think about this for a second: What good is having an internet if there's nothing useful to be found at the endpoints?
Think about this for a second: How much less infrastructure would we need if we wouldn't spend 90% of SMTP traffic on spam and half of HTTP traffic on advertisement and tracking?
I disagree. I have quite a few non-geek friends, and from the times this topic came up, my estimate is that their view of Gates is better than mine, but they do understand that MS isn't a company they like and Gates is not exactly a hero.
You're still arguing from your initial presumption that the "needs" of his country take priority over those of the rest of the entire world.
Wrong, I never had that presumption. But I know judges and how they think (been in court rooms as part of my last job). Their general attitude is that they rule over their jurisdiction and their cases, and that the rest of the world can take care of itself. As such, the judge will rule what he thinks necessary to enforce his order. It's not that he thinks the rest of the world is less important, it's that he thinks the rest of the world can watch out for itself and doesn't need him thinking for them. That's a huge difference.
here's little point in me reading his arguments through, because I can already guess what they are from the summary/article/you and I reject them on principle
Are you for real?
Seriously?
You don't need to read an original argument that is one link away and not all that long, because random people on the Internet talk about it and that's all you need to know?
Sorry, my fault. I had mistaken you for someone that one could have a discussion with.
It's not the judges job to determine the technical solution. It would've been Googles job to offer up an alternative.
As I read it, the judge is basically saying: "I want this gone in my jurisdiction, and if you set up your business such that all your other google.* are available in my jurisdiction, you've gotta take it down there as well, because it's not my problem how you set up your business."
And that's the correct answer from a judge. You shouldn't be able to skip past laws just because you've set up your corporate or legal structure in some specific way.
They follow the laws in each country when doing business in that country only, as it has been for ages..
You've missed the point, by about one AE.
The whole issue at hand is when Google is considered to be "in that country" - in fact, this point has been given about 2 pages of discussion in the judges order. Did you even read that?
They still have to obey the law, but only with regard to buisness in that country
Same as above, you miss the point. The whole discussion is about when "doing business in that country" applies and when not. Again, the judge gave this ample consideration. Read it, it's not stupid.
You can force them to block the content in Canada, but she cannot force it to be not shown elsewhere.
I read the court order. I don't think the judge cares if someone in Iran can get the content or not. What I gather is that he's basically saying: "You must not make this content available to Canadians. If your business is set up in such a way that the only way to do that is to remove it globally, then that's your problem because you've decided to set up your business in this way."
Well, they seem to be saying that they should be able to have the information removed from the Internet, so perhaps you could explain to me how it's really any different
Because "right to forget" is a specific legal construction that, aside from the small differences of location, jurisdiction and domain, applies to a specific subset of information in specific circumstances following a specific procedure.
This case was about denying easy access to an e-commerce entity that has already been found to be in violation of the law. Where "right to forget" is the equivalent of the law telling people to stop putting up posters saying "John is a child rapist!" ten years after he was acquitted in court, this ruling is the equivalent of telling the phone company to list "Mary's Fine Cocain Emporium" under M in its phone directory.
I skimmed the article and they point out that Europe's right to forget doesn't extend out of Europe, fine
Uh, not just "fine". That's kinda the elephant in the room. If the judge had references that right and somehow applied it to Canada, then you would have a point. But he doesn't. I stand by my words that mentioning it in the summary was just click-bait, because the submitter knew that it is controversial.
Better one with an aim to accomplish his objective, sure. Better in regards to the rights of the other 99.5% of the world's population who *don't* live in his country? No.
His objective is that law should not become meaningless just because you own two domain names. I'm fairly sure the majority of that part of the 99.5% who know what domain names are would agree to that.
Read the whole reasoning, it's the first link in the summary. He actually thinks this through.
This is not a court case about some opinion being posted online or some unfavorable blog posting. The defendant in this case is manufacturing counterfeit products and selling them online, and has already been ordered by courts to stop doing so.
This is not about the european "right to be forgotten" at all, that was merely a click-bait blurb added into the summary.
But you can reach google.com or any other "national" google domain just as easily from Canada. The judge was smart enough to understand that.
How do you allow one country to mandate what the entire world is allowed to see without descending into a tangled web of restrictive laws banning all but the most innocuous content?
The very court order linked to in the summary debates this question at length, with several pages of reasoning and listing of arguments for both sides. I refer you to that, as you've obviously not read it.
The opposite of all nations is not no nations, the opposite is less than all nations.
So, who decides which nations laws count and which nations laws don't? You're on thin ice there, my friend.
the company still has to obey the laws in which it resides
Multinational corporations reside in dozens of countries. This simply moves the goalpost. Which laws do they have to respect? Can they pick? If so, we have the hwole tax haven mess all over again.
Following your logic all data in the internet would soon be scrubbed because all companies, including those repressive ones, would want data they do not like removed from the internet.
No, following my logic, if you're a judge and you have to decide if your judgement applies to a company or does not apply just because they're multinational, making it apply is the better choice between those two.
Is it? Strange, we rage against the Big Wall of China every opportunity we get, don't we? And we don't want national Internet filters, do we? But the logical conclusion from your argument is exactly that.
If you try to abide by all parties' standards worldwide, I guarantee you one of the first ones in line will be certain theocracies
Absolutely, yes. I didn't say it was the ultimate solution. But given the two alternatives available to a judge to choose from at this time, his choice was the better one.
It's called a gun, and I'm quite sure we'll see it in action soon. Other than that, if you don't want to go lethal, nets around your premisis might work quite well, especially when they are so thin that the camera won't spot them (it's a low-resolution, shaky image on low-end models, so that's not very hard to do).
RTFA. I doubt your assumption holds true in this case:
The case involves a company that claims that another company used its trade secrets to create a competing product along with "bait and switch" tactics to trick users into purchasing their product. The defendant company had been the target of several court orders demanding that it stop selling the copied product on their website. Google voluntarily removed search results for the site from Google.ca search results, but was unwilling to block the sites from its worldwide search results.
Does this mean that all websites need to obey all nations' laws at once?
Ask yourself the opposite: Does it mean they need to obey no national laws? Or the least restrictive ones? I'm sure there's at least one country on this planet where child rape is illegal, or snuff movies, or if that's not extreme enough for you, life-feed child-rape-and-then-kill-afterwards video-on-demand.
Aside from a few fanatics, I think we agree that there is some limit, somewhere about what you can legally say or show. In some countries it is libel laws, in others it is copyright, in yet others it is politically motivated, and in many more it is based on laws to protect children or others who can't protect themselves.
At this point in time, we have no global agreement on those limits, but local laws. So the two alternatives really are as I outlined above - all nations or no nations.
Given those choices, I think the judge made the right call, because the alternative is anarchy. Which while some people romanticize it, basically means the guy with the bigger club will kill you for your sandwich. Especially among geeks I thought there's some understanding for what the rule of the strongest entails, and that it's not pretty.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose this would be similar to thinking of an experiment that would prove or disprove that some same particular species of spider lives in the rainforest.
The experiment is "look for the spider", and if you find it, then it exists, and if you don't, then you don't really know, but it makes sense to tentatively assume the null hypothesis (that it doesn't exist).
Also, to be more complete, when you've searched the whole forest, several times over, and had a hundred cases of believers saying "there, that's the spider!" and then you caught it and it turned out to be ... not the spider, then you can a) put more confidence on the null hypothesis and b) ignore the next time the believers say "but this time, over there, certainly!".
There is a good argument to be made that the existence of God is also not falsifiable in principle. You could have a super powerful alien capable of destroying entire worlds and causing us to hallucinate in anyway it desires. You could never really trust that an entity claiming to be the creator of the whole universe was telling the truth. Any beings significantly more technologically advanced than us would be practically indistinguishable from a God.
There are two excellent arguments that disprove creator-of-the-universe type gods quite thoroughly. The first is by extrapolation, like above: Everywhere we have looked and thought we'd find godly influence, it turned out to be not so. This has been going on for hundreds of years, so it's safe to assume it's not a fluke. If we can assume that it will continue, then god will retreat further and further the more closely we can look. In the end we will end up with something that a few religious people are already postulating: A being that supposedly created everything and is allmighty, but can never be found because it's actually a total hands-off guy. But then, Nietzsche really killed him, because the argument becomes really simple: A thing can be defined completely by the effects it has upon other things. If it has no effect on anything, then it does not exist. From this follows a) there is no such thing as a thing-in-itself and b) there is no such thing as a no-touching-the-universe-god.
The second is that we know entropy to increase over time. God, however, is a highly ordered state and explaining how the universe went from a high entropy state to a low entropy state, and from high complexity to low complexity turns out to not make the claims more likely or simpler, but the opposite.
I remember fondly the days when we couldn't buy computers, hairdryers, video recorders and even luggage containers in a supermarket, because those needed 'special' vendors with 'secret' knowledge.
As a matter of fact, yes I do fondly remember my first computer dealer because they actually knew shit and helped me put together as well as upgrade several of my first PCs. I spent a ton of my money there and didn't regret one cent of it.
Dealers absolutely can add value to the system. It's just that most don't, and sadly too many consumers shoot for the cheapest price so aggressively that good dealers go out of business and the scum survives, and it's getting ridiculous. Have you bought crap online recently? Same scummy behaviour showing up there now. I was taken aback when I wanted to buy a plane ticket and at the very end of the deal a "payment processor fee" showed up - except that no matter which payment option I picked, there was always this fee, so it should've been figured into the real price, but of course that wouldn't have placed the site so highly in the price-search engines... (yes, I bought elsewhere, even though the final price was the same).
Dealers are scum, but part of the reason is that market evolution strongly selects for the scumbags.
Video about steel-welding-3D-printer without actually showing it in action. *facepalm*
Anyone who listens to telco companies is an idiot, and I say that as someone who worked in one for a decade.
Wireless carriers are the worst. You should assume they're crooks until they've proven the opposite.
It might be, if it wasn't so dead easy to undo any damage.
If the one spreading it is an idiot.
If you do this professionally, you spend time to get a good reputation, you create some secondary sources you can then link to, then hide your actual change in a bigger edit. Then you have a few sockpuppets starting an edit war so that your change gets buried in the history and a second admin account you or a collaborator control swoops in to save the day, restores back to the last "good" edit before the edit war (yours) and locks the page for protection.
I trust hundreds of thousands of eyes working in a transparent manner a lot more than a handful working in a completely proprietary, opaque manner.
We already know from several disasters in the Open Source world, that it's largely an illusion.
If Canada can force Google to remove a link from it's global index, so can China, and a wide variety of other countries. How you miss that is beyond me, and the rest of the sane people.
The part you miss is the difference between a court order against one particular company and the filtering and censorship of all Internet traffic for all citizens.
Because once you have the filtering/censorship infrastructure in place, it can be easily abused for every other purpose, with no transparency or oversight.
And that you dont realize that, and that you dont realize it is a FEMALE judge makes me come to the conclusion that you really did not read this all that thoroughly.
I was just waiting for that to come up, because it was so obvious and clear in your initial response. As if the gender of the judge matters at all to the argument at hand, but I guess when you run out, you grasp at straws. :-)
Dude, the whole "did you read the decision" is nonsense, I read it, and it IS stupid. It showed that she lacked an understanding of the internet.. You dont seem to understand, this is not about "You must not make this content available to Canadians", her order, as she stated is remove it completely from the internet everywhere, regardless of if your business can block it only locally...
Re-read 144, 148, 159 of the courts order.
You're a little overzealous there.
Yeah, $19 billion won't pay for the Internet, agreed.
I do still think you underestimate advertisement. I've consulted for a tracking company, for example, and their database is gigantic. The traffic they generate is comperatively small, but we were talking about infrastructure, right? There's a good part of a datacenter right there, used for nothing but tracking. And that's just one company, there's a dozen of those in my city alone.
Of course the Internet as we know it today is heavily commercialized. I never doubted that. My argument is that quite some of that "commerce" is basically incest with no actual value production, thus it doesn't help paying for the maintenance.
What's astounding is how valuable and reliable a resource Wikipedia has become.
Which makes it more dangerous, not less.
I've written a paper on information warfare years ago, and in my research everything points towards generally reliable mediums being the best attack vectors, because you don't fact-check them as carefully as if you know that you can't rely on it.
Small but important changes in an otherwise reliable article are the best way to spread misinformation. If you can do it in an otherwise reliable encyclopedia - perfect.
If I were being paid by someone to distort a specific fact in the public consciousness, Wikipedia is such a perfect vehicle to do just that, it's almost as if it were designed for that purpose.
I think Google (or somebody) recently built a datacenter in Europe that cost some 85 billion Euros alone; far outpacing your 19 billion figure.
I think you mis-remember. I did a quick Googling and by that figure, Google spent 7.2 billion on all of its datacenters, globally, in 2013. I would be very surprised if they'd spend 12 times their annual budget on one datacenter all of a sudden. All the news I could find at a glance about datacenter construction was on expanding existing ones and it was usually in the range of 100-250 million.
"Emeral Express" is said to cost 300m, according to this article, not 1 billion.
Think about this for a second: What good is having an internet if there's nothing useful to be found at the endpoints?
Think about this for a second: How much less infrastructure would we need if we wouldn't spend 90% of SMTP traffic on spam and half of HTTP traffic on advertisement and tracking?
I disagree. I have quite a few non-geek friends, and from the times this topic came up, my estimate is that their view of Gates is better than mine, but they do understand that MS isn't a company they like and Gates is not exactly a hero.
You're still arguing from your initial presumption that the "needs" of his country take priority over those of the rest of the entire world.
Wrong, I never had that presumption. But I know judges and how they think (been in court rooms as part of my last job). Their general attitude is that they rule over their jurisdiction and their cases, and that the rest of the world can take care of itself. As such, the judge will rule what he thinks necessary to enforce his order. It's not that he thinks the rest of the world is less important, it's that he thinks the rest of the world can watch out for itself and doesn't need him thinking for them. That's a huge difference.
here's little point in me reading his arguments through, because I can already guess what they are from the summary/article/you and I reject them on principle
Are you for real?
Seriously?
You don't need to read an original argument that is one link away and not all that long, because random people on the Internet talk about it and that's all you need to know?
Sorry, my fault. I had mistaken you for someone that one could have a discussion with.
True, he could've, but then we're back in national Internet filters and Big Wall of China territory. Do you really prefer that?
It's not the judges job to determine the technical solution. It would've been Googles job to offer up an alternative.
As I read it, the judge is basically saying: "I want this gone in my jurisdiction, and if you set up your business such that all your other google.* are available in my jurisdiction, you've gotta take it down there as well, because it's not my problem how you set up your business."
And that's the correct answer from a judge. You shouldn't be able to skip past laws just because you've set up your corporate or legal structure in some specific way.
They follow the laws in each country when doing business in that country only, as it has been for ages..
You've missed the point, by about one AE.
The whole issue at hand is when Google is considered to be "in that country" - in fact, this point has been given about 2 pages of discussion in the judges order. Did you even read that?
They still have to obey the law, but only with regard to buisness in that country
Same as above, you miss the point. The whole discussion is about when "doing business in that country" applies and when not. Again, the judge gave this ample consideration. Read it, it's not stupid.
You can force them to block the content in Canada, but she cannot force it to be not shown elsewhere.
I read the court order. I don't think the judge cares if someone in Iran can get the content or not. What I gather is that he's basically saying: "You must not make this content available to Canadians. If your business is set up in such a way that the only way to do that is to remove it globally, then that's your problem because you've decided to set up your business in this way."
telling the phone company to list
to delist of course, sorry.
Well, they seem to be saying that they should be able to have the information removed from the Internet, so perhaps you could explain to me how it's really any different
Because "right to forget" is a specific legal construction that, aside from the small differences of location, jurisdiction and domain, applies to a specific subset of information in specific circumstances following a specific procedure.
This case was about denying easy access to an e-commerce entity that has already been found to be in violation of the law. Where "right to forget" is the equivalent of the law telling people to stop putting up posters saying "John is a child rapist!" ten years after he was acquitted in court, this ruling is the equivalent of telling the phone company to list "Mary's Fine Cocain Emporium" under M in its phone directory.
I skimmed the article and they point out that Europe's right to forget doesn't extend out of Europe, fine
Uh, not just "fine". That's kinda the elephant in the room. If the judge had references that right and somehow applied it to Canada, then you would have a point. But he doesn't. I stand by my words that mentioning it in the summary was just click-bait, because the submitter knew that it is controversial.
Better one with an aim to accomplish his objective, sure. Better in regards to the rights of the other 99.5% of the world's population who *don't* live in his country? No.
His objective is that law should not become meaningless just because you own two domain names. I'm fairly sure the majority of that part of the 99.5% who know what domain names are would agree to that.
Read the whole reasoning, it's the first link in the summary. He actually thinks this through.
I must be missing something.
Yes, like Reading The Fucking Article.
This is not a court case about some opinion being posted online or some unfavorable blog posting. The defendant in this case is manufacturing counterfeit products and selling them online, and has already been ordered by courts to stop doing so.
This is not about the european "right to be forgotten" at all, that was merely a click-bait blurb added into the summary.
RTFA. Google already removed it from google.ca
But you can reach google.com or any other "national" google domain just as easily from Canada. The judge was smart enough to understand that.
How do you allow one country to mandate what the entire world is allowed to see without descending into a tangled web of restrictive laws banning all but the most innocuous content?
The very court order linked to in the summary debates this question at length, with several pages of reasoning and listing of arguments for both sides. I refer you to that, as you've obviously not read it.
The opposite of all nations is not no nations, the opposite is less than all nations.
So, who decides which nations laws count and which nations laws don't? You're on thin ice there, my friend.
the company still has to obey the laws in which it resides
Multinational corporations reside in dozens of countries. This simply moves the goalpost. Which laws do they have to respect? Can they pick? If so, we have the hwole tax haven mess all over again.
Following your logic all data in the internet would soon be scrubbed because all companies, including those repressive ones, would want data they do not like removed from the internet.
No, following my logic, if you're a judge and you have to decide if your judgement applies to a company or does not apply just because they're multinational, making it apply is the better choice between those two.
The proper approach is to block them locally.
Is it? Strange, we rage against the Big Wall of China every opportunity we get, don't we? And we don't want national Internet filters, do we? But the logical conclusion from your argument is exactly that.
If you try to abide by all parties' standards worldwide, I guarantee you one of the first ones in line will be certain theocracies
Absolutely, yes. I didn't say it was the ultimate solution. But given the two alternatives available to a judge to choose from at this time, his choice was the better one.
Whoever knows how to make an anti-drone device
It's called a gun, and I'm quite sure we'll see it in action soon. Other than that, if you don't want to go lethal, nets around your premisis might work quite well, especially when they are so thin that the camera won't spot them (it's a low-resolution, shaky image on low-end models, so that's not very hard to do).
RTFA. I doubt your assumption holds true in this case:
The case involves a company that claims that another company used its trade secrets to create a competing product along with "bait and switch" tactics to trick users into purchasing their product. The defendant company had been the target of several court orders demanding that it stop selling the copied product on their website. Google voluntarily removed search results for the site from Google.ca search results, but was unwilling to block the sites from its worldwide search results.
Does this mean that all websites need to obey all nations' laws at once?
Ask yourself the opposite: Does it mean they need to obey no national laws? Or the least restrictive ones? I'm sure there's at least one country on this planet where child rape is illegal, or snuff movies, or if that's not extreme enough for you, life-feed child-rape-and-then-kill-afterwards video-on-demand.
Aside from a few fanatics, I think we agree that there is some limit, somewhere about what you can legally say or show. In some countries it is libel laws, in others it is copyright, in yet others it is politically motivated, and in many more it is based on laws to protect children or others who can't protect themselves.
At this point in time, we have no global agreement on those limits, but local laws. So the two alternatives really are as I outlined above - all nations or no nations.
Given those choices, I think the judge made the right call, because the alternative is anarchy. Which while some people romanticize it, basically means the guy with the bigger club will kill you for your sandwich. Especially among geeks I thought there's some understanding for what the rule of the strongest entails, and that it's not pretty.