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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

Does your bank need to maintain a good relationship with European governments? If not, does it need to remain connected to banks that do?

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That's not how most regulations work. If you are a chemical company selling something that is legal in the US but illegal in the EU, the EU doesn't use your bank to enforce their regulations on your business in the US.

Using the banks to cut off commerce across borders is an enforcement action for what countries agree are crimes - terrorism, money laundering, fraud, etc. It takes a lot of political willpower and negotiation to use that tool. I sincerely doubt it would be used against American websites that choose to not serve the EU.

The US used this against Rossmann GmbH, which was a German company, in Germany, selling cuban cigars to a German.

And they got cut off from PayPal, and the credit card networks for quite a while.

If the US can use it for selling a product in a store that’s entirely legal to sell under EU law, then the EU can also use the same rules for GDPR.

That's a perfect illustration of my point. The US went to pretty great lengths to have specific bans on import / export from Cuba. German train companies build plenty of things that would not meet FRA standards in the US, the US does nothing about it. But Cuba is seen as a special case. So do you think GDPR and PII are more like Cuba and terrorism, or more like chemicals and transportation standards? I think the latter.

Definitely the former: the way Europeans are talking about GDPR, insufficient respect for privacy is a human rights violation. We don't sanction Cuba because it makes trains the wrong way, we sanction it because we feel it violates its citizens' human rights.

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