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Comment by scaleout1 | Hacker News Reader

I read your comment but it's not clear to me how what you are suggesting would work practically. My friend and I are bootstrapping a startup that would primarily cater to Pakistan audience. We are hosted on AWS and use Stripe for payment processing etc, like most startups. Even if we wanted to host something in Pakistan (which we don't), no such infrastructure exists and we are in place to hire any dev resources in Pakistan either.

Per the article, if you are not hosted in Pakistan, Govt will fine you 3.x, which will probably kill our project, but it's not clear how Pak Govt can find us if we have no presence there?

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This is, ultimately, the only way forward: Pick a legal jurisdiction, keep your employees within it, and let the internet bring worldwide customers to you. If other countries try block your packets, that's between them and their citizens.

The more jurisdictions you straddle (with servers, employees), the lower the lowest common denominator of "legal" behavior. At some point the lowest common denominator may be a nonintersecting set - "government must have access to the data" and "data may not leave the country" are incongruent. This will make life increasingly difficult for giant multinationals like FB and Google.

As long as your content is legal in the US, the US will not extradite you for violating Pakistan's (or Europe's) particular flavors of internet censorship. You may want to be careful about international travel, however.

>Govt will fine you 3.x

Pakistan's average salary [1] is about $15,000 usd annually. Three times that would be less what an software engineering intern makes in Boston [2]. Maybe just add the government to your payroll and call it a cost of doing business?

[1] https://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/pakistan

[2] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/boston-software-engineer-...

from the article they are thinking of fining up to 3.x million USD

Very simple. Pakistan acquires GFW technology from PRC. Your company gets GFW'ed like Facebook in China.

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