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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Slander and libel are criminal offences in the Netherlands. If a crime had been committed against someone, they should have the means to seek justice.

Normally, you wouldn't need Facebook to disclose any names because Facebook isn't anonymous 99% of the time. There are plenty of anonymous and pseudonymous forums that would be at risk and yes they too have to follow warrants should the court decide against them.

If Facebook wants to stay out of such cases, they should either leave the jurisdictions where such warrants are possible (so planet earth, probably) or they should enforce non-anonymous posts so plaintiffs can sue each other without involving a court warrant first.

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> If Facebook wants to stay out of such cases, they should either leave the jurisdictions where such warrants are possible (so planet earth, probably) or they should enforce non-anonymous posts so plaintiffs can sue each other without involving a court warrant first.

How do you propose they leave?

Why is the responsibility on Meta to make sure users in a jurisdiction don’t sign up for their service? Surely some of this responsibility could fall on the user.

Leaving probably means not having offices there, not selling ads there, not recruiting users there, and not hosting anywhere near dutch jurisdiction,

But they can't play it both ways.

They have an office in Amsterdamm, they control a large part of the ad market in the Netherlands, and probably host there or nearby on EU soil.

They can't seriously expect to not be subject to dutch law.

I don't like the idea of extraterritorial jurisdiction. For example, if Iran wants to prosecute the operator of a website hosted in Amsterdam for featuring images of women without hijabs, no other country should cooperate with them.

That's not what's happening here. Facebook has a Dutch subdivision (Facebook Netherlands B.v.) and an office in Amsterdam. They're absolutely subject to Dutch law. They could leave, but the EU means that they'd be subject to this kind of order from a Dutch court unless they left the EU entirely, which would make it harder for EU companies to pay them for advertising, hurting their profits.

>That's not what's happening here. Facebook has a Dutch subdivision (Facebook Netherlands B.v.) and an office in Amsterdam. They're absolutely subject to Dutch law. They could leave, but the EU means that they'd be subject to this kind of order from a Dutch court unless they left the EU entirely, which would make it harder for EU companies to pay them for advertising, hurting their profits.

I agree that they are subject to the laws of the countries they operate in. I do not agree that a company should own all of the responsibility in making sure no Dutch citizens access their services. The idea that the internet would be different depending on where I access seems anti-internet.

When your business model relies on user data to generate profits, you have to collect it and that makes it discoverable.

> The idea that the internet would be different depending on where I access seems anti-internet.

That's GDPR for you, though.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction is becoming increasingly common. If a person commits a crime in a foreign jurisdiction they are convicted, and then when they return to their homeland they are once again convicted for committing a crime abroad.

I know the UK and USA definitely do these prosecutions regularly, even though both countries would throw a hissy fit if Iran started prosecuting every tourist who visits and was known to not wear a headcovering outside Iran.

The summary actually goes into this, the Dutch branch isn't actually involved in this case but Meta didn't object to the reasoning provided by the plaintiff that Dutch law should apply to them.

I'm pretty sure the Dutch subsidiary exists just to avoid taxes, the Irish branch is the main company most EU citizens interact with.

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