Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ocdtrekkie 3121 days ago
That's exactly my point: The penalties foreign countries can exact upon the company is pretty limited, as far as a giant international corporation is concerned.

I definitely think Canada has the right to require that Google obey it's judgement (because, again, as a sovereign nation, Canada can demand anything it wants of entities that do business there), but the cost of noncompliance isn't high enough in most cases. The Canadian Supreme Court has three Google offices worth of leverage to hold over Google to get them to comply, but most countries don't have that sort of power.

In many cases, corporations are currently more powerful than sovereign nations, and I don't think that's a good thing.

1 comments

Now I am confused - where exactly do you stand? Should company executives be extradited for not obeying some random country's law even if they haven't broken any law in their home country? If so, I vehemently disagree with you.

> In many cases, corporations are currently more powerful than sovereign nations, and I don't think that's a good thing.

Why not? Tuvalu has a population of 11,000 and a GDP of $34MM. Why should it have more power than Apple, who has 120K employees and $230B revenue in 2017? There are 140 other countries whose GDP is less than Apple, and 40 whose population is less than Apple. Why should they have more power than Apple?