[mschuster91]

It may not be legally, but practically. Almost all major content-hosting companies are headquartered in the USA and thus bound to the DMCA: Facebook/Twitter (social networks), Google/Amazon/Microsoft (clouds), Github/Gitlab/Sourceforge (code repositories), StackOverflow, Automattic (Wordpress), Akamai/Cloudflare/Fastly (CDNs), Wikimedia/Fandom (wiki hosting). The only major exception is Atlassian who are headquartered in Australia.

No matter if your content may be legal under e.g. European law (e.g. right to repair, right to interoperability, right to reverse engineer), you are going to have a hard time hosting it. And even if you get it hosted at an European provider (remember, we don't have anything that competes with any of the three US cloud giants in terms of functionality!), you will have issues with accepting donations easily - Paypal, Stripe and all credit cards are under US regulation.

And it's not just theoretical, just look at what happened to Kim Dotcom/Megaupload (or, tangentially related, Julian Assange). If the US deems you a danger to their business interests, you are going to get hunted down, no matter where in the world you are and if what you are doing is legal under the jurisdiction of that country.

[feanaro]

I partially agree with you. This seems like a very good argument to start competing with the US harder.

As a counterexample, I'd like to offer you sci-hub which doesn't seem to significant hosting problems. Remember, we are not trying to replace an entire industry and all possible use cases at once. We're simply discussing the hosting of a few git repositories which some US entity might consider unsavoury due to a borked and unfair law.

[mschuster91]

> As a counterexample, I'd like to offer you sci-hub which doesn't seem to significant hosting problems.

They have to change domains all so often as the copyright mafia has a "blanket" seizure grant (https://torrentfreak.com/publisher-gets-carte-blanche-to-sei...), Cloudflare won't touch them as a result, their founder has (at least!) one court judgement of 15 million US$ by Elsevier in New York and another 4.8M$ by ACS against them and I bet that there is some sort of secret indictment floating around that gets unsealed in the case Elbakyan ever travels out of Russia so an extradition warrant can be put out.. the relatively unique advantage they have is that their founder is possibly linked to the Russian secret service GRU: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-dep...

Effectively, Elbakyan's right to free movement is restricted to those nations that don't extradite to the US and have friendly relations to Russia. And for what we learned from the Snowden and Assange cases, it's safe to assume that even flying over a country that has extradition agreements with the US in a passenger flight is grounds enough for intervention.

[im3w1l]

Can you elaborate your last sentence?

[dlgeek]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident