[mannerheim]

> Now for some online services like chat apps and whatnot there's no such middle man

There are plenty of middlemen. There are the hosting services. There are the ISPs. There are the CDNs. If you're going to make Telegram legally liable for these matters, then why not AWS, ISPs, and CDNs?

[irtigor]

I can't reply the other one but you truly are grasping for straws, in your exemple you coud get convicted in the origin country if buying was illegal, for importing and for owing/using it in the destination country if those were offences. That's exactly what is going on here, there's no middle man providing the telegram service for people in Germany so if hosting/providing that service is illegal (because telegram allows pro-nazi stuff or whatever) who else but telegram will be held responsible? They are the ones operating in Germany providing the chat/group message thing, if there were a middleman (like it happens with games in some cases) the court would be talking to them, just like happens (traditionally) with importers.

[mannerheim]

If Telegram is illegal to use in Germany and it has no presence in Germany, its users in Germany are the ones breaking the law. To act as if Telegram faces criminal liability for simply not blocking Germany is as asinine as acting as if an exporter faces criminal liability in the destination country when they have zero presence there.

[irtigor]

The middle man I'm talking about is the one operating in mutiple jurisdictions, so that the "true" seller or buyer doesn't have to (like a importer usually works, buy stuff in a place and brings it to another), what you are talking about is like the shipping company, storage facility owner that rents it out to the importer and stuff like that and those people do get in trouble if they try to get in the middle of the investigation (it would be the same if eg aws did not comply with a judge order of providing the name of who is operating a site so they can get a notice about the illegal stuff they are hosting/providing to users in Germany).

[mannerheim]

I wasn't the middleman when I imported the product. I was the end user. I have also imported products into the US where I was the end user. Complying with American law and European law was my responsibility in both cases, not that of the seller.

[irtigor]

And that's the thing by definition it is literally impossible to be an exporter to country X without operating there. In the same way it is literally impossible to claim that telegram is not providing a service for people in Germany if people in Germany a literally using the service as provided by telegram. You want to have our cake and eat it too, the world simply doesn't work like that.

[mannerheim]

The way import/export laws work, it's the onus of the importer to comply with the law. I don't understand why you expect a completely different set of rules to be reasonable just because the Internet is involved.