[piotrkaminski]

Thanks for writing this up — that's a really interesting perspective on the problem, and definitely worth pondering. I'm not familiar with the underpinnings of cross-country payments so I'll just take your description as valid.

I think it's not completely incompatible with my view, though: if you don't have a country B subsidiary (the assumption underlying this entire discussion!) then the most country B can do is tell the payment processing company you're contracting with to stop doing business with you. That's completely fair and I see it as a kind of "financial firewall" for country B.

Even this power is subject to some checks and balances, though: 1. If your service/site is popular, country B's population may object to no longer being able to do business with you and put pressure on country B's government. 2. You could bypass the financial system with crypto payments. (Yeah, not terribly practical for most use cases, but could become more popular in case of government overreach.) 3. Ad-supported businesses — like the one in the original article, apparently — are immune to this kind of intervention!

Ultimately, a country can only control entities with a physical presence inside its borders, and while some common commercial architectures necessitate this (to some degree) not all do. Countries that make laws that pretend otherwise just end up looking silly.