[colechristensen]

Sure it is. If a country can’t find and enforce a law or extradite someone for doing such a thing, order the carrier of the extortion messages to block the entire country or charge the message carrier itself, especially if minors are involved.

Like if Facebook is being a safe haven for Nigerian extortionists, either they block Nigeria or Australia blocks Facebook.

[jjmarr]

Even assuming this is technically feasible (a premise others don't believe), it is ethically wrong to cut off an entire country from the Internet because a small portion of the population are committing crimes.

Imagine a large American city getting cut off from Facebook because there are many people selling shoplifted items on FB Marketplace and your underfunded govt doesn't have the financial ability to crack down on them. The average person would lose all contact with friends and family because some people are using a service to commit crimes.

[ben_w]

There's a right to life, there's no right to social media.

I think it's fine to cut off FB entirely in response… but then, I also think FB monetised what was previously free, collecting rent on being social, and as such everyone will be better off if it gets blocked in their area.

Including the advertisers. Sales can't exceed global income, so at this point the extra ad slots being forced everywhere only serve to make the advertisers part of a Nash game to spend ever more to fight each other for the same potential reward.

[delfinom]

It's not wrong, it's politics.

Said country affected can sign an extradition treaty to restore access.

[mikrotikker]

They can use other communication services

[thfuran]

What you're describing is the end of the internet.

[ben_w]

They're describing a border. When I was a teen in the late 90s, the internet without borders was cool (until I wandered into trolls I didn't have the resilience to deal with), but very obviously not compatible with national sovereignty on what counted as "illegal".

Now? Does any country today block zero domains? There's nearly 200 nations so I've never bothered to check, but my guess is all block something.

[thfuran]

Not just a border, a closed border. That's not common except in times of war or extreme authoritarianism.

[ben_w]

> order the carrier of the extortion messages to block the entire country

Banning a company from doing business with a country is called "sanctions", not "war", and sanctions happen a lot.

[colechristensen]

It's really not.

Facebook making money off of illegal activity conveniently hidden behind national borders is not the cornerstone of the Internet.

[thfuran]

You think that argument stops at Facebook? Why won't it apply to the VPNs people use to get around the geofencing on Facebook, to all the other social media platforms, to all messaging services, and so on? Now you've blocked huge swaths of services and fragmented all the platforms.

[ben_w]

I think, if The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was remade today, the quote would be:

"…an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think social media is a pretty neat idea."

[Ekaros]

So then ban Facebook. Problem solved. Start advocating this in congress now.

[CJefferson]

Honestly, maybe it’s time to consider that. Saying “oh well, let’s give up on laws because the internet is worldwide and unlimited” doesn’t feel like a good choice to me.

[thfuran]

Shutting down all the roads because criminals use them doesn't really make sense. Does the internet equivalent?

[ta1243]

We have very strong checks on people using roads to cross borders.

I suspect that the same will eventually apply to IP traffic crossing borders. Big companies like google, netflix, meta etc will be approved by default, but anything else will be blocked.

[bikemore]

We know how to pretty effectively police roads, but a surprising number of people here seem to think that any amount of internet regulation is impossible. If it's so harmful _and also_ difficult to police, then it's not unreasonable to ask how much death and destruction is too much, is it?

Unless, of course, "it's so hard to regulate" is just a thought-terminating cliché because the SV set also benefits from lax internet laws. But I'm sure it can't be that, no...

[timeon]

Roads are not the topic in here. Analogies are not arguments.

[thfuran]

Neither are complaints.

[nextlevelwizard]

I mean we do cut off entire countries and their citizens from global markets and from traveling when they do shit like invading their sovereign neighbors and that is completely fine and even desirable. Why can’t we (morally) cut them off also from infecting our Internet? Fuck them. Fix your country then come back and we will reevaluate.

[TeMPOraL]

> I mean we do cut off entire countries and their citizens from global markets and from traveling when they do shit like invading their sovereign neighbors and that is completely fine and even desirable.

It's actually not completely fine. Sanctions are effectively an act of war, just instead of shooting people and risking your own troops, you have your enemy's civilian population starve and shoot each other. This can be justified in some situations, possibly like the one you refer to; but it's definitely not an action to take lightly.

Ironically, in the originally proposed case of blocking Facebook, this is a bit of a "cut off your nose to spite your face" situation. How many small and medium businesses rely on Facebook as their main, or only, customer acquisition, communication and/or sales channel? For many countries, banning Facebook out of the blue would cause some serious economic issues and lead to plenty of actual suffering of innocent people.

(And yes, businesses will adapt, but let's not forget that adaptation in nature only ever means that the survivors of a mass die-off have more resources to use to bounce back. And it's the "die-off" part that's actually the necessary part.)

[nextlevelwizard]

Maybe I missed the part about banning Facebook. I was more for banning users from countries that do a lot of scamming without any repercussions

[thrownaway561]

if they do that they will just use VPNs. you can't stop this no matter what, you just have to educate people and hope they don't fall victim.

[BlackFly]

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that a teenager that is willing to invest time into setting up a VPN so that they can talk to Nigerians probably isn't the sort of teenager to have this kind of problem.

We let people fly to countries without extradition orders. VPNs can be seen just like that: crossing the digital border. But for a company operating in a nation, it makes sense to impose regulation.

[Mordisquitos]

I'm going out on a different limb and suggest that a scammer that is unable to invest time into setting up a VPN so that they can talk to teenagers outside of Nigeria probably isn't the sort of scammer that causes this kind of problem.

[djaouen]

Sanction VPNs that allow this behavior. Force them to use botnets, which means they have to interact with other criminals. :)

[bikemore]

"Don't bother enforcing laws because people try to break them" is an express ticket to a Mad Max world. It's also not a particularly interesting or practical solution, and honestly comes off as a little disingenuous.

[colechristensen]

Then blackhole the VPNs when they're involved in crime and make them share legal financial responsibility for the crimes they enable.

Eventually you keep walking down this line until you write laws that local ISPs are required to globally blackhole countries which otherwise evade law enforcement.

[orwin]

I can make a VPN for like 3 euro on AWS (thinking about it, I can probably do it with their free tier offer). I could probably do the same for a bit more work and study on most PaaS.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Block aws ranges then, Facebook is for residential users.

Residential VPNs exist, but they cost money and increase the barrier for entry, while also being a choke point for abuse.