You’re asking very basic questions that the answers to have been the same for hundreds of years. If you do business in a country you have to answer to its laws or you risk asset forfeiture or arrest.
That would only be true if you step foot in that country or posses assets in that country, right? Though I imagine the US government can reach a lot farther than the Russian or Chinese governments.
Also bear in mind that government can convey restrictions on any other business in that country. See Brazil requiring ISPs to ban Twitter (even a penalty on individuals bypassing the block using VPNs!), or the US basically prohibiting any business with anyone in Russia.
Basically if you want to operate in a country, you probably need to obey their laws, no matter what you think of those laws. If you ignore them, you can't really be surprised if you get blocked or penalized from doing business there.
The ironic consequence of this is eventually if you want to use big tech for messaging privacy you'll be forced to basically pick one under the jurisdiction of an enemy non-extradition state like Russia or China. Sure their governments will farm and exploit the metadata even if encrypted, but they won't be handing it over to the west unless the deal is juicy.
Eh, not really, because the US has shown it's happy to go ahead and make it illegal to have TikTok here as well. The real result is probably much, much simpler: Globally-operating apps won't make as much sense as they got away with in pre-regulatory eras of the Internet.
Big Tech has basically spent the past twenty years pretending their global status made them above the law of any one nation, but in reality, being a global company just means you're subject to all the laws of all the nations.
remarkably, these are not very basic questions, and the answers are not the same for hundreds of years since this is electronic records that cross international boundaries
Certainly principles of international jurisdiction are well settled and fairly consistent. In that sense the comment was correct.
However, you are also correct that legal principles around information collection and transmission are both new and not well settled.
This feels like one of those hn discussions where everyone will end up talking past each other because of terminology failure.
I mean if you were shit talking France when living in England a few hundred years back you're likely to get put on the enemies of France list, even if your pages were for consumption in England. Now if you never left England there wouldn't be much to worry about, unless they suddenly became friends and decided to export your corpse for goodwill.