[izacus]

This theorycrafting is cute, but in reality you've mixed up corporate entities and yourself as a person in a criminal case.

And if a corporate entity finds a way to openly defy a national government, it tends to happen that those governments find a way to change the law (they're the ones making it, right? :P) for that defiance to become punishable by other parts of those governments which can sanction the corporation, prevent their operations within the country or even throw people in jail.

[AnthonyMouse]

You're conflating two different things here.

One is, what does the law say? Did they violate it? Is it illegal for a foreign subsidiary to temporarily shut off access to a branch office? How would we like this to work? Policy arguments about law enforcement vs. due process and government overreach.

The other is, politics. If the local government is captured by a cartel of taxi medallion holders who don't like Uber, the government is going to find a way to screw Uber, regardless of whether Uber is complying with existing law. But then it's politics and Uber is a multi-billion dollar corporation, so they have the option to capture the government themselves.

Of course, that leaves the meta argument. Maybe deciding what should happen based on the second method is worse than the first, so how do we prevent that from being what happens?

[izacus]

No, what I'm saying is that governments aren't compilers you mess around with at will when you're as big as Netflix. The fact that something might be illegal is a changeable state by that very government if they decide a corporation has been jerking them around too much. Something being legal right now is a temporary state.

Did you miss all the screaming of US corporations in relation to EU Acts like DMA? Those changes are exactly what happens when you start to think that law and people behind it are separate.