[113attendees] Can't use US site from EU (Re: US Vaccine Record (QR code for MASS residents))

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2022-03-25, at 11:00, Jared Mauch <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> (aside: I've found there's many US local government sites that must have
> some local firewalls or something that block the use of services from
> EU)

This is a really interesting side observation.

How did that happen?

When the European GDPR came out, there were a lot of consultants that saw easy money and offered their services to US organizations for help in handling the (completely overblown) legal risks that might come out of that.
Instead, many US organizations simply opted not to buy their expensive services but to simply block clients on EU-localized addresses instead.
(Hint: That blocking does not reduce any legal risk, because I’m still an EU citizen even if I access your services from a “US-localized” IP address.  Maybe it would have been worth to look at GDPR and find out that the underlying rules for data protection after all hadn’t really changed from the status quo ante.)

Result: the greedy consultants came out empty-handed, but at the same time caused a lot of damage by severely hampering the world-wide availability of US services and products.

See the graphics on pages three and five of http://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs1920/Cipolla_laws.pdf
for some help on the economic theory that applies here.
Clearly, we are in sector B2 here.

Grüße, Carsten