Comment on 4chan refuses to pay UK Online Safety Act fines, asks Trump admin to intervene
stoly@lemmy.world 1 day agoIf you offer a service in a country you are subject to their laws.
I’m not sure I like the idea that you’re “offering a service” in a country simply by being a data service that can accessed from it.
Someone from Australia can call me and we can chat. It doesn’t mean I or my phone carrier are offering a service in Australia.
You’re right, but that also means your service can get blocked in said country. And that’s what they don’t want, so they’re trying to fight it from home.
Whoever is providing the communications infrastructure to the Australian caller would be offering a service in Australia (5g masts, fibre, customer service etc.)
Only if the call is going via satellite owned by non-Australians could you avoid this.
My website is my website. You visit my website, my website does not visit you.
Imagine contacting a brick and mortar store in another country and threatening sanctions because they don’t check the passport of visitors so they’re “offering services” to another country. That’s sort of what’s happening.
What does that mean? Arent most sites available everywhere by default?
No, you can definitely block entire countries.
oh. So if I publish a website I’m responsible for following other countries/areas laws?
That’s exactly how the EU keeps levying fines on Meta and Xitter. If you make your service available in a country, you have to follow their laws. If you don’t want to do that, then you can’t allow people from that country to use your site. This really isn’t controversial.
The internet is open. It is not up to a site to block a country just because. Which is what happened here, and this why their law is dumb and over reaching.
The argument is more like:
“UK citizens, via the open internet could see your site, and we have now decided that we do not like it. We are not going to complain via diplomacy or via your country’s existing Laws or policing agencies, as such, you must pay us £20,000 in fines, per day, for exisitng because we say so. Despite you having no interests, employees or infrastructure, at all, in our country.”
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 hour ago
I guess this is what it comes down to…
Personally, I’m a firm believer that IP addresses aren’t people and that an IP address range doesn’t mean the end user is from that country, so I lean towards point 2.
…buuuuuut I also really don’t like the idea that countries control access to things like that. I’m sort of in a “wish I could have it both ways” thing. Because the more sites that are adamant about taking view number 2 the more countries will be encouraged to censor. And let’s be honest, this is all about control, there are sensible ways to protect children like creating standardized self labels for parental controls to reject and find on those instead, so… It’s hard.
I hate this.
stoly@lemmy.world 11 minutes ago
I felt this way back in the late 90s when states started requiring sales tax for online transactions. It felt stupid to me that a transaction that occurs in some other state should have to include taxes for the place where you live.