Comment on Imgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine
oce@jlai.lu 3 weeks agoIf it’s like GDPR, it applies to the citizens currently residing in the country, the location of the company or servers do not matter. Now if Imgur doesn’t have anyone there, no business happening and the website is already blocked, I don’t think they have much leverage.
Tetsuo@jlai.lu 3 weeks ago
What I’m understanding is imgur could get fine even if they dont offer their service anymore in the UK.
They could go back to just after the law passed and tell them “hey you were infringing on this extremely disrupting law that would completely change your business in the UK so pay up”.
I mean if a business just decides to not serve UK customer they should leave them alone… Especially such a complex law for something like Imgur…
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The law was announced a long time before it came into effect, so companies that didn’t do anything to become compliant in advance were playing chicken in the hope that it’d be repealed before they ever had to obey it.
echodot@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
It’s not actually a bad strategy, ultimately the law is probably going to get slapped down as unworkable and there’s pretty good evidence to suggest that they knew it wouldn’t work even before they implemented it, which won’t make them look good.
Unfortunately the courts move so slowly that none of this has happened yet and the law has now gone into effect because the timer ran out, but in theory they could have done all the work to comply only for the law never to have happened.
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Isn’t one of the basic principles of law that laws can not be made retroactive so as to arbitrarily extract punishment? if someone tells me “we’ll implement this law in 2026” and they do commit, then I’m unconcerned until 2025-12-31.
freeman@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
But if you break the law after on 2026 you don’t get any excuse for not having time to adapt to the new circumstances.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Why sure but, how could they force Imgur to pay up?
echodot@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Practically they can’t. In theory they could complain to the United States that a US business is attempting to circumvent UK law, but I can’t imagine that having much effect at the moment.
In theory it all works because companies would be more inclined to pay the fine than to lose UK customers, in reality of course it doesn’t work because everybody would just use a VPN anyway, but the people who wrote these laws don’t know about VPNs because they think computers run on magic smoke.