Comment on 4chan fined $26K for refusing to assess risks under UK Online Safety Act
skisnow@lemmy.ca 6 days agoIf 4chan make revenue by advertising UK goods and services to UK users, then they are very much operating in the UK. It’s not reasonable to make the argument that you should be able to do business with a country and opt out of its laws simply by running the physical servers abroad. We don’t tolerate it for wire fraud or CSAM, but nobody’s rushing out to defend the sovereign rights of child abusers and scammers.
I don’t agree with the Online Safety Act on its own terms, but this is a dud of an argument.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
With wire fraud and csam, the activity is illegal in the host country as well as the target country, which is not the case here.
By your logic, any website with advertising is operating in EVERY country worldwide.
skisnow@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
No. Every ad platform out there has the advertiser choose what region to advertise in. Nobody wants to pay to advertise in countries where they don’t sell their products.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
And as a website you don’t deal with any of that, you just implement an ad platform’s ad window and they serve whatever regional ads are relevant to your visitors. So yes, practically all websites with advertising would be operating in every country worldwide, by your logic.
skisnow@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Again you’re just factually wrong. The website operator has a wide degree of control over what can appear on their site in the admin panel.