Block UK access now just in case.
The fault is obviously an incompetent and authoritarian UK government, but that's what the UK overlords have agreed.
> {"data":{"error":"Content not available in your region."},"success":false,"status":400}
They did at least put a thanks to Ray Bradbury.
If I have a website I'm pretty sure I'm bound to break some random country's law without knowing
Answering my own question, I guess it's exceptionalism of the powerful countries where they can just bully you into following their law
They're clearly working up to this; it's what happened with Pirate Bay, etc.
The opinion polls are clear: the normies want this.
Giving normies the vote was a mistake.
It'd be interesting to see how fast the policy would get reversed then.
This was always a stupid policy and so protesting it by pulling services is one way to draw attention to that.
https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/the-children-s-code-what-i...
How many might there be in this case, one wonders? https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
Most commonly it's the EU fining American tech for GDPR violations and related privacy shenanigans.
an oxymoron.
1. Make sites gdpr compliant by installing an extension or two. 2. Use a vpn to pretend to be not from Europe.
If Imgur never had UK presence, then yeah there would be no teeth. But if you're doing business in a country you can't break the law then leave and expect them to just ignore what you did during that time.
The difficulty is getting enforcement; in practice, what happens is that the fine is put down as outstanding and if any executive or employee of the company enters the country, they're arrested and held hostage until the company pays up (or are held directly responsible for whatever the company is accused of). Most countries usually have corporate presency laws to avoid this sort of scenario though.
Alternatively, the judgement can be enforced through diplomatic channels, but that's a giant clusterfuck and unlikely to succeed unless it's something that's very blatantly a crime in both countries, since it's effectively retrying the case. (And even then it can depend on if the country just doesn't feel like cooperating for that specific case, for no other reason than spite; France for example is fond of doing this.)
This is quite a slippery slope. If I host a website in one country, I do not necessarily care where people access my website from. It is not like I actively provide a service to them - they just use internet (decentralised network) to access it. What if I publish a newspaper here, someone takes it where the contents are illegal, am I accountable?
It's not about "hosting a website", it's about providing services.
If you provide services, like selling a newspaper, in the UK, you need to respect their laws, or you will suffer the legal implications of not doing so.
And regarding the accountability, it refers to the fact that imgur USED TO provide services in the UK:
> We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing.
Companies providing services outside the UK can infringe all the UK laws they want, the UK doesn't care.
But as soon as you decide to provide services in the UK, you have to follow the law. And, as they explain in the article, if you break the law, stopping to provide services in the UK will not absolve you for your past wrongdoings.
UK legal imperialism is self centered and unrealistic and undermines speech the world over.
I’m not happy with extraterritorial assertions over internet services either, but you can’t wish them away with sophistry about “we’re not providing services to them!” if you’re happy to take their money and serve them a page in exchange. That’s the definition of a business providing a service to a customer.
The most obvious example of this is websites from the UK or Europe which operate any kind of gambling. [1] This may well be legal (based on licensing) in their jurisdiction, but they still need to restrict access to prevent US people from accessing the service or they will be breaching the US's gambling laws.
Likewise many US firm geofence access for EU residents out of fear of GDPR.
People hosting news sites have often had to geofence to prevent UK residents from accessing their site if they are hosting any kind of reporting of UK court cases that are under embargo or matters that are subject to one of the UK's famous "Super injunctions" [2]
[1] eg this guy was on the board of a listed UK company operating as far as they were concerned entirely legally who was arrested in NYC https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/sep/14/gambling.mo...
[2] eg In the "Ryan Giggs" super injunction case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_British_privacy_injunctio...
…and if the site has no UK assets, how enforceable is the injunction?
> We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law
In that context it's completely fair to say "leaving doesn't absolve you of past transgressions".
>You do not need to abide by UK laws, even if your website is accessible from there.
The UK government does not agree.
Zing aside, I'd be thrilled to see whatever prosecutor or litigator or whatever they call them over there bring a case against a US based company for hosting content in the US, geoblocking the UK, a UK resident using a VPN to bypass that block, and making the case that that is somehow the US company's fault.
The article is from a month ago, but the gears of "justice" rotate slowly: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyjq40vjl7o
One thing to note is that UK government officials also seem to be masquerading and submitting reports to try to ToS these websites.
All they can legally do is bitch and moan and order UK ISPs to block. There's no action they can legally take against Imgur.
This is a very, very dangerous game to play.
This is how employees of your business on vacation in the UK end up in jail.
Good - cause the maximum amount of pain, start pulling services across the board - the more it happens the more painful it becomes for the government to defend it.
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