Comment by miroljub
1 day ago
> Wikipedia should voluntarily remove itself from the UK entirely. No visitors, no editors.
No, it should remove servers, employees and legal presence from the UK. It's not their job to block UK people from accessing it just because the UK regime want them to. Let the regime censors actually put an effort to block them. Let them make a Great Firewall of the UK, why make it easy for them?
Because, as someone living in the UK, the only way people here are going to realise what's going on and apply meaningful pressure to the government is if these organisations force us to. And because once they've given up on one country, they'll give up on the rest just as easily.
Is there backlash for this sort of thing? When they did their blackout thing some years back, a lot of people who were sympathetic to the cause were also highly annoyed at the disruption to their workflows, to the point that if it had gone on much longer it might have backfired on Wiki. I've seen similar affects with protesters blocking roads and such. I always wonder if it's just a small minority or if it happens more widespread
Backlash? What are they gonna do - not look at the Wikipedia they don't have access to?
It's not funded by ads or anything, this literally is easier and cheaper for them, and Britain loses an enormous trove of knowledge.
What would the backlash possibly be? Someone in the UK starting their own censored Wikipedia would be a good thing in the long and short run.
Backlash but positive backlash.
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It'll only bring more clicks to Google's AI summary. The people who care about Wikipedia itself probably already know about the government plans.
Sure, but letting the UK government block wikipedia makes things _much_ clearer for everyone.
If they don't geoblock UK visitors then every person known to be involved with the operation of wikipedia potentially becomes an international fugitive and if they ever land on UK soil (or perhaps even Commonwealth soil), they could be jailed.
Not a fun way to live.
[citation needed] because that’s not how the OSA works.
The UK would only get away with such an arrest if the US would allow it, in which case Wikipedia is already fucked.
It's a lot harder to uproot people than servers.
https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Staff
The ways things are gong in the world they will need to bite that bullet sooner or later, and not just for the UK.
They don't need to make anything - that capability has been there for years. It was mostly used to block sites with IIoC, but they also blocked access to various piracy related sites and things like that.
What does IIoC stand for?
I generally agreed but this depends entirely on the US's willingness to cooperate with UK authorities. This would be the DOJ, FTC, etc. I dont think it would go straight the judiciary although someone can correct me on that if I'm wrong.
IANAL, but international law precedent has allowed countries to prosecute web services for providing services to a country where that service is illegal. A French NGO successfully sued Yahoo! for selling Nazi memorabilia, a crime in France, despite Yahoo! being a US company [0], and this was upheld by US courts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!
Nitpick: International law is treaties between countries, the UN, customs like diplomatic immunity, etc. Here it was just about US and French domestic law.
thanks for the clarification :)
> and this was upheld by US courts.
No it wasn't. It was overturned on appeal. But Yahoo stopped selling Nazi memorabilia anyway.
I'm not a lawyer, but that's not how I read it. The appeal by Yahoo! was dismissed according to the wikipedia article, as I read it. How did you read it?
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