Comment by ajsnigrutin
19 hours ago
> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
They do that by staying out of such countries. Many US companies don't want to work with EU GDPR and just block all european IPs, wikipedia has full right to leave UK. They are under no obligations to provide service to them in the same was as pornhub is under no obligation to provide services in eg. a country that would require them to disclose IP addresses of all viewers of gay porn, etc.
Saying that it was a democratic decision without people actually being asked if they want that (referendum) is just weaseling out instead of directly pointing out that it's a bad policy that very few brits actually wanted. Somehow no one uses the same words when eg. trump does something (tarifs, defunding, etc.), no one is talking about democratic decisions of americans then.
Wikipedia has the full right to say "nope, we're not playing that game" and pulling out, even if an actual majority of brits want that.
I know that and I've been clear about it several times. If business subs unpalatable they gave every right to withdraw. I was responding to the suggestion above that they should do so explicitly as a bargaining chip.
And parliamentary representative democracy is still very much democratic even without referenda on every little issue.