Comment by eduction
7 months ago
It’s you who are mixing things. Putting up a website outside the UK and “deciding to provide services in the UK” are two decidedly different things.
UK legal imperialism is self centered and unrealistic and undermines speech the world over.
The US does exactly the same thing, including at the state level. See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
And you’re suggesting that if the US does it it is ipso facto a good idea? Strange reasoning.
This is also apples and oranges. Running credit cards involves knowing exactly where people are located. You do in a real sense “decide” to do business with people in a given country.
Not every website does that. Some just serve posts to all comers. Some allow people to upload an image. Deducing where those people are from is non trivial. When I blog something I’m not “deciding” in any meaningful sense to “serve” people in country X.
I’m guessing that Imgur happily accepted the ad revenue from UK users while it served them images. If you genuinely were “not providing services” to UK users, you wouldn’t do that.
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.
Do they run their own ad network, or do the ad networks take the money from advertisers and cut Imgur a check? Maybe instead of trying to enforce your standards on every little site on the internet, you should just focus on the people who actually have a direct point of contact with money coming from UK businesses. (Yes, the ad networks.)
It’s completely absurd to say that some hobbyist would have nexus in the UK because they run a Google Adwords campaign to get some occasional pocket change from their project. Pre-Internet, it would be like going after a US magazine because someone brought home a copy from the US. Websites are not global entities by default, somehow responsible for obeying laws across nearly 200 national jurisdictions and many more state/provincial/local jurisdictions, across different languages and legal customs. Completely absurd! Who do you think you are to demand such a thing?
On the other hand, I think it would be perfectly fine to say that UK domiciled ad networks cannot put their ads on sites that violate some arbitrary standard. (An anti-freedom law to be sure, but at least it’s consistent with common international conventions.) This puts the onus on the ad network, rather than the site owner, who may not know or care who is visiting or from which country.
The standard you are proposing here ultimately boils down to "you can do business in a country without being subject to its laws, as long as your commercial transactions with the customers in that country are laundered through a sufficiently convoluted network of international companies like payment processors and ad exchanges". I don't think it should be terribly surprising that states don't subscribe to this view of sovereignty and jurisdiction.
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> if you’re happy to take their money and serve them a page in exchange.
How about the fact Imgur just ceased service to millions of users from which they took no money?
> if you’re happy to take their money
The law doesn’t require that they take any money, and you’re merely guessing they are. Weak