Comment by patrickmay
7 months ago
As the owner of a U.S. based website, I am not sending data anywhere. Some people in the U.K. might request data and download it from my site. I'm not forcing it on them.
7 months ago
As the owner of a U.S. based website, I am not sending data anywhere. Some people in the U.K. might request data and download it from my site. I'm not forcing it on them.
You can absolutely take that stance and be fine as long as you never get into the sphere of influence of UK law enforcement for potentially a very long time.
If they get hold of you your interpretation of who sent what doesn't matter but theirs does. They can absolutely hold you until your fine is paid or you spend and equivalent amount of time in prison.
Many people like to vacation in the UK or Europe (one diverted flight away) and they might decide that it's better to just block users and be done with it. Some people may even happily pay a small fine incurred before the block.
HTTP responses (website contents) are data that the web servers you are paying for are sending. People can’t download anything from your site without your servers sending the data. Nothing forces you to send that data when you receive an HTTP request. Indeed, geoblocking is a common way to prevent sending data to jurisdictions whose laws the sending of the data might be in violation of.
HTTP GET is pull, not push. The user is pulling data, not the server is pushing data. Government doesn't care though. It intentionally have chosen not to understand that detail.
It’s the server’s choice to send or not to send the data. The fact that the server is receiving a request for the data in no way implies that it has to obey it. If someone places an order for a product whose distribution violates a law, the distributor is still responsible for sending it. Someone selling drugs is still responsible even if the buyer requested the drug. Someone distributing unlicensed material is still responsible even when that material was specifically requested.
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