IP Blocking the UK Is Not Enough to Comply with the Online Safety Act
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The UK's Online Safety Act is criticized for its extraterritorial reach, with commenters arguing that US companies shouldn't have to comply with UK laws, and that the UK should instead block access to offending content at the national level.
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The UK (nor the US) has no advantage in providing services, all it can do is demand that other people be prevented from providing them.
Edit: that's not to say it isn't a valid strategy; NK has a big stability buff.
Capitalists need more growth and more returns now and since innovating, producing goods, and providing customer service costs money, we simply charge people a monthly fee to use their heated car seats.
This is what the brutal, messy end of capitalism looks like. Relentless self-cannibalization, burning billions of dollars tomorrow to make one cent today.
If nothing makes sense, that's because it doesn't. There is no logic or reason or planning involved. It's more money now, period. Consequences don't matter because we get more money right this second.
Capitalists are apparently unaware of what happens when they've extracted all possible money from the economy.
Given that, shouldn't you be able to answer the question?
English became the language of international trade, of course, because we’re all just so adorably stupid, and our countries are tiny and harmless. Plus it is such an easy language to pick up…
With enormous damage to global society, I might add
It's been exceedingly obvious but it's nice to know that Ofcom never thought that anyone would bother to fight back. This is clearly not about public safety but about controlling American corporations.
Parliamentary forces seem to be directly suborning this corruption.
Not exactly. On the surface, it's about kowtowing to pearl-clutching UK NGOs that are empowered by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch's hysterical tabloids; and underneath, the real agenda is about restricting the influence of unsanctioned sites that could influence UK discourse - influence that established UK press barons (like the Murdochs, Lebedev, etc) want to keep very much to themselves.
Is 4chan attempting to unfairly or unduly influence UK "discourse?" Or are they just _contributing_ to it as members of the public on an anonymous forum?
> Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch's hysterical tabloids
Which actually are an attempt to influence UK discourse. The framing errors are interesting.
Your naivete is endearing. Every general-purpose public forum, these days, is heavily manipulated by bots.
I could see that last century. But do they even care about influence anymore? Isn't the money all they care about now?
The OSA is mostly supported by people who read The Guardian or The Times and watch the BBC. It was originally the work of academics (not big tabloid readers usually) like Lorna Woods, who is supposedly a professor of "internet law", a guy who is the founder of Ofcom, and Baroness Beeban Kidron. If you search Google News for their names you will find lots of left leaning broadsheets and not tabloids.
https://news.google.com/search?q=Beeban%20Kidron&hl=en-GB&gl...
The first five news sites for that search are: Financial Times, The Guardian, BBC, The Times, The Guardian again. Zero tabloids.
This is a narrative. Reality is something else. These stats are from June of last year; by that point, Farage (leader of a party with barely an MP for most of the past decade) had been invited more often than SNP leader Alex Salmond, who was literally in power and ruling over dozens of MPs. https://theconversation.com/bbc-question-time-analysis-of-gu...
To me, this looks like the culmination of many years of ad hoc censorship breeding cadre of favored censors. They've all grown into a system of expectations where they can just finger frustrating bits of counter-narrative and have it disappeared.
The Powers That Be don't care to hear pesky details about jurisdiction. As such, there is no one around with the temerity to point out the inherent absurdities. So they pursue "offenders" despite the obvious futility, because not doing so means explaining difficult things to people that will not listen.
As I recently wrote[1], there is no metaphysical certitude that Ofcom and its intentions will be forever futile: all that is necessary is for the political vectors to align optimally (as they inevitably will,) and the LEOs of the US would be happy to oblige.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45622304
WITH A RAP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ql6tGu9aWg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=r4mRo2M5VMA
It’s one thing to be talking about suicide or assisted suicide because you’ve decided it’s right for you and your situation.
It’s another to be dealing with depression from trauma, unable to get help and have no support system, and then be coerced by individuals on forums with ulterior motives.
I’m not saying I am in support of the UKs attempts, but it’s also not helpful to paint everything black and white on either side. Real solutions require dealing with the grays and the details.
edit: And for reference I have spoken to people in the later situations who have found all too many toxic individuals online who will say things like “you should definitely just kill yourself” in the midst of such situations, who after therapy consider those people to have been committing even more trauma (most likely because they get off on the control of another persons life, playing out murder fantasies etc, and who use the internets anonymity to further traumatize people at their most vulnerable)
What they cannot be allowed to do is tell organizations in other jurisdictions that they now suddenly fall under UK jurisdiction.
There are 195 countries in the world. If all of them followed a policy like UK's Ofcom, the internet would be gone in no time and world-wide user-to-user communication would become impossible for legal reasons. It's obviously not a sane position.
Do you have evidence for that? Because when I search I do see them doing investigations concerned with abuse of people including mentioning coercive and controlling behaviors
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
> If all of them followed a policy like UK's Ofcom, the internet would be gone in no time and world-wide user-to-user communication would become impossible for legal reasons.
Sounds like a slippery slope fallacy to me. Again, not necessarily supporting the policy, but when such arguments are used against it, it’s not convincing.
Let me put it another way: Would you comply with a similar letter from North Korea? From Russia? From China? If not, your attitude is hypocritical and inconsistent.
We're taking those threat seriously and have decided to block all UK IP numbers and not to do business with the UK for the time being. News that Ofcom might ignore such measures are worrying to us.
And here’s why your argument is a fallacy:
“This type of argument is sometimes used as a form of fearmongering in which the probable consequences of a given action are exaggerated in an attempt to scare the audience” [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
By the way, I've worked closely together with argumentation theorists at university for many years, so I know quite well what a slippery slope argument is. You should know that not all of them are fallacies.
And that's what the site is for. They could improve by blocking all countries where there's free access to assisted suicide though.
> It’s another to be dealing with depression from trauma, unable to get help and have no support system, and then be coerced by individuals on forums with ulterior motives.
You've answered your own question. "And then" - exactly, THEN, not before. If they could get help, they would. But they can't so they end up there. If your alternative is that they should just suffer for years instead then I strongly disagree with this stance.
I remember one guy on a Polish forum announcing his plans which were stopped because someone called the police.. I kept checking his profile since then and it's clear that he continued to suffer and does to this day.. whoever thought that they "saved" him instead subjected him to literally years of suffering.
This is honestly disgusting and exactly the problem. You don’t know why they couldn’t get help. There are many possible reasons and instead they should be continued to be encouraged to find proper mental health counseling, not feed into a mental health crisis talking about suicide.
And it’s not your place to decide what is suffering or not for them. That is exactly the problem. The fact that you checked on this persons profile and decided based on that he’s continuing to suffer is exactly the issue. You are not a trained mental health provider I’m sure. Encouraging someone in that place to commit suicide is exactly the problem. You are not a soothsayer who can see into this persons future. What if in 10 years that person has a child and finds true joy and meaning, glad that they went through what they did in the previous years. There are many such cases.
It’s also not your job to somehow “ease suffering” for a person on the internet you don’t know, with some kind of self satisfaction and sense of control over another’s life that you took away an individual’s suffering by helping them kill themselves.
Instead the person needs to decide for themselves, by themselves, AND they need to be in a healthy mental state to make that decision. Depression is not a healthy mental state, it’s a period of delusion.
Your comment only proves exactly why sites such as this need massive regulation, and anyone who knows someone who contemplates suicide and came out the other side living a fulfilling life with joy and happiness would understand exactly why.
And I could agree that a site talking about assisted suicide is a net positive, but the burden is on that site to ensure it is not encouraging people in mental health crisis to suicide. In an open, mostly unmoderated forum that is a very high bar indeed, and it's even higher when the company hosting such a site has a profit motive. Trained mental health providers should be available and reviewing discussions in those situations, and such regulation requiring that is in my opinion not a hinderance on free speech.
And for anyone reading these comments and suffering with depression, if you’re unable to find good mental health care, first and the very least read the following book, and know that there are people who can help you find the light on the other side:
https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-New-Mood-Therapy/dp/0380...
There are many possible reasons, that's why they should be PROVIDED with help, not "encouraged to somehow find it" as if they didn't know that something was wrong already..
> And it’s not your place to decide what is suffering or not for them. That is exactly the problem. The fact that you checked on this persons profile and decided based on that he’s continuing to suffer is exactly the issue.
It's not my place to decide, but it's THEIR place to decide. I don't need to be a trained mental health provider to see that that person is TELLING the world that they suffer, posting and interacting with other people who also suffer.
> You are not a trained mental health provider I’m sure.
No, but I am the person who used to suffer, and that makes me more qualified to talk about these problems than a trained+qualified+certified+award-winning "mental health provider" (which.. did not help me btw, others from the community did).
> Encouraging someone in that place to commit suicide is exactly the problem
I'm not encouraging anybody to commit suicide.. where did you even get this idea? My stance is to not prohibit that last resort solution.
> What if in 10 years that person has a child and finds true joy and meaning, glad that they went through what they did in the previous years. There are many such cases.
It doesn't delete these 10 years of suffering which you apparently see no problem subjecting people to. It was his decision and that decision was not respected. Should it not be interrupted, that person would not suffer ever again and we'd not need to have this discussion.
> with some kind of self satisfaction and sense of control over another’s life that you took away an individual’s suffering by helping them kill themselves.
I did NOT encourage them to do that. It was their decision and it was interrupted. The people who interrupted that have that "self satisfaction", I see things as they are. Those people didn't care about that person at all, just called the police and forgot about him. It's not that they could pay his bills or anything, they didn't care.
> AND they need to be in a healthy mental state to make that decision. Depression is not a healthy mental state, it’s a period of delusion.
Disagree, if someone decides that it's enough suffering for them, that decision should be honored. If you can't cure that person instantly, prolonging this "unhealthy state" is what I'm against.
> and anyone who knows someone who contemplates suicide and came out the other side living a fulfilling life with joy and happiness would understand exactly why.
Nothing bad would happen to that person should they not be interrupted. This search for "joy and happiness" is absurd and it blinds you so that you accept that you might subject someone to literally years of suffering.
Doing no harm is a high bar, and that bar requires commitment that online communities and the companies that run them almost certainly cant provide without a lot of effort. The disregard for the possibility that those communities may have caused harm (even if you believe they helped you) is alarming.
> This search for "joy and happiness" is absurd
This is the problem when people with this viewpoint get together in forums, it can create a vicious feedback cycle that are not healthy for anyone.
I'm sorry you are suffering or have suffered. But searching and finding joy and happiness is not absurd. We only have one life to live, and it definitely doesn't need to be suffering. Every one of us has the power to change that (believing you cant is a thought trap, a type of delusion.)
> Nothing bad would happen to that person should they not be interrupted
This speaks volumes. You are saying that the death of a person is nothing bad. A life.. a loved one. A child going through a momentary suffering. That death is BAD. Not understanding that is delusional thinking.
> It doesn't delete these 10 years of suffering which you apparently see no problem subjecting people to
I'm not subjecting them to anything, nor are you by not talking or telling a person how to commit suicide. That persons suffering is not your or my responsibility. But the moment you do talk to that person about how they could commit suicide, then you have taken on a responsibility. And it is an immense one, not to be taken lightly.
Finally I'll say this, all your comments indicate to me someone who is suffering from depression. If you truly believe that not to be the case, I challenge you to read the following book cover to cover, do all the exercises, and once you have finished, look back on your words and ideas and see if you may have been stuck in some delusional thinking:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0380731762?ref_=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_u...
And finally, if you ever actually consider suicide, I urge you to question your thinking and consider the possibility you could make a choice that in another mindset you would regret. Imagine getting high on shrooms or LSD and jumping off a roof. Depression is like that... when you come to, you realize you were just on a bad trip.
And as my favorite Starship captain says... "Never give up. Never surrender!"
Maybe you consider it "Gubbbermenntt overreach" but I kind of consider suicide prevention as a reasonable function of state.
However, some random clicks on sasu found people who had been forum members for over a decade. Possibly not entirely mentally healthy - to be fair - but evidently still very much alive.
If the primary effect of participation was to increase the rate of suicide among its users, the forum would act as a sieve. While it might attract new members, the retention of long-term members (as observed) would be statistically improbable. The fact that a stable, long-term user base exists is evidence that for many, the forum serves a different function—likely as an outlet to manage and process ideation, not just to escalate it.
The state banning this outlet could, perversely, remove a coping mechanism and inadvertently have the opposite of the intended effect.
a us person could travel to a country x and that x could send this us person to a UK prison? I don't know if doing so would be legal but when the rubber hits the road, each country x is technically sovereign and does not have to honor the first amendment of the US constitution.
So even if it might be frowned upon to extradite foreign (US) nationals in country X (such as Canada or India) to the UK, they could do it anyway to send a message?
The only further question would be if the country is friendly enough with the UK to extradite.
When it's a matter of drug charges or other obviously criminal activity, the US embassy and diplomats don't normally raise a fuss, but for something like this where the person made first amendment protected speech in the US? That'd definitely raise all kinds of hell.
Plenty of US citizens would actively cheer the notion of having a foreign government arrest their political opponents as an end-run around the fact they're not allowed to do it at home.
After all, 1A/"freeze peach" laws should only protect you from your government, right?
I'm not convinced that plenty of US citizens would celebrate a foreign government arresting an American for what would be protected by the 1A in the US. There will always be trolls, of course.
> After all, 1A/"freeze peach" laws should only protect you from your government, right?
If my government has the longest dick of all governments in the world, and knows how to swing it, I'm not so sure.
So no, I don't think that the people who celebrated that would care, and said people would actively support an administration that actively encouraged the UK in this manner for the same reason.
Traveling is no joke. Americans often act like the world is their playground, but you are subject to the laws of the jurisdiction you're standing in. Traveller beware.
Are they? Is all speech protected? If so, how do you prosecute people who leak secrets?
Yes
> Is all speech protected?
No
> how do you prosecute people who leak secrets?
See above
Pretty much avoid entering Britain or its dependencies or you'll be nabbed on a Commonwealth Warrant and extradited to England.
The main issue is that few countries respect freedom of speech on principle and even that group has edge cases.
E.g. if I involuntarily swing my arm and hit someone in the face as a result of a medical condition I lacked the appropriate mens rea and am not guilty. If I intentionally punch someone in the face while being somehow unaware that I'm not allowed to do that I am guilty.
Hard to see how mens rea would save anyone from being guilty here.
Anti-blasphemy laws, which is what these laws are, don't care about that either.
Imagine that your own country finds out that you were a prolific serial killer while on a holiday in another country. Do you think they will just ignore it?
This is country B considering something a citizen of country A did while in country A to be a crime. And not that it even matters but in country A that thing is legal. Like country B is a sovereign state and can arrest you for whatever it wants while you're there but the bigger question is whether country A should be mad about it and impress themselves on country B to get them to not do that.
That's really the issue here and exactly what the GRANITE Act he's proposing does.
It seems like the US is actually being too nice here. It's a perfectly reasonable position to reject the notion that a country has global jurisdiction and to consider such an arrest to be a hostile act against the US. I would be pissed the moment a country thought it could punish one of my citizens for something they did while under my jurisdiction—even something that I consider to be illegal.
Or imagine that country X with age of consent of 18 would find out that the citizen of country X while home, married 8yo child and impregnated her.
It's the same principle. So there is nothing special about extending jurisdiction beyond your own borders.
The issue in this case is that Freedom of Speech is such a fundamental right, that it should not be forbidden anywhere in the world. Sadly, it is forbidden in most Western countries, let alone developing.
Now, granted, the US is a freer country than the UK is so that doesn't usually matter all that much, but all the US would need to do to nullify its 1A would be to simply permit the UK to enforce its claims of extraterritoriality in US-friendly airspace.
What speech they might be permitted to prosecute would naturally change based on administration.
based.
as someone from a country that had reached the bottom of many slippery slopes in less than ten years, it's very disheartening to see the West following us.
That has been happening for decades at this point. That doesn't make today's violations ok, but neither are they something new. The people of the USA gave up on freedom after 9/11.
Edit: I appreciate the down votes but research him, he has never participated in a real case. He is not a practicing lawyer by any real measure.
Of course it's not literally 'violating the First Amendment', but it sure seems like the kind of thing the writers of Constitution would have tried to protect against if they knew it could happen someday.
I support the cause, but I don't think that's true. RIPE, the RIR responsible for UK, makes available a list of allocations per country. For UK:
These are actual per-country allocations, not interpolations from access patterns.Geo-IP databases are mostly accurate, emphasis on mostly.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, mobile roaming traffic uses "home routing", not "local break-out". This means it is routed to the country where the user normally resides, not where they currently are. This means:
- For people visiting the UK (and potentially staying there for a long time, if on a permissive roaming plan), their IP address won't show up as UK despite long-term residence / citizenship.
- British people visiting other countries will still be subject to OSA, even when they should not be.
- People (including British people!) who buy British AirAlo SIMs may not get a British IP. AirAlo often uses SIMs registered in a different country than the one you're visiting, and the "exit node" (P-GW) may be located in a different country altogether. I suspect this last option will become quite attractive if VPN bans ever actually come into effect.
This is pretty much unfixable without major changes in how LTE roaming is conducted worldwide, and the UK isn't important enough to make that happen.
No edge cases, it is a matter of law.
Let's, for analytical clarity, set aside the UK and examine Germany as an isolated datapoint.
AWS, for instance, possesses and operates the entirety of the 3.0.0.0/9 address space – a range distributed across numerous jurisdictions and continents. Notably, significant CIDR allocations from 3.0.0.0/9 reside within German territory, yet remain absent from the RIPE registry. Such inadvertent obfuscation undermines efforts at precise geolocation.
One may, through inference and correlation – specifically via https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json – arrive at a reasonably accurate estimation of the German CIDR's by aggregating address ranges tied to a designate AWS region they are associated with. Such inference is only feasible due to the vendor’s decision to publish such data. I would reasonably conjecture that other cloud providers engage in a comparable practice.
Thus, whilst it is not altogether impossible to ascertain the geolocation of a given IP address, the exercise remains contingent upon the discretionary transparency of global infrastructure operators and multiple indirect information sources – a rather fragile foundation upon which to build certainty.
This is likely why someone living in the UK was able to access one of the sites in question despite the geoIP-based ban.
Edit: RIPE actually has documentation on this fallacy specifically https://docs.db.ripe.net/RPSL-Object-Types/Descriptions-of-P...
> “country:” – Officially Assigned two-letter ISO 3166 country code or "EU" (exceptionally reserved). It has never been specified what this country represents. It could be the location of the head office of a multi-national company, where the server centre is based, or the home of the End User. Therefore, it cannot be used in any reliable way to map IP addresses to countries.
altogether, if you dont care about following this UK law, whats the need to carr what the UK government does? just dont go there or do business with people who care about the UK government. same as US sanctions and secondary sanctions. the UK at least is a small market
And more to the point, many US states passing or attempting to pass laws which aren't all that different to the UKs OSA. Mississippi's version is in some ways even more onerous to enforce as it requires social networks to age-check all of their users, not just those who want to access adult or "harmful" content. Bluesky notably went along with the OSA but considered Mississippi's demands to be over the line and geoblocked them instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
What's the point exactly? That some US states also did something similar re porn so therefore it's a nothingburger and we shouldn't care about this lawyers campaign to protect the internet from censorship?
By testing from.. a single VPN IP?
And as noted in other comments here he doesn't seem to understand how geo ip databases are maintained. I sure won't be asking this guy to represent me anytime soon.
Lawyer: "I've confirmed that at least one UK IP address is blocked."
Regulators: "We've confirmed that at least one UK IP address is not blocked."
In what world is the correct response "Dear regulators, you're incompetent. Pound sand." instead of "Can you share the IP address you used so my client can address this in their geoblock?"
That would imply that the client actually would like to be contacted every time Ofcom found a leak in the geoblock. Not a good idea imho.
>They’re definitely not treating it like a public safety matter, where they know how to reach us and know that I generally respond within the hour.
He's just pointing out that Ofcom's behavior is inconsistent with Ofcom sincerely believing it's a public safety matter either.
The UK should pound sand.
Is the strategy really just "get new federal laws passed so UK can't shove these regulations down our throats"? Is that going to happen on a timeline that makes sense for this specific case?
It seems like inside the US, this must be constitutionally protected speech anyway. I’m not 100% sure, but it would seem quite weird if the US could enter a treaty that requires us to enforce the laws of other countries in a way that is against our constitution. Of course the constitution doesn’t apply to the UK (something people just love to point out in these discussions), but it does apply to the US, which would be the one actually doing the enforcing, right?
Anyway, bumping something all the way up to the Supreme Court is a pain in the ass, so it may make sense to just pass a law to make it explicit.
Any world in which US citizens in the US aren’t subject to UK laws in any case.
>What appears to have happened is that SaSu had a site mirror and that someone figured out a way to hit the mirror – which was also subject to the geoblock, something which took me under a minute to personally confirm – without using a VPN.
> If I had to guess, it’s that some NGO found some UK-based IP addresses which weren’t captured by the block because they weren’t properly geolocated.
Ofcom's clarified contention is that the geoblock is unreliable, while the lawyer seems to be rebutting the original statements that they interpreted Ofcom as claiming no geoblocking was active ('remains accessible to UK users', 'was directly available to people with UK IP addresses (with and without a VPN)').
Separate from the free speech debate, the international law part of this seems pretty cut and dry. Here's the bolded parts:
Isn't that how laws work...? Like, it's illegal to be gay in some countries. Theoretically, those countries could open proceedings against every openly-gay person in the world, and try them in absentia. That would be evil and silly of course, but I don't understand what legal principle it would be violating?More pointedly: what is this lawyer actually "representing" these "clients" for? I don't see any mention of any US legal action, and presumably you need to be british to represent people in UK court. Isn't this just activism, not representation?
Jurisdiction? Don't you first have to commit the crime in the jurisdiction in question?
The two may negotiate over that, in which case common sense ideas like "they didn't do it in your territory" may make one side look foolish, which may in fact have a real influence over the outcome of the negotiations.
If they can't come to an agreement, then it may become a matter of whether the "offender" happens to travel somewhere where they can be grabbed. In the end, jurisdiction is about who has the power to enforce their laws. There's no universally-agreed-upon uber-legal system to make it otherwise.
I put up my cat picture website but because the UK is a tiny and barely known country, I don't realise that this cat website would be breaching laws there.
My website gets popular and I receive a strongly worded legal letter from an entity in the UK claiming that they want to take me to court and fine me for providing this website to their citizens.
I am like: WTF? Just fucking block it from your perspective if you don't want your citizens to see it? And I seek legal advice from my lawyer who says: Well, they have no jurisdiction here, so you can ignore this letter, but if you want to minimise hassle, you could just geoblock the UK and hopefully they'll stop coming to you.
So I implement basic geoblocking, which works 99.99% of the time (at least when it comes to figuring out which country an IP is in).
The UK entity acknowledges this in a letter and tells me that this is a sufficient solution for now, but they'll keep watching me.
I go about my business, for some reason or another I make a mirror, which I also implement the geoblocking on, now proactively, because I don't want any more annoying letters from the UK.
Some time later, the UK entity sends another letter claiming they're continuing the proceedings because someone in the UK told them that they could still access my cat website and provided evidence. Within 10 minutes myself and my lawyer both use VPNs to verify the geoblock is still working, and we're confused.
We ask the UK entity WTF, and they say: We have evidence, the fact that it's clearly still working from _our_ perspective is irrelevant, I bet you just geoblocked our IP address.
What do you do in this case?
It was obvious from the minute that idiots started creating IP location databases in the first place that people would demand that they be used like that... and those demands seem to be winning out.
Also, Britain isn't important enough to make this stick against e.g. an American.
If someone writes me a letter asking a question about material that is prohibited in his own country, that is not my problem. It is his responsibility to comply with local law and that of local government to seize material that is illegal there. They cannot deputize me to act, unpaid and without consent, on their behalf.
That's what happens when you respond to a request after all. (Up to very minor nits, e.g. you might be paying a cloud provider instead of an ISP).
Governments that expect some content or other blocked can damn well do it themselves, in their own legal system. They cannot compel someone else to spend his time, talent, or treasure to enforce their petty rules.
If they go after one of their own for requesting something from me, whatever. If they block me, whatever. I suppose they're within their rights to do that.
The federal government "deputizing" or trying to chill private actors out of speech, out of doing business, etc. is a violation of Americans' first amendment rights; so held SCOTUS last year. No way in h--- are we letting some tinpot foreigner do so.
What you are describing is exactly what is going on here. OFCAM’s final action, if taken, is blocking at ISP level. All of the legal stuff is happening in the UK system.
I’m just sort of curious for your thoughts after learning that.
(Also, I’m curious about the SCOTUS decision, I.e. which one? I used to be a law nerd and got a kick out of reading oral arguments for the first time in years this week, would appreciate more material)
Murthy v. Missouri was generally a loss; 6-3 with Justice Barrett for the majority ruling states lacked standing, which is consistent with the Roberts court's informal policy of dodging. Alito dissented, joined by Thomas and I think Gorsuch, and that is worth a read. The more important one was NRA v. Vullo, a unanimous opinion from Sotomayor. Gorsuch wrote a concurrence as did I believe one other justice.
Governments can do whatever they damn well please in their own territory. Including arresting you if you ever visit because you violated some law that they wrote that applies to people in the rest of the world, or even you violated some law that a friend of theirs (i.e. a country with an extradition treaty) wrote to apply to people in the rest of the world. If those actions compel people to spend their time, talent, or treasure to enforce their petty rules then they can do that.
Whatever "actively reaching out" standard you are imagining doesn't exist in the first place. Even if it did though, you clearly violated it when you sent the reply to the request actively aware that it could go across borders.
SCOTUS (with an emphasis on the US) decisions seem rather irrelevant to non-US actors.
The US will not enforce UK judgements or fines if enforcing them is contrary to the US' own laws, including its Constitution. SCOTUS ultimately decides when that's the case.
So it's really, really relevant to whether a non-US actor like Ofcom can actually collect fines from people inside the US. That's a separate question from what the UK government can do to people from the US who actually enter the UK, and an important one.
If I were a UK citizen or resident, I'd probably be pretty pissed off that Ofcom was wasting money and resources on battles they are going to lose. Well, I suppose, since Ofcom is funded in large part by the UK-based businesses it regulates, if I were an officer, employee, or shareholder of one of those companies, I'd be pissed that they're wasting money paid by my company to fund them.
And even though Ofcom is not directly a UK government agency, there are certainly political costs to tilting at windmills for the UK government.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. I'm not thinking about that at all. I do not care about that at all. I am not beholden to the laws of any other nation when I operate my website[0]. I don't care about "reaching out across borders". I don't event know the geographical origin of requests that hit my server, because I don't care, and I have no need or desire to hook up some sort of (error-prone) geoIP database to my logs in order to categorize requests. Once the HTTP response packets leave my server and hit the first router hop, I have no knowledge or interest in where they end up after that.
> SCOTUS (with an emphasis on the US) decisions seem rather irrelevant to non-US actors.
Not sure why you're bringing that up, as GP didn't mention SCOTUS at all. But as a US citizen and resident, SCOTUS' rulings are all that matter to me when it comes to what I personally do while at home. If SCOTUS says the content on my website is legal based on US law, then I don't really care whether or not it's legal in other countries[0, again], and I shouldn't really have to; life is too short to have to worry about that sort of thing.
[0] Sure, I agree with you that this could be a problem for me if I do break any of their laws, and then later decide I want to visit that country. It could also be a problem if that country has an extradition treaty with mine, and my country is for some reason incentivized to give me up.
As mentioned in my previous reply, this isn't how the internet works. There is no teleportation or ICBM delivering the packets. There is infrastructure spanning borders and the infrastructure is the thing that is ignoring the laws. The infrastructure has accurate geographic knowledge about the physical connections. The webserver doesn't have that information at all and must infer it. From the perspective of the webserver, the physical world might not exist at all. There is no such thing that can be described as awareness from the website operators perspective. IP addresses do not encode geographic information. The entire point of the OSI layer model is that the higher layers know nothing about the lower layers nor do they know anything about the physical location of the nodes.
Again, only the operator of the network has that information and the operator is located inside the UK. It is those network operators in the UK that are wilfully ignorant and aware of the things you claim a website operator from a far away country should be aware of.
Just think about how ridiculous your comment is if you sued someone in the US from the UK and brought up their awareness. How would you prove that they knew the location of every single router and fiber cable the packets are traveling through? That's what you're arguing here. You're arguing that there is full and complete awareness.
The network infrastructure is the thing that is performing the delivery that is actively reaching across borders. Not the webserver.
The entire HN submission is full of people saying that it is the UK networks responsibility to make sure that their laws are upheld and that anything happening inside US borders is simply people going above and beyond in assisting the UK in the pursuit of the enforcement of its laws. The geoblocks on the side of the webserver are a form of optional assistance and a sign of goodwill.
Meanwhile Ofcom seems to be of the opinion that this isn't enough yet they simultaneously do nothing about the violators physically located in the UK. This means they are going out of their way to make an unenforceable and impossible to implement law so that they can manufacture probable cause.
Website operators can give the UK a list of IPs to block, which would make it very easy for the UK to enforce their own laws even against VPNs, but it is only the UK that is capable of doing that, and they are shirking their responsibility onto those who can't do it on their behalf.
Second, where is the person writing the letter from? Mars? They're going to have a hard time finding a place where kidnapping and extortion are legal.
Third, the letter would in fact presumably be aimed at a specific person in a specific country... as would the kidnapping.
The company could be from china or Russia with little interest in diplomatic pandering for such a small incident.
Providing a user a service in exchange for payment is also aimed at a specific person in a specific country.
heck, if no laws can be applied across borders, it could be a website selling the service of fake extortion letters.
And don't mix up "difficult to enforce" with "legal". Constantly changing domains and hiding who is behind the service are efforts to avoid being caught by very real and enforced laws.
"Innocent"? That's a strange word to choose. Who cares what's "innocent"?
> It’s a choice, and has been the default for a long time, but it means one has chosen to speak outside the borders of their own country and that comes with rules, like them or not.
... or it means one has chosen to speak inside the borders of their country, and people outside those borders have chosen to import that speech. Web sites don't lob speech at you willy-nilly.
The bottom line is that that standard is impractical to implement, illiberal in its effects, and just generally a bad idea. For that matter, it's also at odds with most of the ways the world treats trade in physical goods.
In a nutshell, I'm moderately confident that this will suffice to keep Ofcom away.
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