I don’t agree that choosing to host a website without limiting the audience is 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.
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No, one has chosen to make something available for contact within one country. One is not actively himself reaching across borders to do so. One cannot reasonably be required to take any affirmative action to fulfill the whims of a foreign government.
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.
What is having your web server send IP packets with an IP address addressed to an overseas address to your ISP who you have signed a contract with to have them deliver those packets to the designated address if not actively reaching across borders?
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).
It is a reply. I am not responsible for checking the locality of an IP address. Indeed, I can never do so with one hundred per cent accuracy. It is Not My Problem.
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.
“ Governments that expect some content or other blocked can damn well do it themselves, in their own legal system”
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)
No, it's also able to do things like issue fines, which they have, although American law is not amenable to actually collecting those if their assets are all here. I don't really care if british choose to block something on british soil.
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.
The remarkable thing about Murthy is it was bipartisan, with the 3 dissenters being conservative.
You can't but ISPs could if they wanted to. Someone knows the billing or contact information of the person originating the packets.
It is a reply... that you chose to send despite being fully aware that by doing so you might be reaching out across borders because that's how the internet and your contracts with your service providers works.
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.
> It is a reply... that you chose to send despite being fully aware that by doing so you might be reaching out across borders because that's how the internet and your contracts with your service providers works.
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.
The US will enforce most UK court judgements. I'm not sure how administrative fines work; there might be a need to involve a court first, but once that's done the US will [on edit- may] enforce them.
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.
Sure... I think it's pretty much a given that Ofcom expects the US won't help them enforce this law given the 1st amendment. That doesn't mean they won't/shouldn't do their best to do so by themselves..
> That doesn't mean they won't/shouldn't do their best to do so by themselves.
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.
>that you chose to send despite being fully aware that by doing so you might be reaching out across borders because that's how the internet and your contracts with your service providers works.
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.
You seem grossly misinformed about how the internet works. The server isn't located in the country that made the request. There is an entire network between the server and the client. A part of that network exists in the US and another part of it exists in the UK.
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.
The client requests content from a server. The server may be abroad. It's the same as ordering goods from abroad, only much faster. I wonder what the law is for importing goods that are illegal in the destination country.
It's really the same principle. For physical goods that are crossing borders, but are illegal in the destination country, their customs officials can seize the goods. For data packets on the internet, the destination country is free to block them if they find them objectionable.
whatever the laws are, they are the responsibility of the importer, not the producer.
If someone writes you a letter than they have your family hostage, and to route 50.000 dollars thorough bitcoin to not have them killed, with a AI generated video as proof; are they scott free because they're not based in the US?
First of all, this is about Web sites, and that's not a valid analogy. Web sites don't spontaneously send you letters, let alone kidnap you. You only get content you actively asked for.
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.
Websites absolutely spontaneously send letters, or advertising flyers.
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.
Yeah, nah, the internet is pull not push. If a citizen of country A seeks material from country B that's legal in B but illegal in A that's on them.
This is the key point. No site is sending material to the UK unsolicited. People in the UK are initiating the download of information they find of interest. If the UK government has a problem with that, it's on them to block the downloads on their side. UK laws have no power outside the UK.
If you choose to call my automated joke line running off of an answering machine in my home, do I have to follow your country's laws or my own?
That's absurd. If I put up a website that I believe is lawful in my own country, I'm not even thinking about people in other countries. If people from elsewhere access it, it's up to them to ensure that the content on my site complies with their local laws.
If the government of their country believes that accessing my website is a problem for their residents, then the onus is on them to sort it out on their own, without my involvement. They are perfectly capable of ordering ISPs that operate inside their borders to block my website from their customers.
The fact that Ofcom hasn't just done something like this in the case of SaSu, 4chan, etc., shows that they are not actually interested in "online safety"; they're making political statements and are trying to throw their weight around like the bullies they clearly are.
are your websites compliant with Russian, Chinese, and Iranian laws and online regulations?
Beat me to it. This is my go-to analogy for people who don't understand the problem. I am 100% certain I've violated North Korean law by posting mean things about Dear Leader. I couldn't care less. If I were to find myself in NK, I'm sure I'd care a lot, but that's not going to happen, so I don't.
If I'm not afraid of violating NK law — because I'll never, ever be there — then the same logic holds for the laws of every other country I won't be visiting.
> I don’t agree that choosing to host a website without limiting the audience is innocent.
"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.
It actually doesn't lmao.