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It appears that you are mixing things here. It's not about "hosting a website", it's about providing services. If you provide services, like selling a newspap

It appears that you are mixing things here. It's not about "hosting a website", it's about providing services. If you provide services, like selling a newspaper, in the UK, you need to respect their laws, or you will suffer the legal implications of not doing so. And regarding the accountability, it refers to the fact that imgur USED TO provide services in the UK: > We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing. Companies providing services outside the UK can infringe all the UK laws they want, the UK doesn't care. But as soon as you decide to provide services in the UK, you have to follow the law. And, as they explain in the article, if you break the law, stopping to provide services in the UK will not absolve you for your past wrongdoings.

eduction 1y 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.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  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.
  - iamnothere 1y ago
    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.
    - Analemma_ 1y ago
      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.
      - iamnothere 1y ago
        > I don't think it should be terribly surprising that states don't subscribe to this view of sovereignty and jurisdiction. Well they will have to put up with it, as they have done over the past few decades. Or, alternatively, they can engage in aggressive China-style site blocking. Only the US has significant extraterritorial legal reach. IMHO, this policy is a transparent effort to forcefully alter the content policy of US companies. It’s more about political influence than it is about “content safety” at home. (Unilateral site blocking, perhaps with an appeals process, would be a much more effective approach for this.) The UK will regret the consequences if they push too forcefully on this.
        josephg 1y ago
        > IMHO, this policy is a transparent effort to forcefully alter the content policy of US companies. I don’t see it that way. US companies have an atrocious record wrt user privacy and security. The Europeans don’t want their citizens data being bought and sold by online providers. And that’s a reasonable demand! Either clean up your act or leave Europe & the UK. If US companies don’t want to obey UK laws, they can’t do business in the UK. It’s just like farmers can’t sell produce in the UK if they don’t meet British health standards. Consider the inverse: imagine if another country ran a porn site which blatantly hosted underage content (CSAM). Under your view of the world, would the us govt be ethically entitled to tell the site to clean up its act or it’ll get blocked from the US? That sounds fine to me. I’d be shocked if they were even given a warning about that. But how do you square that circle? Wouldn’t that be a “transparent effort to forcefully alter the content policy of another country”?
  - chrisjj 1y ago
    > 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?
  - eduction 1y ago
    > 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
- pjc50 1y ago
  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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - eduction 1y ago
    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.
notarget137 1y ago
Does every single website that exists and is available in UK automatically provides services in UK? Isn't it just simpler to completely block every request from UK by default to "not provide services"?
- afandian 1y ago
  Transactional services (I don't know if that's the right word), where you have a known user, is different from passively providing web pages that people can read and you don't track them or ask them to register for an account. But I think that distinction was pretty moot when web 2.0 came along. Imgur's entire purpose is clearly to host user generated content though, so you can't argue it's not "providing services".
  - chrisjj 1y ago
    > Imgur's entire purpose is clearly to host user generated content Not at all. Imgur does the passive side too. And by number of operations, it is by far the biggest one.
    - afandian 1y ago
      Without user-generated content there is nothing to host. And in any case they long ago turned from an image hosting site into a social media site. There's reactions and commenting as a core part of the service now.
      - chrisjj 1y ago
        > Without user-generated content there is nothing to host. So what? Without the passively-read content there'd be no user-generated content. > There's reactions and commenting as a core part of the service now. It is totally optional.
elAhmo 1y ago
What service is Imgur providing in the UK specifically?
- KaiserPro 1y ago
  Memes.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    OFCOM: You are are hiding illegal Pepe menes underneath your floorboards aren't you? - UK 2025
    - KaiserPro 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - avianlyric 1y ago
      Wrong regulator. This is the ICO, and almost certainly a GDPR violation. Nothing to do with the more recent madness coming out of the UK.
- Jenk 1y ago
  Advertisement.
lurk2 1y ago
> that imgur USED TO provide services in the UK Meaning that the servers were located in the UK, or that the users were, or both?
- ryandrake 1y ago
  It's so ambiguous. Let's say I'm a citizen of country A, currently residing in country B. I'm using a VPN headquartered in country C to make my traffic appear to originate from country D. I access a web site with servers physically located in country E, that uses a load balancer / cache hosted in country F. The company that runs the web site is headquartered in country G but has employees in countries H, I, and J. Whose laws need to be followed?
  - Spivak 1y ago
    Seems like B and G. Then if you do business with A (what the GPDR calls "UK Establishment") and A has laws governing its citizens abroad like the UK GPDR then also A.
    - shagie 1y ago
      But the traffic is coming from country D rather than country B. There's no way for the company to know that the person and their interactions is subject to the laws of B rather than D.
      - josephg 1y ago
        Most sales aren’t that complicated. Usually UK law targets anything sold to people who are physically in the UK, paying in GBP. Which from the sounds of things, was something imgur did. Does it also count for people in the UK using a vpn? What about people in the UK paying using American money? It’s not clear, but it doesn’t really matter. These laws target the service providers, not the customers. If you website says “this product isn’t available to UK residents” and you IP block and don’t take GBP as a payment method, nobody will get too angry if a spattering of tech savvy people get around the block using a VPN.

eduction 1y 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.

Analemma_ 1y ago
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.
- iamnothere 1y ago
  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.
  - Analemma_ 1y ago
    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.
    - iamnothere 1y ago
      > I don't think it should be terribly surprising that states don't subscribe to this view of sovereignty and jurisdiction. Well they will have to put up with it, as they have done over the past few decades. Or, alternatively, they can engage in aggressive China-style site blocking. Only the US has significant extraterritorial legal reach. IMHO, this policy is a transparent effort to forcefully alter the content policy of US companies. It’s more about political influence than it is about “content safety” at home. (Unilateral site blocking, perhaps with an appeals process, would be a much more effective approach for this.) The UK will regret the consequences if they push too forcefully on this.
      - josephg 1y ago
        > IMHO, this policy is a transparent effort to forcefully alter the content policy of US companies. I don’t see it that way. US companies have an atrocious record wrt user privacy and security. The Europeans don’t want their citizens data being bought and sold by online providers. And that’s a reasonable demand! Either clean up your act or leave Europe & the UK. If US companies don’t want to obey UK laws, they can’t do business in the UK. It’s just like farmers can’t sell produce in the UK if they don’t meet British health standards. Consider the inverse: imagine if another country ran a porn site which blatantly hosted underage content (CSAM). Under your view of the world, would the us govt be ethically entitled to tell the site to clean up its act or it’ll get blocked from the US? That sounds fine to me. I’d be shocked if they were even given a warning about that. But how do you square that circle? Wouldn’t that be a “transparent effort to forcefully alter the content policy of another country”?
- chrisjj 1y ago
  > 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?
- eduction 1y ago
  > 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
pjc50 1y ago
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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- eduction 1y ago
  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.

notarget137 1y ago

Does every single website that exists and is available in UK automatically provides services in UK? Isn't it just simpler to completely block every request from UK by default to "not provide services"?

afandian 1y ago
Transactional services (I don't know if that's the right word), where you have a known user, is different from passively providing web pages that people can read and you don't track them or ask them to register for an account. But I think that distinction was pretty moot when web 2.0 came along. Imgur's entire purpose is clearly to host user generated content though, so you can't argue it's not "providing services".
- chrisjj 1y ago
  > Imgur's entire purpose is clearly to host user generated content Not at all. Imgur does the passive side too. And by number of operations, it is by far the biggest one.
  - afandian 1y ago
    Without user-generated content there is nothing to host. And in any case they long ago turned from an image hosting site into a social media site. There's reactions and commenting as a core part of the service now.
    - chrisjj 1y ago
      > Without user-generated content there is nothing to host. So what? Without the passively-read content there'd be no user-generated content. > There's reactions and commenting as a core part of the service now. It is totally optional.

elAhmo 1y ago

What service is Imgur providing in the UK specifically?

KaiserPro 1y ago
Memes.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  OFCOM: You are are hiding illegal Pepe menes underneath your floorboards aren't you? - UK 2025
  - KaiserPro 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - avianlyric 1y ago
    Wrong regulator. This is the ICO, and almost certainly a GDPR violation. Nothing to do with the more recent madness coming out of the UK.
Jenk 1y ago
Advertisement.

lurk2 1y ago

> that imgur USED TO provide services in the UK Meaning that the servers were located in the UK, or that the users were, or both?

ryandrake 1y ago
It's so ambiguous. Let's say I'm a citizen of country A, currently residing in country B. I'm using a VPN headquartered in country C to make my traffic appear to originate from country D. I access a web site with servers physically located in country E, that uses a load balancer / cache hosted in country F. The company that runs the web site is headquartered in country G but has employees in countries H, I, and J. Whose laws need to be followed?
- Spivak 1y ago
  Seems like B and G. Then if you do business with A (what the GPDR calls "UK Establishment") and A has laws governing its citizens abroad like the UK GPDR then also A.
  - shagie 1y ago
    But the traffic is coming from country D rather than country B. There's no way for the company to know that the person and their interactions is subject to the laws of B rather than D.
    - josephg 1y ago
      Most sales aren’t that complicated. Usually UK law targets anything sold to people who are physically in the UK, paying in GBP. Which from the sounds of things, was something imgur did. Does it also count for people in the UK using a vpn? What about people in the UK paying using American money? It’s not clear, but it doesn’t really matter. These laws target the service providers, not the customers. If you website says “this product isn’t available to UK residents” and you IP block and don’t take GBP as a payment method, nobody will get too angry if a spattering of tech savvy people get around the block using a VPN.