5 ms·

> why wouldn't it have the power to hold that entity accountable? Literally because the entity is not under the jurisdiction of the UK. The UK can force domest

> why wouldn't it have the power to hold that entity accountable? Literally because the entity is not under the jurisdiction of the UK. The UK can force domestic companies to block the website but they cant force the website itself to do anything. The claims of fines against 4chan are therefore nonsensical. Probably just part of the legal proceedings prior to blocking the site I guess but still strange to see.

flumpcakes 1y ago
It does have 'jurisdiction' because it applies to the citizens: it is offering a service to UK citizens. If I had a website operated outside of the US, where you can download US citizens private medical records and phone conversations, I would be liable to breaking US law. If you do not want to be held accountable to a regions laws, then you do not offer a service to or deal with data that relates to that regions citizens. I don't think this is a hard concept to grasp. Jurisdiction does not imply enforceability. There are laws from your country that you can break while not even being in that country and be held accountable.
- trothamel 1y ago
  Simply offering a service to UK citizens isn't enough to provide jurisdiction. If I run a lemonade stand, and a UK citizen walks up a pays a dollar for a glass of lemonade, then that doesn't give the UK jurisdiction over the lemonade stand. That's what's happening here - a webserver is operating entirely out of the UK, with no nexus. UK citizens send requests to it - just like all other countries citizens do, so either the website would be covered by all laws or just the places where it has nexus. This is especially true in the US, where speech is strongly protected - making Ofcom's assertion that its regulation overrides the first amendment especially egregious. The UK government's behavior here is a bit shameful.
  - flumpcakes 1y ago
    > If I run a lemonade stand, and a UK citizen walks up a pays a dollar for a glass of lemonade, then that doesn't give the UK jurisdiction over the lemonade stand. It does... to correct your example, the UK citizen is paying a dollar for the lemonade while in the UK. Are you saying that if I had a website hosted in Russia that pretended to be your bank and stole all your money from phishing that is perfectly legal?
    - trhway 1y ago
      >Are you saying that if I had a website hosted in Russia that pretended to be your bank and stole all your money from phishing that is perfectly legal? Website hosted in US publishing truth about Ukraine war - even calling it a war is already a felony in Russia - is it legal or illegal? I'm personally against stealing money, and i'm for calling a war a war, yet how do we formally codify that into law - there are 200 countries and at any given moment, especially while online, you're probably violating some law of some country. Before internet globalization, the geography based jurisdiction was such an objective approach. Now it is more like "catch me if you can" which is obviously not a solid foundation to build on. Like that plane that had emergency landing in Minsk, and the Belorussian dissident flying on that plane was arrested by the Belorussian police. And many here on HN were critical of MBS when Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul - what if our plane has to make an emergency landing in Riyadh ...
      - flumpcakes 1y ago
        > Website hosted in US publishing truth about Ukraine war - even calling it a war is already a felony in Russia - is it legal or illegal? That's illegal in Russia. Russia has fined Google more money than exists in the world. It doesn't mean anything, but you bet the CEO of Google isn't going to visit Russia. Russia can choose to block any websites that hurt their feelings. Much like the UK and 4Chan. > what if our plane has to make an emergency landing in Riyadh ... Then you hope to God that the people with the bone saws don't read hackernews.
      - tw04 1y ago
        > Website hosted in US publishing truth about Ukraine war - even calling it a war is already a felony in Russia - is it legal or illegal? Try hosting one of those sites and then fly to Russia and let us know. I think you’ll find it’s quite illegal and will be enforced to the fullest extent of the law the second you enter their jurisdiction. It turns out it doesn’t actually matter whether you or I think the law in question is BS. We don’t run Russia or determine what laws they enact.
    - trothamel 1y ago
  - NicuCalcea 1y ago
    > If I run a lemonade stand, and a UK citizen walks up a pays a dollar for a glass of lemonade, then that doesn't give the UK jurisdiction over the lemonade stand. You are allowed to sell lemonade to British tourists. But if you're shipping lemonade to the UK, you are subject to UK lemonade regulations. That doesn't mean that the UK has jurisdiction over your business and can shut it down or anything like that, but if you travel to the UK or UK banks handle your transactions, they have the right to seize funds and shipments, close your accounts or detain you if you set foot in the UK. Your choice are: follow UK regulations; stop shipping lemonade to the UK; or continue as you were, never go to the UK, and know that the UK can always ban shipments from your stand. The US does the same thing all the time, and even worse[1]. Lots of piracy sites located in jurisdictions where US copyright laws don't apply are seized by US federal agencies and replaced with a notice about piracy. Those sites haven't broken any laws in the countries they're hosted in, they have no legal presence in the US, and yet the domains are banned/seized and administrators detained if they ever step foot on US soil. The UK is not threatening to seize anyone's site. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_In_Our_Sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_In_Our_Sites
    - justinclift 1y ago
      > The UK is not threatening to seize anyone's site. Yet? :)
    - galangalalgol 1y ago
      Why is it the website operators job to figure out where people are from? It isn't even generally possible for them to do correctly. A better analogy would be that a british person hired someone who looked and sounded american to go to the us to buy some lemonade and have it shipped to the uk where having it breaks the law, and then blaming the lemonade stand.
      - integralid 1y ago
        A good start would be to use geoip. It's not perfect, but it will almost certainly be enough to make UK happy (the same happens when detecting European for GDPR purposes).
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Countries claim juristiction for thing outside their borders all the time. however they place a much higher bar on what they claim. Lemonaid stands are likely safe, but even if it is legal where you live the US will claim pedopillia laws aganst you they can get you. part of the high bar is claiming juristriction requires sending your army. (Sanctions are often used too which might or might not work). That is why the threat is if the directors travel to the uk - that gives them sone power - but still expect US government to do 'things' if the arrest any US citizen on this.
- stickfigure 1y ago
  Someone has to be willing to extradite. I'm sure China, Russia, and Iran would love to prosecute all those pesky political dissidents abroad. I'll be pretty shocked if someone ever gets extradited out of the US for not showing a cookie banner.
  - flumpcakes 1y ago
    I agree and in the majority of the cases 'enforcement' is usually just a block at the ISP level.
wisty 1y ago
Jurisdiction only applies within a sovereign country. If there's some dispute that crosses national lines, you don't call the International Bureau of Investigations to send International Agents in to drag the perp before the Planetary Supreme Court.
estimator7292 1y ago
"Offering to" is a nonsense term. The website exists on the open internet regardless of jurisdictional borders. A UK citizen must actively go to the website, initiating a connection from within the UK and requesting data from an IP address that may or may not have some kind of relationship with geography. 4Chan isn't popping up unbidden on people's phones. Wither a UK citizen chooses to visit a website is no business of the website operator. To say that 4Chan is somehow responsible for the actions of unknowably many private citizens is absurd. If the UK wants to enforce internet censorship within their borders, that's their own business. Putting pressure on wholly independent foreign businesses for the crime of existing is not reasonable. This is just as bad as US credit card companies censoring adult material from the entire global online economy. They're trying to censor large parts of the global internet for everyone, not just their citizens. If they cared about UK citizens so much, they'd do something like proactively blocking noncompliant websites to force them to immediately either comply or fuck off. They should be trying to protect their citizens instead of trying to bully foreign companies they have no jurisdiction over. It's their responsibility to enforce their laws, not the US courts.
nprateem 1y ago
Yeah this line of thinking worked really well for Assange

flumpcakes 1y ago

It does have 'jurisdiction' because it applies to the citizens: it is offering a service to UK citizens. If I had a website operated outside of the US, where you can download US citizens private medical records and phone conversations, I would be liable to breaking US law. If you do not want to be held accountable to a regions laws, then you do not offer a service to or deal with data that relates to that regions citizens. I don't think this is a hard concept to grasp. Jurisdiction does not imply enforceability. There are laws from your country that you can break while not even being in that country and be held accountable.

trothamel 1y ago
Simply offering a service to UK citizens isn't enough to provide jurisdiction. If I run a lemonade stand, and a UK citizen walks up a pays a dollar for a glass of lemonade, then that doesn't give the UK jurisdiction over the lemonade stand. That's what's happening here - a webserver is operating entirely out of the UK, with no nexus. UK citizens send requests to it - just like all other countries citizens do, so either the website would be covered by all laws or just the places where it has nexus. This is especially true in the US, where speech is strongly protected - making Ofcom's assertion that its regulation overrides the first amendment especially egregious. The UK government's behavior here is a bit shameful.
- flumpcakes 1y ago
  > If I run a lemonade stand, and a UK citizen walks up a pays a dollar for a glass of lemonade, then that doesn't give the UK jurisdiction over the lemonade stand. It does... to correct your example, the UK citizen is paying a dollar for the lemonade while in the UK. Are you saying that if I had a website hosted in Russia that pretended to be your bank and stole all your money from phishing that is perfectly legal?
  - trhway 1y ago
    >Are you saying that if I had a website hosted in Russia that pretended to be your bank and stole all your money from phishing that is perfectly legal? Website hosted in US publishing truth about Ukraine war - even calling it a war is already a felony in Russia - is it legal or illegal? I'm personally against stealing money, and i'm for calling a war a war, yet how do we formally codify that into law - there are 200 countries and at any given moment, especially while online, you're probably violating some law of some country. Before internet globalization, the geography based jurisdiction was such an objective approach. Now it is more like "catch me if you can" which is obviously not a solid foundation to build on. Like that plane that had emergency landing in Minsk, and the Belorussian dissident flying on that plane was arrested by the Belorussian police. And many here on HN were critical of MBS when Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul - what if our plane has to make an emergency landing in Riyadh ...
    - flumpcakes 1y ago
      > Website hosted in US publishing truth about Ukraine war - even calling it a war is already a felony in Russia - is it legal or illegal? That's illegal in Russia. Russia has fined Google more money than exists in the world. It doesn't mean anything, but you bet the CEO of Google isn't going to visit Russia. Russia can choose to block any websites that hurt their feelings. Much like the UK and 4Chan. > what if our plane has to make an emergency landing in Riyadh ... Then you hope to God that the people with the bone saws don't read hackernews.
    - tw04 1y ago
      > Website hosted in US publishing truth about Ukraine war - even calling it a war is already a felony in Russia - is it legal or illegal? Try hosting one of those sites and then fly to Russia and let us know. I think you’ll find it’s quite illegal and will be enforced to the fullest extent of the law the second you enter their jurisdiction. It turns out it doesn’t actually matter whether you or I think the law in question is BS. We don’t run Russia or determine what laws they enact.
  - trothamel 1y ago
- NicuCalcea 1y ago
  > If I run a lemonade stand, and a UK citizen walks up a pays a dollar for a glass of lemonade, then that doesn't give the UK jurisdiction over the lemonade stand. You are allowed to sell lemonade to British tourists. But if you're shipping lemonade to the UK, you are subject to UK lemonade regulations. That doesn't mean that the UK has jurisdiction over your business and can shut it down or anything like that, but if you travel to the UK or UK banks handle your transactions, they have the right to seize funds and shipments, close your accounts or detain you if you set foot in the UK. Your choice are: follow UK regulations; stop shipping lemonade to the UK; or continue as you were, never go to the UK, and know that the UK can always ban shipments from your stand. The US does the same thing all the time, and even worse[1]. Lots of piracy sites located in jurisdictions where US copyright laws don't apply are seized by US federal agencies and replaced with a notice about piracy. Those sites haven't broken any laws in the countries they're hosted in, they have no legal presence in the US, and yet the domains are banned/seized and administrators detained if they ever step foot on US soil. The UK is not threatening to seize anyone's site. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_In_Our_Sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_In_Our_Sites
  - justinclift 1y ago
    > The UK is not threatening to seize anyone's site. Yet? :)
  - galangalalgol 1y ago
    Why is it the website operators job to figure out where people are from? It isn't even generally possible for them to do correctly. A better analogy would be that a british person hired someone who looked and sounded american to go to the us to buy some lemonade and have it shipped to the uk where having it breaks the law, and then blaming the lemonade stand.
    - integralid 1y ago
      A good start would be to use geoip. It's not perfect, but it will almost certainly be enough to make UK happy (the same happens when detecting European for GDPR purposes).
- bluGill 1y ago
  Countries claim juristiction for thing outside their borders all the time. however they place a much higher bar on what they claim. Lemonaid stands are likely safe, but even if it is legal where you live the US will claim pedopillia laws aganst you they can get you. part of the high bar is claiming juristriction requires sending your army. (Sanctions are often used too which might or might not work). That is why the threat is if the directors travel to the uk - that gives them sone power - but still expect US government to do 'things' if the arrest any US citizen on this.
stickfigure 1y ago
Someone has to be willing to extradite. I'm sure China, Russia, and Iran would love to prosecute all those pesky political dissidents abroad. I'll be pretty shocked if someone ever gets extradited out of the US for not showing a cookie banner.
- flumpcakes 1y ago
  I agree and in the majority of the cases 'enforcement' is usually just a block at the ISP level.

wisty 1y ago

Jurisdiction only applies within a sovereign country. If there's some dispute that crosses national lines, you don't call the International Bureau of Investigations to send International Agents in to drag the perp before the Planetary Supreme Court.

estimator7292 1y ago

"Offering to" is a nonsense term. The website exists on the open internet regardless of jurisdictional borders. A UK citizen must actively go to the website, initiating a connection from within the UK and requesting data from an IP address that may or may not have some kind of relationship with geography. 4Chan isn't popping up unbidden on people's phones. Wither a UK citizen chooses to visit a website is no business of the website operator. To say that 4Chan is somehow responsible for the actions of unknowably many private citizens is absurd. If the UK wants to enforce internet censorship within their borders, that's their own business. Putting pressure on wholly independent foreign businesses for the crime of existing is not reasonable. This is just as bad as US credit card companies censoring adult material from the entire global online economy. They're trying to censor large parts of the global internet for everyone, not just their citizens. If they cared about UK citizens so much, they'd do something like proactively blocking noncompliant websites to force them to immediately either comply or fuck off. They should be trying to protect their citizens instead of trying to bully foreign companies they have no jurisdiction over. It's their responsibility to enforce their laws, not the US courts.

nprateem 1y ago

Yeah this line of thinking worked really well for Assange