If that were true why is everyone so irritated by this? Just ignore it in that case. But for those people that may want to become subject to British jurisdiction in future or do other business there in future, they will take requests from Ofcom seriously.
When DoorDash or whatever courier comes to a restaurant, they pick up “order number”. That order number is in essence just private IP. Courier translates it to address=public ip.
It follows that the restaurant writes the address on every delivery. Do they ID each recipient?
In the original example the Parisian bars sells and sends the alcohol.
You’ve modified that to introduce a proxy, DoorDash, that now sells and sends the alcohol. If DoorDash sells it they’re the ones in trouble in your example.
If a country has media or broadcast standards laws, and you distribute or broadcast content in that country that violates those laws, that’s on you. The country can just fine you if you chose not to comply. Just the same as they would if you were doing it while living in that country. You’re not obliged to care about the fine if you don’t live there and never intend to travel there. But if you do then you’re going to be subject to their laws at that point, for violating those laws when you distributed that content in that country.
It should be done that way because nominally the law is supposed to address a serious problem (supposedly protecting kids) as they justify that as the reason for an invasion of privacy and additional business regulations. Ignoring the reality of what the internet is and passing a law that clearly won't achieve it's stated goals but has serious drawbacks that will be enacted is not good governance, at best it's showboating at worst it's a deliberate step towards an Orwellian panopticon.
The hardware that propagates the data transmission is owned partly by the UK and partly by Canada. The Canadian website operator has turned off the transmission to the UK on their side and has fulfilled their obligations. The UK is complaining that they didn't turn off transmission on their side.
What you're saying is that the website operator should travel to the UK to enforce UK law from Canada. It's nonsensical.
Edit: If this wasn't clear enough here is a cartoonish version:
Ofcom: Your site violates UK law. By allowing UK citizens access, you must abide by UK law.
Website operator: I do not care about serving UK citizens and am now blocking UK IP addresses. Thank you for notifying us.
Ofcom: We have decided that we will not block access to your website from the UK. Therefore it is theoretically possible to access your website anyway, which is a violation of UK law. No matter how much effort you spend on ensuring that UK citizens do not gain access to your website, we will make sure that there will always be a non zero possibility of violating UK law. Since we are not blocking anything, the blame cannot lie in UK users circumventing a UK side block, which would force us to prosecute UK citizens rather than you as the website operator.
Please shut your website down to ensure compliance.
Website Operator: Okay so you're telling me I have to build the great firewall in the UK, make all ISPs adopt it and lobby a change in UK law to make the firewall mandatory, just so I can host my website?
> Website operator: I do not care about serving UK citizens and am now blocking UK IP addresses. Thank you for notifying us.
Wait did 4chan actually block UK addresses? My understanding was it hadn’t which makes your story fall apart.
The idea that a router is responsible for the packets it forwards rather than the person that made the content and put that content in those packets is getting silly.
I don’t think the founders made a mistake. They understood the weaknesses in their system and were very open about the fact that it wouldn’t always be smooth sailing. Thomas Jefferson famously said: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”.
Liberty isn’t a constant state, but a dynamic cycle. Even 250 years ago, they knew that a guy like Donald Trump would come along.
At this stage tech companies should be pushing for very strong legislation that makes the US a bastion of data privacy to restore trust. But they are still pushing in the other direction.
No amount of legislation can stop subpoenas, wiretapping and other extrajudicial means the US has used for data surveillance since the inception of the Patriot Act. With data privacy increasingly becoming a critical matter of national security, strengthening data sovereignty laws and holding corporations accountable was always the way forward.
This is untrue. Subpoenas, wiretapping, and other extrajudicial means can be stopped by legislation that bans them. You can't say in one breath that legislation that enables it (Patriot Act) cannot be undone by more legislation. There are many hurdles required to produce the required legislation, which may not even be broadly supported by the public, but it isn't correct to say "no amount of legislation can stop existing legislation".
If they could be stopped by legislation that bans them, they would have been stopped by the legislation that banned them prior to the legislation that authorised them, but we know this is not the case. They were being done on a wide scale long before they were legal.
That would require to repeal the FISA and the Patriot acts. That won't happen.
More fundamentally, however, the US constitution only protects Americans and American companies. Europeans would be foolish to trust the US with their data given this lack of basic protection and oversight.
Extrajudicial means something not legally authorized. The surveillance apparatus in the US for decades has operated outside the confines of legality. By definition, they cannot be stopped by legislation that bans them.
None of them want that. Meta actively hates you. Google doesn’t want data privacy. Neither does Apple, even if they aren’t overtly abusing it for advertising. Why would any of them push for more privacy? Their users largely don’t care (or they wouldn’t use those services in the first place).
The people in this regime and their supporters really seem surprised to discover that actually other countries do have agency and national pride. Serious empathy gap in these people.
The US owned the world’s tech stack and countries let it because it was convenient and despite its problems people mostly trusted the US was on their side. In one year we’ve utterly destroyed that and made ourselves enemies of the democratic world. That Silicon Valley did not see this would threaten its global business says something.
This is something even defense analysts have been hammering about tirelessly. The American pivot to counter China should not come at the cost of the Atlantic relationship. Using Cold war scare tactics against China will not work, because China is not in the sphere of European countries that were under the shadow of Russia. China’s language and culture are so far removed from the rest of the world that the risk of direct conflict would not be a matter outside of Taiwan, and cultural hegemony will not take place in the same way Russia tried and at times succeeded.
It feels doubly stupid that not only did American Business sell out their nations’ economic base to Chinese competitors decades back, they fumbled again and sold out to the guy who (yet again) damaged relations of countries funding the service, finance and defense sectors of the US. So now you lost the manufacturing base and you lost the other money-makers. No wonder they are going all-in on fossil fuels to Europe.
No other company is as clear an example of this double whammy as Tesla. Move manufacturing to China to lose the technological edge, and alienate end-users, to lose the customer base.
The adult engineers and adult managers responsible for such things should get the same treatment as any adult having such conversations directly. You can’t just say “wasn’t me, it’s the AI layer I built to do the abuse for me”. You’re actively choosing to abuse and groom children. Sick stuff.
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