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.
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 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.
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.
