You’re not going to extradite US site operators, period. Find another approach.
"If country B doesn’t like it, block the mail in question". Saying only the country of origin can regulate activity done in another country creates a legal worm-bucket with vast implications. It's also not how laws work currently in pretty much any other sector than the internet.
IP block should be sufficient to void the laws; That's how other EU laws work. If the UK wants more than than then they should just create a firewall. But saying the internet should be a fully unregulated hellscape is not a sensible position here.
That’s actually how it works? Unless you have an extradition agreement, or military overmatch, or you are willing to expend some diplomatic leverage, you are typically not getting a citizen out of a foreign country. The government complains about this all the time with goods from SE Asia, and sometimes they seize fake designer goods and make a lot of noise about it. But the people making the knockoffs just keep on making them, don’t they?
Not sure I see how your logic has led you there. If a company (regardless of where they are headquartered) is operating in your country, then you necessarily have some sort of jurisdiction over it:
- If they are using servers or domain names hosted in your country, you can seize them.
- If they are making use of your country's financial system, you can ban them from that system.
- If they are shipping physical products to your country's residents, you can intercept those packages at customs.
- If any employees (or, better, officers) of that company are physically present in your country, you can fine or arrest them if they don't comply.
- If you have an extradition treaty with the country where they're operating, you can ask that country for help. If they decline, that's unfortunate for you, but that's life.
And right, in the end, if there's no "presence" aside from people in your country accessing foreign websites, then you can (given the right legal mechanisms) order ISPs in your country to block those sites. I don't see why any foreign-operated website should have any obligation to examine your laws and pro-actively block your residents from their site if needed; if you want your laws enforced on your residents, then... enforce them on your residents.
> But saying the internet should be a fully unregulated hellscape is not a sensible position here.
While I do see a few low-effort comments to that effect, I don't think that's a common opinion here. I don't even think the person you're replying to holds that opinion.
But this is the real issue. To what extent is a company "operating in" a country where it has no staff and no physical presence?
The principle that someone should become subject to the laws of a country they've never visited and where they have no assets just because they communicated with someone else who does live in that country seems questionable. Even if money is sent by the person living in that country to someone based elsewhere it still seems questionable.
Taken to their logical conclusion these kinds of arguments would kill off a lot of the value of the modern Internet (assuming they could be practically enforced). Can you even write a blog post any more if it might be controversial in any country in the world? Do you have to pay if you show ads next to that blog post and someone from the Sovereign Republic Of East Nowhere visits - but the Sovereign Republic Of East Nowhere has a law prohibiting online advertising as a social harm and imposing a fine of 1000% of global revenues generated through ads? What happens when the laws of two different countries are in direct conflict and one requires you to include an official warning of some kind alongside certain information on your blog but the other one prohibits such statements unless you're formally qualified to give advice in the field?
If you want to interfere with international trade or international communications at all then it makes far more sense practically - and arguably both morally and legally as well - to legislate so that your own people in your own country who are subject to your own laws are the ones who must or must not act in a certain way. If there's some kind of regulation on physical goods then make the person importing those goods responsible for compliance. If you want to tax international transactions then make the person in your country who is participating in those transactions responsible for declaring and paying the tax. But realistically this leads to a lot of non-compliance because your citizens don't have to be experts in international tax law so you can collect your $1.53 when they bought a new T-shirt from some online store based in another country and had it shipped.
What the UK is doing is claiming, without having dealt with this via treaty that I am somehow responsible for keeping their citizens off my website. This is not something they can actually do. Now if they made a deal with my country that said that I had to in some way we'd be in a different universe. But currently they do not.
As I, and probably many others, see it. If they don't want UK citizens visiting 4chan or whereever they should control the flow of data through their borders better and punish their citizens for data smuggling if they vpn their way around it. It's no different than prohibited goods like automatic weapons. If I send someone in the UK a fully automatic ak-47 (which is legal in my juristiction) then I suspect UK customs will catch it at the border and possibly jail, or at least have a stern talking to the recipient.
