Ofcom has a bad handle on web requests. Clients connect out. 4chan et al aren't pushing their services in anyone in the UK.
If you posted cocaine from your cocaine-legal country to an address where it was illegal, and you followed all the regular customs labelling rules, I'm not sure you should be liable. And you shouldn't be extradited either. Even the UK demands that extradition offences would have been criminal had they been committed in the UK. Now I'm sure in practice, you'd find yourself in trouble immediately but I don't think it's fair.
The ramifications of laws like this is everyone needs to be Geo-IP check every request, adhere to every local law. It's not the Internet we signed up for.
If the UK wants to block packets from across the pond, they should (but I hope they don't) do it via a Great Firewall, rather than expecting random foreign websites to do it for them.
Is it “different” then?
Being serious here.
The place you sent the box then repacks it and mails it to the UK. Somehow the UK thinks that you and only you have broken the law.
This is the same as letting a delivery cross your borders, except the delivery vehicle here is permanent infrastructure, similar to a pipeline and it is purposefully set to be permissive and allow anything through.
Why are you suddenly pretending that there is no equivalent to the customs office in this scenario?
It's not like the website operator is sneakily smuggling cargo on a container ship. VPN usage is done UK citizens. The operator has already denied shipments to UK addresses in this scenario.
It's kinda voluntary, though, there's no international agreement about this.
EU doesn't believe in human rights or freedoms.
Therefore they're actually transacting that business on UK/EU soil.
Didn't the US use this argument to prosecute and extradite the Mega founder?
I wonder if the UK/EU will reverse uno the US's stance and start extraditions on US CEOs.
Imagine this scenario, a major G7 country declares:
All bytes sent to a computer on their soil count as a transaction on their soil.
And the end client being on a VPN is not a defence UNLESS the website owner attempts to verify the user's identity.
Immediately have to pay local taxes, conform to local laws.
Unless you keep all your assets in the US and never fly abroad, our shady website operator is exposing them self to real risk of being snatched by police somewhere or having their assets seized.
The only thing stopping that from happening is the trade agreements the Americans have put in place, the very trade agreements everyone's now looking at and thinking 'what are these really worth?'.
Yeah, it's fantasy and it won't happend but it could.
The internet is not free, it runs on sufferance of a bunch of governments and some, like China, already lock it down.
The more America, who probably gains the most from it right now, plays with fire, the more risk something like this crazy scenario happens.
Another more plausible scenario is countries simply start repealing safe harbor laws. End of YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/etc. in those countries overnight.
The extradition has succeeded so far because it's based on acts that would have met a criminal bar in New Zealand, and deemed to have a high likelihood of being successfully prosecuted. Fraud, copyright infringement, etc.
The US has standing because many MegaUpload servers were in the US.
No? All countries catch drug dealers from other countries all the time even for the crime that happened outside of their borders. Or do you really think El Chapo could vacation freely in Europe.
This seems significantly different to openly and honestly posting narcotics.
But US=Good and Europe=Bad on hn
LOL, classic. Everyone thinks they are the one being picked on. Plenty of people would argue that what you say here is actually the polar opposite of what happens on HN.
