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This is a shame, Imgur was a good source of fun. I understand what's the reason behind this decision, the current "implementation" of the Online Safety Act is the worst way to handle this problem. Unfortunately I can't see any way that can be reasonably implemented to check the age of the user.
What's the backstory here?
UK passed an insanely stupid and dangerous (as well as authoritarian) act called Online Safety Act. It's essentially because of shitty parents allowing kids unsupervised access to the internet, rather than expecting parents to parent they pushed the cost/risk to companies. Imgur decided they didn't want to foot the cost/risk and pulled out. As a brit, I don't blame them, if I was US based I'd geoblock the UK as well.…
Is that info from Imgur? Or from conjecture?
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When you receive a request to your website (or any service), that request comes from an IP address. There are databases that can tell you what country an IP address is from. It's not perfect, but it works well enough 99.99% of the time. Then, if the country is blacklisted, you do not allow access.
So that could be defeated by a VPN?
Hopefully many more companies do this and British internet users migrate to use of VPNs. This will apply maximum pressure on the government to reverse these parochial laws.
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Does every single website that exists and is available in UK automatically provides services in UK? Isn't it just simpler to completely block every request from UK by default to "not provide services"?
Transactional services (I don't know if that's the right word), where you have a known user, is different from passively providing web pages that people can read and you don't track them or ask them to register for an account. But I think that distinction was pretty moot when web 2.0 came along. Imgur's entire purpose is clearly to host user generated content though, so you can't argue it's not "providing services".
Not at all. Imgur does the passive side too. And by number of operations, it is by far the biggest one.
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It’s you who are mixing things. Putting up a website outside the UK and “deciding to provide services in the UK” are two decidedly different things. UK legal imperialism is self centered and unrealistic and undermines speech the world over.
I’m guessing that Imgur happily accepted the ad revenue from UK users while it served them images. If you genuinely were “not providing services” to UK users, you wouldn’t do that. I’m not happy with extraterritorial assertions over internet services either, but you can’t wish them away with sophistry about “we’re not providing services to them!” if you’re happy to take their money and serve them a page in exchange.…
How about the fact Imgur just ceased service to millions of users from which they took no money?
> The ICO also confirmed that companies could not avoid accountability by withdrawing their services in the UK. This is quite a slippery slope. If I host a website in one country, I do not necessarily care where people access my website from. It is not like I actively provide a service to them - they just use internet (decentralised network) to access it. What if I publish a newspaper here, someone takes it where the…
It appears that you are mixing things here. It's not about "hosting a website", it's about providing services. If you provide services, like selling a newspaper, in the UK, you need to respect their laws, or you will suffer the legal implications of not doing so. And regarding the accountability, it refers to the fact that imgur USED TO provide services in the UK: > We have been clear that exiting the UK does not all…
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…but how enforceable would the fine be? They pull out and have no UK assets to seize.
> They pull out and have no UK assets to seize. How do you expect the "pull out" to happen? They must have had a UK bank account or similar, whose transfers won't get approved as they're trying to escape from criminal prosecution. Or they'll work with the US to ensure responsible individuals are held responsible. It isn't exactly the first time someone/something commits crime in a country then try to escape, there is…
How so? None is needed to take revenue from UK-seen ads.
Hopefully many more companies do this and British internet users migrate to use of VPNs. This will apply maximum pressure on the government to reverse these parochial laws.