IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

Starmer’s government may have also forgotten that its nuclear deterrent is on lease from the US.

Something about this feels off. It’s clearly not in the interest of the UK diplomatically given the current US admin. Are the people on the UK side of the cross-Atlantic CISA/State/Ofcom “counter-misinformation” op still blindly running their scripts as if the US elections never happened? It sure feels that way.

> Internet but not for any other commerce. If you sell products to someone in the EU, you are liable to EU laws about that product category and commercial activity. The internet is the only exception, and that has caused a lot of problems.

I don't know the state of play now, and I do know that things have gotten more that way over time. But the traditional approach to international product sales is that the importer is responsible. That originally meant the person who physically brought it into the country. As common carriers became more common, it meant the person who ordered the thing. That's occasionally been leavened by some consideration of whether the seller specifically targeted customers in the receiving country. And nowadays there's more of a tendency to start "blaming" sellers in some cases, probably because nowadays "importing" something is often a retail order from a specific consumer, as opposed to somebody bringing in a shipping container on spec to resell. Maybe some of those changes are appropriate, but it's just not true that physical goods have always been treated the way you want Web sites treated here, or even that they're mostly treated that way now.

> IP block is the currently the only reasonable way to apply laws to internet based commerce.

"IP block" works in both directions.

If you want to keep something out of your country, you should be responsible for blocking it, not the other way around. That's not necessarily easy, but it's less costly in total than demanding that every Web site enforce every country's regulation... and it has the advantage of putting the cost of a regulation on the people imposing it, which is where it belongs.

> It has its flaws in accuracy; but ISPs could easily create a system to make them more reliable for IP lookup.

From your use of the word "easily", I conclude that you personally would not be among those responsible for making that work.

> Arguing that websites cannot be regulated outside of country of origin is an insane position to take with even the minimal level of hypothetical reasoning of what that would imply.

First, you can in fact "regulate" by blocking, without trying to extend the reach of your laws outside of your border. Your claim that a regulator is left totally powerless is just false.

Second, in practice, that "hypothetical" is pretty close to what we have now, and even closer to what we had 10 years ago. The world did not end.

> UKs laws are dumb, but they should be free to enforce them for websites operating in the UK

Sure, as long as we recognize that "operating in the UK" properly means "is physically located in or controlled from the UK" and not "happens to be accessible to people in the UK". The latter definition would indeed be insane.

Maybe this is very european of me but 250KM is outrageously far. Dublin to Belfast is like 130KM. If it says they're in Seville (in Spain) within Comedically far.

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The US will enforce most UK court judgements. I'm not sure how administrative fines work; there might be a need to involve a court first, but once that's done the US will [on edit- may] enforce them.

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.