> Mr Capel said: “We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing.
The end game of these rules seems to be that it's impossible for small forums to cope, so content gets centralised on big tech. I would be surprised if they don't support this.
"Investment" here seems to be operations and personnel, resulting in taxes going to the UK government.
They aren't making $630 billion per year in money off of those companies, but the operating income means they're getting taxes on that $630 billion (income tax from company and employees, VAT for purchases, etc.) and the personnel working in the UK are probably spending most of that money in the UK (velocity of money theory comes into play here).
The resulting economic benefit for the UK government is enough that they'd notice the drop if all that started to transition away.
The UK government is currently gas lighting the public into ignoring 60k+ in quarterly job losses and is historically unpopular. Despite that it is railroading orwellian attacks against rights and freedoms of the citizenry, all of which without a mandate. This is a kamikaze government of austerity-obsessed foreign agent traitors. The only thing they would be upset about in your scenario is about the inconvenience it would cause those trillion dollar American companies.
Yeah this is where i am getting mixed up because the article isn't saying what the cause was. I thought it was related to the digital id thing that every site need to make sure they check for minors..
The GPDR is far more complicated than just that superficial example.
But I'm curious about how far you feel that assertion goes. Ignoring what the GPDR says exactly, how do you feel about the various examples?
I have http request logs from requests that you've made. Do I have to delete them when you ask?
You sent me an email, do I have to delete my copy?
I host an email service for me and a friend exclusively, you request that I delete your data, do I have to delete emails you sent to him as well?
You answered a long thread about an esoteric computing question, hypothetically under the name denvercoder9, do I have to delete that comment? What about the replies to it which quote you?
I have evidence that you committed a crime of some sort, do I have to delete that?
Someone else posted true information about you to my site intended to categorize comments to HN posts. It's someone else data about you, do I have to delete that when you ask?
You questions, which are entirely valid, are why decent legal education is vital
Common law has the concept of reasonableness.
If you're a single person hosting a simple website, having logs is perfectly reasonable thing to have to check for fraud and other nefarious things.
> You sent me an email, do I have to delete my copy?
Depends who hosts the email server, and is it commercial. Buisnesses need a purpose for holding onto emails, its not reasonable for a non business single person to have one.
> You answered a long thread about an esoteric computing question, hypothetically under the name denvercoder9, do I have to delete that comment? What about the replies to it which quote you?
Thats actually interesting, the only thing that PII is the name, so if the name is deleted thats complying.
> I have evidence that you committed a crime of some sort, do I have to delete that?
It's clear to me, it's a huge risk for any company to allow access to UK visitors at this stage. All companies should be blocking all UK visitors. It's just too much risk for them to take.
The fault is obviously an incompetent and authoritarian UK government, but that's what the UK overlords have agreed.
It's not specific to the UK: many developed countries are cracking down on Internet businesses. There's going to be an awful lot of regulation, and it will be incompatible between different countries. The one-model-fits-the-whole-world style of business is over: you're going to be confined to national borders again.
The opinion polls are clear: the normies want this.
The often cited YouGov polling, I think sampled a few thousand people. There are almost 2.5 million signatures on petitions between the OSA and Digital ID.
If you mean the opinion polls, I don't have any to hand, but there have been a few articles submitted to /r/ukpolitics since the Online Safety Act took effect detailing opinion polls showing that the UK Government's regulation of internet content has been well-received by the wider public (although the userbase of that subreddit has vociferously disagreed).
I can counter any of the iffy polls by simple point to the official online petitions service. There were a huge number of signatures to revoke OSA and two million signatures to abolish the plans for the Digital ID. While the Digital ID is technically a separate issue, many of the same privacy concerns are present.
The number of people that signed these petitions is far more representative than any polling.
On top of that, recently I've seen reportrs of both the Liberal Democrats and Reform (the two largest parties after the main two) recongising the OSA as unpopular and are likely to suggest reforming/removing it.
On top of that. The labour government and the conservative government that proceeded it which created the OSA were/are both deeply unpopular.
So any notion that there is a popular mandate for this is nonsense.
The Bristol young lib dems oppose it, but the parliamentary party doesn't think it goes far enough. The Bristol lot are great, I talked to them about it, but they're unlikely to change things on the national level.
That is unfortunate to hear. I don't really care for any of the political parties in the UK and tell them exactly what I think of them when they knock on my door.
I wouldn't trust them in young LibDems in Bristol either. Doesn't matter if they seem nice or not. Lots of young politicians have nice ideas and over time they either end up as bad as the ones they are replacing, they are forced out or leave of their own accord and then complain about it on a podcast.
shouldn't it be the other way round? if the UK doesn't like something a non-UK company is doing it should be them that go through the trouble of blocking it.
If I have a website I'm pretty sure I'm bound to break some random country's law without knowing
Answering my own question, I guess it's exceptionalism of the powerful countries where they can just bully you into following their law
> shouldn't it be the other way round? if the UK doesn't like something a non-UK company is doing it should be them that go through the trouble of blocking it.
They're clearly working up to this; it's what happened with Pirate Bay, etc.
They don't want (correctly) unfavorable comparisons to China's "Great Firewall" made, which most Western governments have lambasted in the past, so there's a PR/Politics side of it too.
It would be much better to not block them rather serve them a single screen that explains why the rest of the site is unavailable to them citing the specific laws that make the action necessary
It’s hilarious that imgur is still returning JSON errors even when connecting with a browser. I guess their dev team have never heard of the Accept header.
(My residential IP is blacklisted for some reason and I always get a JSON error message from them)
It is exactly the same with the EU's GDPR, by the way...
That's the funny or hypocritical thing: Both laws have the same reach but people here tend to praise the GDPR for it while being furious about the Online Safety Act.
Block UK access now just in case.