Sections 105 and 108 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea allows any country to go after drug smugglers in international waters but it does require that a court in that country approve of the action. It's certainly worth questioning if a court can issue a preemptive ruling on a proposed action against alleged drug smugglers. There's also the issue that Maritime Law is weird, convoluted, and probably sanctions most state actions if you dig around enough.
Since you are going all lawyer on this one, you should know they weren't flying any national flag. Technically, if you do this in international waters you are a pirate and anyone can legally do what the US did in that situation. Maritime law is very old and has some interesting provisions in it. The parts you quote only matter if a national flag is being flown at the time.
It still sounds absurd to me. Nations should not be in the business of passing laws that apply to extraterritorial actions of foreign citizens. I know that it happens, especially with the US, but IMHO it’s just not how things should work.
This has become far too normalized due to decades of bad behavior by the US, and it’s going to come back to bite us as US power declines. Just wait until 30 years from now when you can’t safely visit anywhere in the far East because you made a subversive comment about China. Although I’m sure the same people will hypocritically wail and gnash their teeth about the laws made by those people, when of course our extraterritorial laws are just fine.
The end punishment will still end up being that 4chan is not allowed to do business in the UK. If they want their website to work in the UK, they should follow UK law.
Then the UK should just step up and pass a censorship law, not do this song-and-dance about fining businesses outside their control.
If this kind of BS becomes too common then running a small internet business will become impossible. Even if you don’t do business in a country, you will have to consider whether or not they might consider you in violation of some obscure law and then consider whether or not that country has the leverage to impact your business or even your own personal safety. It’s utterly ridiculous. This would spell the end of the global internet, except for megacorps. It’s already a tough business environment as it is.
The status quo is that some countries have these laws, but they are generally ignored unless you’re a citizen, you manage to do something geopolitically significant, or you get involved in transnational crime rings. This seems acceptable to me. If countries don’t like the free internet, then ban it so we can all see what you’re really up to.
> This has become far too normalized due to decades of bad behavior by the US, and it’s going to come back to bite us as US power declines.
This has been happening long before the US started doing it.
If anything, it's normalized in the US because of the bad behavior prior to the US doing it. China's a great example. What does brutally crushing dissent internally and abroad without even a facade of a single care about human rights get you? Well, in their case, damn near superpower status. Been that way since at the very least Nixon's administration.
The net effect was people started to wonder why we bother with the inefficiencies of "rights" and "privacy". The concern for human rights shown since the end of WWII in the West (particularly the US) is an exception, not norm, in history.
>The net effect was people started to wonder why we bother with the inefficiencies of "rights" and "privacy".
Who are these people you're talking about, tankies, faschists?
The Chinese have the government that they deserve. They screw each other over, and what goes around comes around. It's a cautionary tale, not an example to follow.
If the California stores ships to the UK, you can be certain that they will.
And they'd be right to do so as a country has sovereignty over what is allowed or not in their country, not matter the country of origin of the seller.
They have a right to stop the packages at the border. They have no right to go after the stores themselves and more importantly they have no power to do so unless the US helps them, which they would never do over a free speech issue.
