As we have recently seen, the US may send the military to sink your boat and kill you if they think you might be planning to break a US law. Whether this is legal or not is another matter.

Ok, hypothetically though, and going back to the smoking in Paris law, if the UK banned smoking in Paris, and a French citizen proven to have smoked in Paris vacations in the UK, the only thing stopping the UK from prosecuting them is that it would be kinda "act-of-war-ish" to start imprisoning French citizens. Technically they could under their own law, they just wouldn't dare since they don't want to start a major diplomatic incident or war.

There are a few cases of claiming universal jurisdiction criminalizing what citizens of other countries do even outside the country, but that's generally things like crimes against humanity.

Boats are considered the territory of the flag state.

> America will not arrest or prosecute someone from the UK visiting Thailand as a sex tourist.

Sure it will. Citizenship is irrelevant. If you travel abroad to have sex with underage people and then come to the US, you can be prosecuted regardless of your nationality.

They likely do not have a flag state and could be considered pirates. Fisherman dont have 100k worth of outboard motors either.

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.

>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.

In the complaint[1], they explicitly state "4chan has no presence, operations, or infrastructure outside of the territorial limits of the United States." So, no, 4chan is not bringing their services into the UK: UK users send requests that travel to the US and hit 4chan servers/CDNs there.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71209929/1/4chan-commun...

No, the ISPs who operate the ASes and routers that make up "the internet" are the ones who bring the service to the UK.

4chan does not reach out to UK users in any way, only responds to their incoming requests.

It really is analogous to UK users going to a foreign country, buying something that their home country has an issue with, having a third party ship it to their home country, and then their home country getting mad at the store.

To argue the details, no they don't bring their service to the UK. Rather, they surface their services where ever their servers are. And then "the internet", other people's hardware and such that they have no control over, bring it to the UK. I know it's pedantic, but this particular thread is _about_ the pedantics.

You can argue that either way. It's not the best analogy. I extrapolate in another comment in this thread.

NZ agreed to cooperate with the US request. That made all the difference. If the US agrees to allow UK to proceed, then that's trouble for 4chan.

4chan brings their services into the UK

How exactly do they do that? Do they have peering agreements with UK-based ISPs?

From what I've heard, their servers are in the US, so UK residents are connecting to the US to access the site and not the other way around. 4chan sells memberships that allow users to bypass some of the rules. If they accept payment from UK banks (no idea if they do or not), then perhaps the UK can make a claim they're doing business in the UK.

The most important difference between this and Kim Dotcom is the US has a lot of weight to throw around, evidently having enough to lean on the governments of small countries like NZ. In the case of 4chan though, it's a once-great but now relatively minor country trying to have their way with an American company, meanwhile America has laws explicitly for the purpose of telling the British to fuck off with the imposition of any of their free speech violating antics against Americans.

I could be milk, right? Or a sheet of paper.

I'll concede that it's not terribly far fetched. If the french entity produced a good that is illegal in the UK put it in the post to be delivered to the UK, then we have something like an analog to producing HTML in one place and displaying elsewhere.

However, the thing about sovereignty is that you don't have it if you can't enforce it.

But what does successfully mean? An Australian court can rule on it, but Australia is going to have to take it up with US State from there. Or send the navy, I guess...

No, the tobacco was being served from France, the Brits used British pidgeon carriers to bring the tobacco to Britain.

No, it really isn't. Plus the free advertising this gets them will be worth more than any market other than the US.