Why is it the website operators job to figure out where people are from? It isn't even generally possible for them to do correctly. A better analogy would be that a british person hired someone who looked and sounded american to go to the us to buy some lemonade and have it shipped to the uk where having it breaks the law, and then blaming the lemonade stand.

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NicuCalcea 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Why is it the website operators job to figure out where people are from?

Why not? It's their responsibility to comply with UK laws if they want to keep serving British customers and making money off of them. Just because the service is provided online doesn't mean it can go on unregulated. You're acting like this is something new that websites haven't had to do for decades.

	▲	grayhatter 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> > Why is it the website operators job to figure out where people are from? > Why not? Because laws vary from location to location, and it's an unreasonable for a [UK] agency to make demands from an exclusively [US] group under the assumption that they are aware of every possible law in existence. Someone in the [US] can't expect to have reasonable influence over the laws in the [UK] that they're now required to follow? That's a blatantly unfair system. That's why not. But actually why? You confidently assert that because it has happened before, that's the way it should always be! You're still trying to apply rules for jurisdiction, that don't map well to the Internet. If I was sending someone to the UK to buy and sell, I think your arguments would make sense. But that's not the analogy that applies here. The better analogy is, people from the UK are traveling across jurisdictional lines, and buying from my shop, based exclusively in my country. My country feels privacy and anonymity are important fundamental rights, and my business exists to that end. Here, instead of trying to control UK citizens, and making it illegal for them to travel to the US to do something they want to prevent, they instead are trying to force the US group to attempt to doxx every user and exclude some of them. That feels insane to me, what's your take on that examplev Also, I feel it's important to note, part of the reason they're using this specific tactic, is because they're aware how impossible and intractable their demands actually are. To call internet geolocation complex or error prone would be an understatement. So based exclusively that they're demanding someone other than them should tackle a near impossible task, should be enough of a reason to reject the demand. Legal or not, unreasonable demands deserve rejection.

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integralid a day ago | parent | prev [-]

A good start would be to use geoip. It's not perfect, but it will almost certainly be enough to make UK happy (the same happens when detecting European for GDPR purposes).

	▲	eptcyka a day ago \| parent [-]
		Lmao, why would a web server operator need to care where their clients send requests from? Imagine if half the countries in the world required this, each with distinct requirements on how to handle traffic from their jurisdictions. Insane. Relieve us of the misery of acting as though OFCOM’s requests are reasonable- they are not.