What I’m understanding is imgur could get fine even if they dont offer their service anymore in the UK.
They could go back to just after the law passed and tell them “hey you were infringing on this extremely disrupting law that would completely change your business in the UK so pay up”.
I mean if a business just decides to not serve UK customer they should leave them alone… Especially such a complex law for something like Imgur…
The law was announced a long time before it came into effect, so companies that didn’t do anything to become compliant in advance were playing chicken in the hope that it’d be repealed before they ever had to obey it.
It’s not actually a bad strategy, ultimately the law is probably going to get slapped down as unworkable and there’s pretty good evidence to suggest that they knew it wouldn’t work even before they implemented it, which won’t make them look good.
Unfortunately the courts move so slowly that none of this has happened yet and the law has now gone into effect because the timer ran out, but in theory they could have done all the work to comply only for the law never to have happened.
Practically they can’t. In theory they could complain to the United States that a US business is attempting to circumvent UK law, but I can’t imagine that having much effect at the moment.
In theory it all works because companies would be more inclined to pay the fine than to lose UK customers, in reality of course it doesn’t work because everybody would just use a VPN anyway, but the people who wrote these laws don’t know about VPNs because they think computers run on magic smoke.
What I’m understanding is imgur could get fine even if they dont offer their service anymore in the UK.
They could go back to just after the law passed and tell them “hey you were infringing on this extremely disrupting law that would completely change your business in the UK so pay up”.
I mean if a business just decides to not serve UK customer they should leave them alone… Especially such a complex law for something like Imgur…
The law was announced a long time before it came into effect, so companies that didn’t do anything to become compliant in advance were playing chicken in the hope that it’d be repealed before they ever had to obey it.
It’s not actually a bad strategy, ultimately the law is probably going to get slapped down as unworkable and there’s pretty good evidence to suggest that they knew it wouldn’t work even before they implemented it, which won’t make them look good.
Unfortunately the courts move so slowly that none of this has happened yet and the law has now gone into effect because the timer ran out, but in theory they could have done all the work to comply only for the law never to have happened.
Why sure but, how could they force Imgur to pay up?
Practically they can’t. In theory they could complain to the United States that a US business is attempting to circumvent UK law, but I can’t imagine that having much effect at the moment.
In theory it all works because companies would be more inclined to pay the fine than to lose UK customers, in reality of course it doesn’t work because everybody would just use a VPN anyway, but the people who wrote these laws don’t know about VPNs because they think computers run on magic smoke.