I’m curious what the actual ramifications would be. The UK doesn’t exactly have a great firewall. Even if they did, the actual great firewall is only so effective. I’m guessing the UK would start pressing the payment processors against Reddit for their paid services. I don’t know if that would make enough of a dent in their revenue to make them think twice or not.
If they have any UK offices, those would have to close for sure. They’d effectively have to be “accessible” in the UK but not “operating” in the UK.
The morally correct course of action for an international Internet-based business facing this situation would be to cut all ties with the UK, make sure you have no business presence there at all, and then duly ignore their laws.
But that might make the shareholders unhappy I guess.
They’d risk getting blocked in the UK if they did that. Sure users could get around that using a VPN, but not everyone uses one so in general that’d reduce their userbase and as such their revenue. Shareholders sure won’t like that either.
I’m curious about the technical/enforcement side of this. The UK doesn’t really have a great firewall. Would they press ISPs to drop routes for their ASN?
Hopefully DoH and DoT take off to help with that. But also are ISPs usually running devices hefty enough to inspect every DNS response going through their network? I thought they mostly run pure routers.
With unencrypted DNS it’s dead easy to redirect to your own resolver. In fact, if you’re trying to enforce DoT or DoH on your LAN it can be good practice to do this to ensure that rogue applications aren’t bypassing your resolver.
I don’t think ISPs really do this though currently.
Fun unrelated backstory: I found a website that resolves DNS records using 1.1.1.1 over DoH in JavaScript. I had to flat out block connections to 1.1.1.1.
I hate reddit as much as the other guy, but I’m not sure what other course of action they have if they are by law required to do this.
What this new law means for fediverse users and servers hosted in the UK is still to be found out.
Host server -> ignore law -> eventually get shutdown -> host new server -> ignore law
Its torrent sites all over again
I’m curious what the actual ramifications would be. The UK doesn’t exactly have a great firewall. Even if they did, the actual great firewall is only so effective. I’m guessing the UK would start pressing the payment processors against Reddit for their paid services. I don’t know if that would make enough of a dent in their revenue to make them think twice or not.
If they have any UK offices, those would have to close for sure. They’d effectively have to be “accessible” in the UK but not “operating” in the UK.
Big corps like reddit and pornhub will likely not lower themselves to the likes of pirate bay. Not my opinion, only an assumption.
The morally correct course of action for an international Internet-based business facing this situation would be to cut all ties with the UK, make sure you have no business presence there at all, and then duly ignore their laws.
But that might make the shareholders unhappy I guess.
They’d risk getting blocked in the UK if they did that. Sure users could get around that using a VPN, but not everyone uses one so in general that’d reduce their userbase and as such their revenue. Shareholders sure won’t like that either.
I’m curious about the technical/enforcement side of this. The UK doesn’t really have a great firewall. Would they press ISPs to drop routes for their ASN?
The usual way is to ask ISPs to drop the DNS record for Reddits domains.
This leaves most users unable to reach the site. Determined users won’t be stoped. But it’s good enough for the powers that be.
Hopefully DoH and DoT take off to help with that. But also are ISPs usually running devices hefty enough to inspect every DNS response going through their network? I thought they mostly run pure routers.
With unencrypted DNS it’s dead easy to redirect to your own resolver. In fact, if you’re trying to enforce DoT or DoH on your LAN it can be good practice to do this to ensure that rogue applications aren’t bypassing your resolver.
I don’t think ISPs really do this though currently.
Fun unrelated backstory: I found a website that resolves DNS records using 1.1.1.1 over DoH in JavaScript. I had to flat out block connections to 1.1.1.1.