If you’re unwilling to accept this, then you must be extremely careful when you travel internationally or turn off access to that country altogether.
This is true for every country on Earth. This is the price of doing business internationally.
Agreed, and I like to point out the same when talking of Apple and Co. not liking EU laws. This however, is very different.
It's more akin to me publishing a book in my own country, then another country's book importers importing that book and me getting in trouble for putting into print ideas that are not allowed there.
Remember, I'm not the one importing the book (the ISP in the case of a website), nor did I ask for it to be done.
I think it'd be difficult to argue against that unless someone else was a proxy middleman during the delivery of the book (VPN).
It’s not my analogy, I’m just running with it ;)
But to run with it more: connecting to the website is analogous to an order. Like a person ordering a book or a patron ordering a drink at a bar. The bartender must ask for ID if they suspect the person is not of age.
If a book was illegal in a location then I think it could be argued that delivering it to the location could be akin to smuggling contraband. So I don’t think your reasoning gets you off criminal liability.
By the way, this is all academic. These laws won’t be enforced. It’s all nonsense. There’ll be some public knuckle wraps for the big providers, but that’ll be it.
If you’re a business that falls foul of the laws, you should still adhere to them. But if you’re a small, self hosted site, nothing will happen. The uk police have no resource for something like this and so unless you’re completely egregious, I think it’s not worth worrying about.
Agree with the point that it's mostly to extort larger firms who do in fact operate businesses there.