And the U.K quickly descending into a totalitarian state continues.
This is like the Supreme Court ruling over a case set in California. It would effect New York all the same, who cares if the case is based in California?
So it has precisely zero effect on Britain beyond not blocking certain types of liability that the British government might create through its own laws.
As explained near the end of the article:
>As a consequence, active intermediaries and blog operators will have considerable incentives to discontinue offering a comments feature, and the fear of liability may lead to additional self-censorship by operators. This is an invitation to self-censorship at its worst.
The statues under the United Kingdom Hate Speech laws means people can sue in courts for comments containing hate speech and the ECHR now has a precedent to rule in their favor and hold the intermediate party liable for said comments. The result? Nobody wants to be held liable, so they shut down their comment sections.
That's bad for free speech and is a side-entry form of censorship. Not direct from the state, but implied and enforced by the state on private entities.
OTOH, its a decision which does not impose new prohibitions on such restrictions by states, rather than imposing free-speech restrictions, so, with regard to its impact on Britain, its kind of hard to see it reasonably be described as imposing totalitarian on the UK so much as signaling that, should Her Majesty's Government choose to impose certain restrictions, the European Court of Human Rights won't be an effective venue to fight them.