Like this, I remember hearing about Ofcom trying to enforce age verification on American owned and operated websites in which was met with resistance as British legislation has no jurisdiction on US soil (there is even an actual court case about it in the US) since it contradicts freedom of expression towards American citizens. It makes me wonder why try to enforce someone else’s laws on another nation, it won’t work as laws are geographically bound.

Social Media companies are NOT headquartered on where age checks have became a thing (UK or AU), like how X (Twitter) or Facebook have their HQ in California which should render AU’s -16 SM “Ban” useless as those laws carry zero jurisdiction in the US. It doesn’t matter if they tried to fine them 50m AUD (they have more in USD and remains stronger than AUD), the thing is FB, Instagram or X are US based firms (so AU legislation has no jurisdiction).

You can be the CEO of any SM company & retort “YOUR LAWS MEAN NOTHING, AS I DO NOT LIVE IN YOUR COUNTRY!” simply refuse to comply as you are aware they cannot enforce laws from one country to someone elses since legislation is geographically bound. It happened with the “Hub” as they stood their ground refusing to comply, what happened? They simply stopped supporting those regions (as in the website no longer works there).

  • lucullus@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    11 days ago

    the thing is FB, Instagram or X are US based firms (so AU legislation has no jurisdiction).

    They are headquartered in the US, but in fact they are multi nationals, doing business in many countries. If you do business in a country, you have to abide to the local law. SM companies are seeing, how difficult that can be in the online space and are trying to avoid following the law.

    AV is kind of a bad example of that, since it is flawed in so many ways, but the principle of jurisdiction is important and needed. Just as Apple has to use USB C (like any other smartphone company) in the EU, or the upcoming (I think) legislation about replaceble batteries in products.

    Of course Apple, Facebook, Google etc could just decide to move out of the market, and for smaller markets that already happened in the past. Though moving out of any bigger market (eg the EU or China) will cost them so much more. And in addition other companies would fill the space left behind. So by moving out of a big market, the company would create its own big competition - and no big company likes competition.