A US judge has ruled that another nation may not dictate what can or cannot be posted on an American web site.
This was part of the Yahoo Auctions case in France. Though Yahoo’s French site followed French rules against selling Nazi memorabilia, French who wished to buy such things were simply going over to Yahoo’s American site.
The French judge decided, no, that wasn’t fair, and told Yahoo they would be massively fined if this were allowed to continue. He based his ruling on the idea that Yahoo could, if it wanted to, ID who was a French person and who was not by what IP blocks they were coming in on.
Yahoo caved, and simply removed all such auctions from all their sites. Which was a good decision for a bad reason, but I digress. They also appealed to a US judge to determine whether a French court could actually order such a thing.
The US district court judge, Jeremy Fogel, decided, nope.
Note that France still has recourse. They can force their locally controlled ISPs to block Yahoo’s sites in general. They can pressure ISPs in other EU states to do the same. They can monitor IP traffic on their networks. They can do any number of things.
They can also fine Yahoo’s French company (assuming it’s structured that way) anyhow, until Yahoo closes it down and moves out.
But they can’t tell a US company what they can and cannot post on their own American-hosted site. Any more than the US can tell a French company what it can or cannot run on its servers.
(Similarly, it seems to me that a Tennessee state court cannot fine or arrest a California-based/hosted site or its owner for violating local obscenity laws. But that’s been a stickier issue to resolve.)
This seems so blindingly obvious to me that it’s not clear why The Register considers it a “parochial” view of things.