What matters is where the customer is at the time, not where they're from. If a British person goes to France and buys food from a French shop, they are for all intents and purposes a French customer at the time the sale takes place; French food standards laws would apply.

I think I agree with this.

By the same token, if you travel to France and then use the internet to access 4chan, you are a French internet user for the purposes of that interaction, and French laws would apply to you. If a French person came to the UK and accessed 4chan, British laws would apply to them at that time.

Fair. But the UK law isn't going after the user it's going after the provider. In another country. That's the distinction, right?

Is this how the internet works? Lawyers in Florida decide how computers connect to each other? Interesting 🤔.

Whether you're the courier yourself or it is an Uber Eats rider doesn't matter. The point is there is a pathway to another jurisdiction where a transaction happens. At the point of transaction, in that jurisdiction, are any laws being broken? If the answer is no, as much as we might not like it, then that is massive jurisdictional over reach.

Another analogy: You're a UK satire site that operates in English and talks about everything from games to politics and one of your users posts a picture of President Xi dressed as Winnie The Pooh eating a cum filled doughnut he bought from this little French village on his last state visit to France. Suddenly China takes umbrage to this and sends you a letter demanding money and threatening arrest (because they're like that). What do you say then? Get fucked! Right? You've broken no UK laws. It's legitimate satire. But China doesn't see it that way. Who wins?

How do you suggest any government regulation of the web should work then? Should our laws against things like hate speech and CSAM not apply to sites that don't have legal presences in the UK?

Fair point. It's very tricky to get the balance right. I don't have an easy answer as it is not an easy subject. You could take the Chinese strategy and remove the access to these sites for Chinese users (a great firewall but Bri'ish. Oi M8 u can't internet there). Or you reach outside your sovereign jurisdiction and attempt to impose laws from one country on another.

I suppose traditionally if you look at this in the same way as breaking regulations by larger multinationals the point there is that they do have a non trivial presence on the UK (or the EU) and so we can play the game of fining them on our own soil under our own jurisdictions or making it harder to grant new business to them. Until you reach the size of Apple who simply say "get fucked UK I won't bow to you". But you can't do that to companies that don't have a presence in the UK as the threats are meaningless.

Which brings you back to the Great British Bake Off Wall. Only we need to figure out how that can be used using existing laws and not abused. But then one needs to accept that we are more like China than we want to admit?

That's a huge question that's plagued law makers since the birth of the internet. The status quo has been that if you have a legal entity in that country, that legal entity is subject to the county's laws.

The UK does not have jurisdiction over foreign companies. They only have jurisdiction over UK companies, which may include UK arms of multinationals.