Comment by kulahan
Comment by kulahan 7 hours ago
I assume it's mostly symbolic and/or serving some greater legal purpose.
Comment by kulahan 7 hours ago
I assume it's mostly symbolic and/or serving some greater legal purpose.
Threatening with prison or a fine of double digit millions of pounds doesn't seem very symbolic.
They didn't just threaten anything - they imposed the fine. Imposing a fine while knowing that it likely will never be collected is the very definition of "symbolic".
The threat of imprisonment if you don't pay the fine is the polar opposite of anything "symbolic". It puts individuals at significant personal risk should they ever make the mistake of traveling through the UK, in turn limiting their freedom of movement permanently even without being in prison.
This is just not that big a deal for people who don't have family or business connections there already. It'll be like 'oh no, banned from a once-great place.' Had the UK remained in the EU, they might have been able to get other countries to honor such an arrest warrant, but as it is they just look petulant.
I mean Russia has fined Google 20 decillion USD. What is the point if you can't collect? Like me fining my neighbor 100 million Euro. He will laugh at me and tell me to get lost.
Are you likening the UK to Russia?
This is not a fictive fine, it's threats of imprisonment, and ignoring the whole thing means having to avoid travelling to or through the UK for life, and that's assuming the UK doesn't try to activate any sort of extradition agreements.
Even without going to prison, that's a permanent and quite significant theft of freedom of movement. If you ever travel abroad, you could end up accidentally booking a transfer through the UK.
No one ends up unintentionally transferring through Russia anytime soon. And likening the legal threats of a foreign nation to a joke from your neighbor makes no sense.
Agreed, but if anything, it just shows how they lack teeth to mandate any action outside their jurisdiction.
If an entire continent was at stake, this would be a different story. But, in the end, the UK is small in the grand scheme of things. Any website operated outside the UK won't care, and actively demonstrating this is pretty illogical from their part.