CRA

Posted Jan 4, 2026 14:49 UTC (Sun) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
In reply to: CRA by dskoll
Parent article: Kroah-Hartman: Linux kernel security work

Matt DeVillier's actions were just petty. This wouldn't be to help people be petty. Rather, it would be to help people avoid subjecting themselves to hostile jurisdictions.

Like, let's say I have a message board hosted in Texas, and France wants to sue me because someone in France visited my website and I didn't annoy the hell out of him with the EU's required "I USE COOKIES" bullshit. Applying Zippo, a court may actually enforce a stupid EU judgment based on that against me ... BUT not if I geoblock the EU. And, while California's "cookie law" isn't as brain-damaged as the EU's, it's still pretty brain-damaged, so I'd want to geoblock them to avoid Zippo jurisdiction there, too.

In addition to California, I may want to make it a triple play by blocking New York and Florida, too, to avoid being sued by the human skid marks who abuse the ADA to suck settlement money out of random small businesses: https://instituteforlegalreform.com/blog/small-businesses...

A well-run jurisdiction monitoring organization could help me decide who to block and when to stop blocking them based on my particular website's needs.

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CRA

Posted Jan 4, 2026 14:53 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

Everything you've posted is hypothetical. Care to cite any case where an individual running a personal website has been subjected to punishment under the laws you mentioned?

It's simply Malibal all over again, mixed in with a healthy dose of dog-whistle politics.

CRA

Posted Jan 5, 2026 2:41 UTC (Mon) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (1 responses)

Many of these stupid Internet laws, such as California's, allow civil suits for monetary damages. I'd prefer to make the first move by blocking the hostile jurisdictions at the outset than wait for a blood-sucking parasite to try to make a quick buck off of me with an abusive lawsuit about how I manage cookies.

Be reactive if you want, but I'll bet all the family-owned restaurants that didn't put alt text in their images wish they'd taken my approach.

CRA

Posted Jan 5, 2026 9:49 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

> Many of these stupid Internet laws, such as California's, allow civil suits for monetary damages.

I looked this up and it's interesting. The California law has statutory damages (which the EU doesn't) and allows for class actions (which we don't really have here in most member states*) and the combination leads to the interesting business case where you can start a class action against some site and claim statutory damages for a whole bunch of people who don't care and have no actual damages.

So yeah, the statutory damages thing does make California especially risky.

* We don't have class actions in NL, the way this is handled is to start a non-profit association that does a test case on behalf of its members and if they win they use that as leverage to settle the rest of the cases. This is the implementation of the Representative Actions Directive (2020/1828)

CRA

Posted Jan 5, 2026 18:26 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

> In addition to California, I may want to make it a triple play by blocking New York and Florida, too, to avoid being sued by the human skid marks who abuse the ADA to suck settlement money out of random small businesses: [link]

The ADA is a federal law. Lawsuits under the ADA may be brought in any state, if there is personal jurisdiction over the defendant and venue is proper in that state. The Second Circuit case Bensusan Restaurant Corp. v. King suggests that merely having a website accessible from the forum state is probably not enough for personal jurisdiction, but it was decided in 1997, so things may have changed since then. See also International Shoe Company v. Washington.

Regardless, geoblocking one state will not prevent lawsuits from other states. If geoblocking is necessary (contrary to the Second Circuit's ruling), then you have to block the whole US (and avoid doing business in the US, which probably has implications for hosting etc.).

CRA

Posted Jan 8, 2026 15:57 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

> The ADA is a federal law.

Yes, but there's a huge-ass circuit split as to whether websites are always subject to the ADA, only subject to the ADA if there is a physical brick-and-mortar business they're connected to, or never subject to the ADA. If you can force the bottom-feeder into a circuit that says websites are never subject to the ADA, the bottom-feeder will drop the case and leave you alone because he and you both know he can't possibly win.

I hope the current Supreme Court takes up a case on this issue soon, because the current Court will probably decide "never," and I think that's the right answer because anything else is an unacceptable speech regulation. Or would it be constitutional for Congress to pass a law that says newspapers must be printed in Braille upon request?

> The Second Circuit case Bensusan Restaurant Corp. v. King suggests that merely having a website accessible from the forum state is probably not enough for personal jurisdiction

No, Bensusan v. King decided that New York hadn't given its own courts that jurisdiction under New York state law. The federal question the district court answered in violation of constitutional avoidance was not affirmed by the circuit. A better case to look at is Zippo v. Zippo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippo_Manufacturing_Co._v._...

It's a district court case but was adopted by several circuits in the years following its decision. It promulgates a "sliding scale" test that says you're not subject to jurisdiction if your website is purely passive, are if your website is "extremely interactive," and might or might not be if your website is somewhere in the middle, depending on where in the middle you are.