Well they will have to put up with it, as they have done over the past few decades. Or, alternatively, they can engage in aggressive China-style site blocking. Only the US has significant extraterritorial legal reach.
IMHO, this policy is a transparent effort to forcefully alter the content policy of US companies. It’s more about political influence than it is about “content safety” at home. (Unilateral site blocking, perhaps with an appeals process, would be a much more effective approach for this.) The UK will regret the consequences if they push too forcefully on this.
I don’t see it that way. US companies have an atrocious record wrt user privacy and security. The Europeans don’t want their citizens data being bought and sold by online providers. And that’s a reasonable demand! Either clean up your act or leave Europe & the UK. If US companies don’t want to obey UK laws, they can’t do business in the UK. It’s just like farmers can’t sell produce in the UK if they don’t meet British health standards.
Consider the inverse: imagine if another country ran a porn site which blatantly hosted underage content (CSAM). Under your view of the world, would the us govt be ethically entitled to tell the site to clean up its act or it’ll get blocked from the US? That sounds fine to me. I’d be shocked if they were even given a warning about that. But how do you square that circle? Wouldn’t that be a “transparent effort to forcefully alter the content policy of another country”?
Yes, that would be fine, as it would be here.
What I have a problem with is nations saying that a site built and hosted in a totally different country with a different set of laws and norms is “illegal” globally. Yes, I don’t like it when the US goes after people like The Pirate Bay abroad either, but that’s a result of the US being able to bully other countries for whatever reason it wants to. (That also needs to change.)
If Europe or the UK wants to protect its citizens, it should either block websites that it sees as a threat (as most of the EU does with RT) or it should come up with a scheme where ad networks with nexus in the EU must stop doing business with them. Attempting to reach across borders into the US to change US domestic norms is going to get them a well-deserved slap in the face.
To be clear, you think the UKs data regulator, going after Imgur for not properly handling data collected from minors, which is a pretty big GDPR violation (a 7 year old law) is secretly about influencing US content policies?
I mean, maybe, but that one very convoluted approach. I’m not sure why the UK would be trying to use fines for the mishandling of data collected from minors, notably, nothing related to content on Imgur, to get Imgur to change its content policies.