[UK] "Emergency" Phone & Internet Data Storage Law to be brought in.

[Socky]

No, this is not okay. First the UK then US. Naw.

[LifesCompanion]

Glad I live in Australia... I guess? 

[WatfordJC]

In terms of what data is being collected, it's business as usual. Nothing has changed.

 

Unless you are a company not based in the UK.

 

A Canadian company, for example, using a .com domain with UK users will now have to comply with US, Canadian, UK and EU data retention and other extra-territorial laws, and since the EU harmonized law has been struck down, that will now be up to 28 different laws on data retention just for EU users.

 

Mega, for example, will have to comply with this law, as it does with US laws - US courts don't seem to care about countries, I believe they've now ordered RIPE NCC (Europe, North Africa, and Russia), DENIC (Germany), and JPNIC (Japan) to do things. To paraphrase, "take this domain offline because it breaks US laws, if you don't, we'll tell Mastercard, VISA, Paypal, and others to stop processing your transactions, or even delete your country from the Internet - we don't have to delegate those IPs or TLDs to you."

 

As much as I want to believe the Tories, Lib Dems, and Labour front benches (and presumably most of the back benches) are all in agreement on the legislation because it has been carefully drafted over the last 3 months, I can't help but feel this a repeat of the Digital Economy Act. That got rushed through, some of it was unworkable, some of it was unlawful, and Ofcom said it wouldn't be expensive to companies but then we found out Ofcom did their sums wrong.

 

So yeah, gut > Parliament.

[Murdoch]

Unless you are a company not based in the UK.

 

A Canadian company, for example, using a .com domain with UK users will now have to comply with US, Canadian, UK and EU data retention and other extra-territorial laws, and since the EU harmonized law has been struck down, that will now be up to 28 different laws on data retention just for EU users.

 

Mega, for example, will have to comply with this law, as it does with US laws - US courts don't seem to care about countries, I believe they've now ordered RIPE NCC (Europe, North Africa, and Russia), DENIC (Germany), and JPNIC (Japan) to do things. To paraphrase, "take this domain offline because it breaks US laws, if you don't, we'll tell Mastercard, VISA, Paypal, and others to stop processing your transactions, or even delete your country from the Internet - we don't have to delegate those IPs or TLDs to you."

 

As much as I want to believe the Tories, Lib Dems, and Labour front benches (and presumably most of the back benches) are all in agreement on the legislation because it has been carefully drafted over the last 3 months, I can't help but feel this a repeat of the Digital Economy Act. That got rushed through, some of it was unworkable, some of it was unlawful, and Ofcom said it wouldn't be expensive to companies but then we found out Ofcom did their sums wrong.

 

So yeah, gut > Parliament.

 

This law applies at an ISP / Telecom provider level. It doesn't apply to every company Online. It's not as far reaching as you've seemed to presume.

 

It's business as usual for companies operating as ISPs or Telecom providers in the UK. Which is the point I was making. This is not new.