I think you're looking at it the wrong way. I'm not thinking about that at all. I do not care about that at all. I am not beholden to the laws of any other nation when I operate my website[0]. I don't care about "reaching out across borders". I don't event know the geographical origin of requests that hit my server, because I don't care, and I have no need or desire to hook up some sort of (error-prone) geoIP database to my logs in order to categorize requests. Once the HTTP response packets leave my server and hit the first router hop, I have no knowledge or interest in where they end up after that.

> SCOTUS (with an emphasis on the US) decisions seem rather irrelevant to non-US actors.

Not sure why you're bringing that up, as GP didn't mention SCOTUS at all. But as a US citizen and resident, SCOTUS' rulings are all that matter to me when it comes to what I personally do while at home. If SCOTUS says the content on my website is legal based on US law, then I don't really care whether or not it's legal in other countries[0, again], and I shouldn't really have to; life is too short to have to worry about that sort of thing.

[0] Sure, I agree with you that this could be a problem for me if I do break any of their laws, and then later decide I want to visit that country. It could also be a problem if that country has an extradition treaty with mine, and my country is for some reason incentivized to give me up.

The US will not enforce UK judgements or fines if enforcing them is contrary to the US' own laws, including its Constitution. SCOTUS ultimately decides when that's the case.

So it's really, really relevant to whether a non-US actor like Ofcom can actually collect fines from people inside the US. That's a separate question from what the UK government can do to people from the US who actually enter the UK, and an important one.

As mentioned in my previous reply, this isn't how the internet works. There is no teleportation or ICBM delivering the packets. There is infrastructure spanning borders and the infrastructure is the thing that is ignoring the laws. The infrastructure has accurate geographic knowledge about the physical connections. The webserver doesn't have that information at all and must infer it. From the perspective of the webserver, the physical world might not exist at all. There is no such thing that can be described as awareness from the website operators perspective. IP addresses do not encode geographic information. The entire point of the OSI layer model is that the higher layers know nothing about the lower layers nor do they know anything about the physical location of the nodes.

Again, only the operator of the network has that information and the operator is located inside the UK. It is those network operators in the UK that are wilfully ignorant and aware of the things you claim a website operator from a far away country should be aware of.

Just think about how ridiculous your comment is if you sued someone in the US from the UK and brought up their awareness. How would you prove that they knew the location of every single router and fiber cable the packets are traveling through? That's what you're arguing here. You're arguing that there is full and complete awareness.