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.
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.
Sorry, being in effect banned from a country (and possibly anyone it has an active extradition agreement with, which is unrelated to EU membership) is a big deal.
Imagine being a US citizen, and suddenly being banned from Texas and Utah. It's not like you were planning on visiting those, right? Just remember to never accidentally take interstate 10, 15, 20, 40, 70 or 80 when driving around, that can't be too hard.
Suggesting it is okay to have arbitrary freedoms taken away because "you wouldn't use it anyway" is a very slippery slope. Who needs privacy and free spech, not like you want to badmouth the eternal supreme leader anyway.
I am not suggesting it's OK to have arbitrary freedoms taken away. I am suggesting that Hiroyuki Nishimura probably does not give a shit about the UK's temper tantrum.
You wrote that the theft of freedom was "symbolic" and "just not a big deal".
It also very much seems like Nishimura gives a shit by virtue of the active effort he is putting into his legal defense, consuming both time and money.
It is extremely relevant an entity granted powers by their sovereign governemnt is threatening that the next legally mandated escalation should they not comply with their unrealistic demands is imprisonment. And yes, ending up in jail is a realistic outcome when their laws dictate it, so if it goes that far you are now playing the floor is lava but instead of lava it's nations with UK extradition agreements.
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.
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.
Russia is a well known authoritarian state arbitrarily penalizing anyone not aligned with and assisting their ideals, with no expectation of any kind of fair process.
The UK is a misguided democracy within the usual group of countries considered "the west", enforcing stupid and broken laws in a highly questionable fashion that presents fundamental questions about jurisdiction in the modern world.
However, it is acting against an entity is cancerous enough that even the defendent is purely challenging (and getting support on) the technical legal grounds in a search for precedent.
If your flight is redirected due to weather/etc. to some British commonwealth country, then you might be grabbed upon landing. Or if you are a really big fish, your plane might be forced to land on a crown-controlled land.
The only member of the Commonwealth that is British anymore is the UK and any of the independent countries in the Commonwealth grabbing a passenger on behalf of a civil judgement in a English court seems no more likely than any other random country doing so.
Even more unlikely is the crown exercising the kind of power you're talking about. Never mind that Charles isn't the King of the majority of Commonwealth countries.
