Does merely serving content alone constitute "operating" in the EU and so should every website be compliant with the EU Cookie Law?

Question

I was wondering if all websites in the world need to be compliant with the EU Cookie Law.

For example a company website of a US company, hosted in the US but serving visitors in the EU.

Also, does the situation change when that US hosted website used a CDN (content delivery network) and cache content (partly) within the EU?

In other words (like @Mowzer suggested):

Does merely serving content alone constitute "operating" in the EU (or any other specific jurisdiction)? Which, in turn, subjects the operator to that jurisdiction's internet laws and regulations?

Answer 1

If you operate in a given jurisdiction you must comply with that jurisdictions laws. There are over 190 sovereign nations in the world many with sub-national jurisdictions; no one said this was easy.

Answer 2

This is an unanswerable question. The closest thing that can be given as an example is yahoo vs Union of Jewish Students and the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, where yahoo (a US based company) was selling Nazi memorabilia in france which is illegal. The French court threatened yahoo with fines and yahoo said we are not in your jurisdiction, the us court said that they were not going to get involved until the fines were issued. In the end yahoo conceded and put ip restrictions on the Nazi memorabilia.

No fines or prosecution was ever handed down only ever threatened.