An internet site is not responsible for those who access it. Imagine China doing this sort of thing, and allowing their citizens to access all of the internet.
The internet is not push. It’s pull. Freerepublic is a site hosted in the US. If folks from outside the country get on the web and access it, If they are from a country that charges a penny for every bit that they collect from FR, that is on them, not FR.
FR’s responsibility for that stops at the US border.
Now, if FR rents space in Germany, never mind.
It's the only way to be sure.
Yup. This is one of the major failures of the internet IMO. One of the things that I was excited about way back when the internet first came into the public consciousness was it's absolutely distributed nature. Anyone could serve information from their own home if they wanted to. Of course, early on, it was more difficult because of the issues surrounding dial-up lines and the ephemeral nature of those types of connections.
The bigger issue though, when we started getting more 'hard' connections to the net is that ISPs were absolutely opposed to such things. I had huge issues when I set up private mail and web servers because ISPs tended to block the needed ports. There were ways around such things, but they were a serious pain in the arse, in that you normally needed to use alternate ports to get around their stupidity, so folks had to know that your server was running on port 8080 instead of the default http/https ports.
I eventually got around that by hosting the services I wanted on CoLo'd servers, but there are other downsides to that. It is this reluctance on the part of ISPs that gives services like Fakebook and others such power, because in order to put stiff out there, you pretty much have to use their services, with all the restrictions that this entails. It is largely the intransigence of ISPs that has kept a more distributed content sharing model from coming about.
Much of the evil that we now see in the big 'social' monopolies is rooted in the fact that it is much more difficult than it should be for your average Joe to post stuff on the internet. (I'm not going to go into the security considerations that arise when you make local content available - that's a whole nothing rant)