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Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

It’s funny. Their “Advertise” page explicitly mentions UK on demographics section (7% of users). Both Advertise and Rules pages explicitly mention local along with US laws. It looks like they actually do business in UK serving ads to UK users and thus should be subject to local laws themselves.

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If they want their assets, they will have to use U.S courts to get them and U.S courts will refuse to enforce British law that violates the first amendment. It's pretty simple actually. If they had assets in Britain, then they could get to them, but they don't.

They can just treat 4chan as malware server or a drug cartel. There exist sanction mechanisms against foreign entities that do not use local law enforcement in which case opinion of US courts will be irrelevant.

But it's not, and so the treaties to which the US is party for those cases would not apply.

What sanction methods are you thinking of that could get to US citizens on US soil without US governmental consent?

1. Preventing those citizens from doing illegal activities on UK soil

2. Using broader spectrum of law enforcement options if those citizens arrive in the UK

Blows my mind someone actually unironically makes this argument.

4chan is showing ads on their site, but if your idea had any grounds, the issue would be with the ad network, not 4chan.

While that'd be a pretty bad legal precedent too, it'd at least be coherent.

More realistically, 4chan will likely be banned by UK ISPs after a court ruling.

The previous mail was likely just to move the process forward to show they have no interest in following the UK law.

>4chan is showing ads on their site, but if your idea had any grounds, the issue would be with the ad network, not 4chan.

It's hard to understand the logic of this statement. Why the ad network? 4chan business is to show ads to users while offering them a platform for conversations. What 3rd party service do they use is irrelevant unless that is by coincidence an UK company.

>More realistically, 4chan will likely be banned by UK ISPs after a court ruling.

This is exactly what my comment above means.

Serving ads to UK users does not grant the UK enforcement jurisdiction over 4chan. They have no presence, assets, or agents in the UK. If the UK still attempts to issue a judgement contrary to the first amendment, the constitution in general, and/or US law, it will not be recognized by US courts.

In short, the UK can kick rocks.

the UK could block access to 4chan, or block the ability for 4chan to sell ads in the UK

It's bad optics to build their own Hadrian's Firewall, so they are trying to bully foreign companies into compliance instead. If they want to go after the ad revenue, they would have to try to identify and prosecute the UK-based companies doing business with 4chan, and they will struggle to do that when they have no ability to subpoena 4chan for their business records.

Such firewall exists everywhere, because courts can block access to various websites on different grounds (malware, copyright infringement etc) everywhere.

4chan will laugh and UK users will VPN to access 4chan and nothing of value will have been provided by this laughingstock of regulation.

except 4chan disallows posting from vpns, which is probably why they didn't self censor already

yeah they been blocking VPNs for a long time.

Most users lurk, not post (as for all social media).

Using a pass allows posting from VPN (and posting without a pass is really annoying last I checked, as the anti-spam measure are quite insistent).

So if you were posting previously (with a pass) then nothing has changed.

Nobody in the world cares about US constitution or opinion of US courts. It is absolutely irrelevant. If American company does business somewhere and breaks local laws, that part of their business can be disrupted or shut down (by blocking traffic, restricting financial transactions to certain entities, blocking shipments), executives may be arrested on arrival, there may be secondary sanctions etc.

This is absolutely common practice happening everywhere. There is a firewall in every country. Think of malware servers that America blocks.

> Nobody in the world cares about US constitution or opinion of US courts.

Reminder not to take any kind of legal advice from HN.

As if any government would ever take any advice from HN... :)

No, seriously, what's your point? That for a G7 government interfering with interests of American companies outside of US jurisdiction it is somehow a problem?

Yes, it is 'somehow a problem'. Just like the reverse is 'somehow a problem'. Effectively advising a large audience that they can ignore the law whereas there are plenty of examples of why you probably shouldn't be ignoring the law is a pretty silly thing to do.

https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/stlouis/press-releases/200...

Is one of my favorite examples to point to but there are countless others besides.

> Effectively advising a large audience that they can ignore the law

Who did that?

Edit: I agree with you, just don’t understand why did you choose to reply to that part of my comment.

Yeah man nobody cares about freedom of speech. /s

You know that first amendment of the thing you say nobody cares about. A fundamental human right people are giving up in the UK so they can be “protected” from big bad ol 4chan. What a joke…

Last time I checked USA is not the most democratic country in the world (#28 in democracy index below Uruguay, Czechia and Malta), so it is certainly not the role model for freedom. Yes, surprise, there exist other views in the world on how to find the balance between many different fundamental human rights and it does not mean those views reject freedom of speech. They just restrict it differently than America (which has several categories of unprotected speech and ranks lower in press freedom indices than some other countries which may restrict more categories).

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