Totally separate from the issue of whether this is good or bad: it doesn't look like these Ofcom guys are playing with a full deck.
Totally separate from the issue of whether this is good or bad: it doesn't look like these Ofcom guys are playing with a full deck.
they're a quango, staffed by those who couldn't make it as civil servants (not a high bar)
I'd be surprised if anyone who works there has ever used the internet
similarly useless are ofwat (water) and ofgem (energy), both of which allowed massive scandals to happen on their watch
ofwat: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jul/21/new-powerfu...
Still civil service.
> I'd be surprised if anyone who works there has ever used the internet
They do, but the pricks who created the law are/were reactionary politicians, who couldn’t be bothered to actually draft decent laws.
Ofwat and ofgem are different issues, they have suffered regulatory capture.
Ofwat has the power to bankrupt the entire water system. Which is great, but then the government would have to bail out the shareholders. which means not only higher taxes, but no private investment for large scale. Oh and ballooning public debt.
Which means stagflation, well harder stagflation. There is a ton more to this.
Don't get me wrong it needs reform, but that costs money. We need to have the money to hire decent staff. But with the impeding cuts and what ever dipshittery from Reform next, thats not going to happen
(and ministerial interference)
(whether or not that will help is another matter)
It's not like the fine has zero consequences. It will likely restrict 4chan and its senior officials from visiting or dealing with the UK, which I'm sure is annoying on a personal level if nothing else. I don't know if Ofcom currently has the power to order ISPs to block non-compliant domains, but if it doesn't you can bet it will be using this to push for that power.
As for not being able to intimidate the long tail: for US companies, yes this might further weaken Ofcom's influence over them. But companies with a UK presence who try to call Ofcom's bluff after this are likely going to have a bad time.
How does this ruling affect the company's right to free speech in the US? It's a fine for refusing to comply with a law in the UK; any sufficiently competent organisation could choose to comply with censorship/age gating in one country and avoid those restrictions in all others.
As I understand it, not at all.
I don't think the British institutions care at all about their rights to do whatever they want outside the UK; the problem is, 4chan does provide access to people in the UK, so it's a bit like a pirate radio station that the UK would like to not be receiving owing to the station's complete lack of interest in following UK laws.
To put it another way, if 4chan blocked the UK, the UK would consider this development to be appropriate. UK might not cancel the penalty fine, but that's because the offence for which it has been issued has already occurred; after all, nobody gets out of an already-issued littering ticket during a holiday by returning to their home country.
They really wouldn't, otherwise they would've done that already since it is well within their power to command ISPs to blackhole any offending website. That they chose to levy fines instead tells me all I need to know about their true intentions.
1) Identify non-compliance or risk
2) officially request information from the website
3) wait for reply
4) formal enforcement proceedings: a fine and prep for court action (they are here)
5) convince a court to order the site to be blocked
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
Note that they themselves say there:
Where appropriate, in the most serious cases, we can seek a court order for ‘business disruption measures’, such as requiring payment providers or advertisers to withdraw their services from a platform, or requiring Internet Service Providers to block access to a site in the UK.
That sounds to me like they consider curtailing speech by blocking a website to be one of the last things to try, not the first.That's the default when you host an app on the world wide web, though. Regardless of how big of a burden it is for 4chan (I would think it's as simple as flipping a switch in some control panel blocking UK access?), it still does compel the US-based company with no commercial presence in the UK to consider complex international law and to make changes to their US-based web app in response to a foreign jurisdiction's regulations, which feels wrong to me.
This is tangential to whether it affects "free speech" outside the UK, though, and I'm inclined to agree that it doesn't, but I guess it depends on how you define free speech. If 4chan's web app itself is considered speech, and not just the content that's posted there, maybe. But I think free speech advocates are a lot more concerned with the content.
But note that merely being accessible in the UK is not enough here. The service must either target the UK or have a significant number of users in the UK, or it provides harmful content. So the online forum for Oregon gardeners is quite safe even if, indeed, accessible from the UK.
But still it is an awkward legislation and it would be simpler to simply block rather than to threaten and fine services from around the world.
The American consensus basically became that US courts don’t enforce overseas judgments on free speech stuff where the speech would be legal in the US. Even if that speech could be “heard” elsewhere.
See the Ehrenfeld v. Bin Mahfouz case (2005) and subsequent US SPEECH act (2010).
So UK laws stop at the UK border.
4Chan is a US company, based in the US, with all its people and stuff in the US. It has never had a presence in the UK.
In the US people and companies have the right to free speech guaranteed under the first amendment, that includes speech conducted online. Many people would consider having the ability to speak, but having the government restrict hearing that speech to amount to a free speech violation.
The only jurisdiction 4Chan operates in is the US and they are defending their rights: they also have that right, the US isn't North Korea, or China, or the UK.
This isn't a matter of can they censor, of course they can. This is a matter of they don't have to, and they won't.
The UK has no jurisdiction, or reason to believe they have jurisdiction, or ability to enforce its laws extraterritorially over pretty much any foreign entity, but especially not the US.
Anyway you look at this, this is a jumped up little backwater not content with robbing their own citizens of their rights, they are now trying to rob others too.
I'm not originally from the UK, but have lived here for over 20 years. I'm fully settled here, with a family, children at school, sports, hobbies, friends etc, but lately it just feels more and more gloomy.
The annoying thing is, I had planned to use geoarbitrage at some future point to sell up and retire somewhere on the European mainland, but that arbitrage opportunity has or is disappearing as places like Portugal become more expensive.
This isn’t a play to get money or 4chan to comply, it’s a play to increase the strength of their legislation. So expect stronger blocking etc to be on the cards to prevent foreign entities from avoiding the law.
It was for anti-terror, but now its being used on pricks like Yaxely-lenon, who Imagine will make much hay from it.
Imagine the IT departments of every mutltinational corporation desperately trying to sort out permissions to keep important information off of machines deployed in the UK. New authorization groups for everyone in the UK, lots of meetings with lawyers to sort out what they can have access to. Everyone in the UK becomes a second class psuedo-trustworthy employee overnight.
Were I in charge of IT, when that bombshell came across my desk, I think I would give every UK employee a chromebook, and migrate all workloads to the cloud. No data could be saved locally. No thumb drives. Depending on the availability of good cloud tools, the productivity hit might be so large that layoffs would be warranted.
Companies will be permitted to use vpns as long as their AUP forbid employees from using their own for personal reasons.
Or so.
Plenty of the ways authoritarian can go.
VPN companies like Mullvad currently accept anonymous accounts with payment via crypto.
You can also just lie about your country of origin when signing up to a VPN account even with a 'compliant' provider that blocks UK IPs.
If I'm wrong someone can drop me a link since I live in the UK.
If you live here how can you not spot how every govt since they kicked out brown has been pushing for this?
I don't rule out they are daft enough to consider it, I just think they aren't quite that stupid.
OSA was a "something must be done, this is something, it must be done" thing - they can appease the mumsnet types for a bit with it and would generally prefer it quietly went back to sleep for a bit.
Not least because it's gonna hurt them electorally because while the people who are slightly in favour of it where slightly in favour of it a lot of the people who aren't really aren't seeing it as either unworkable, stupid or unworkable and stupid.
Even if the goal is just enforcement, you would get more enforcement, collect more fines, if you didn't put your ability to actually collect fines into question. When 4chan successfully defends itself and the UK extracts no money, that will show US companies which would have been in doubt, that they can also defend themselves.
I think you may be giving them too much credit. You're essentially saying that their real goal is to get an ISP block and everything they are doing now is performative to get to that real, unstated goal.
On the other hand I may be underestimating them as, to me, they just seem like power-tripping troglodytes.
How do you expect this to happen? The law is pretty clear and afaik 4chan has been pretty explicit that they know the law and they're ignoring it. 4chan's 'out' is that they don't have any legal presence in the UK. More legitimate enterprises do so the results of this will have no bearing on them.
This is important because otherwise UK fines may be enforceable in US courts.
UK law is generally unenforcible in the US except extradition agreements for crimes commuted while residing in the UK. That's not the case here and there's no agreement that applies to this case.
I suppose the action 4chan is taking in US court is exactly to avoid this possibility.
I am curious as to how that could possibly work. Is there some trade agreement that requires the US to respect UK court rulings? Generally the US has sought to distance itself from any kind of foreign influence or control.
If the company is in the UK, then yes, they are obviously screwed. The damage to the UK's web presence has already been done. I don't expect anyone would want to incorporate an internet dependent company there.
I do wonder if you bother to actually read the stuff you are typing.
like have you _met_ anyone from ofcom? or seen the shit that 4chan routinely post?
4chan is literally the living embodiment of what the OSA was designed(and will probably fail) to stop. No moderation, loads of porn, incitement to violence
but to your point, `claims of "hate speech"` Ofcom have no mandate for hate speech. But then I imagine facts are less interesting than a daydream of cypherpunk rebellion.
It used to be more extreme, it's not today. It's why spinoffs like 8chan were created, they felt there was too much moderation on 4chan. If you hear of some diabolical internet stunt, these days it was probably soyjak.party that organised it, not 4chan's /b/
As you allude, Ofcom cares not, they just want all sites to bend the knee to them.
Governments are just organizations and organizations are made of people. We see plenty of folly in the private sector; the government can do it too, don't you worry. Arguably they can do folly in ways the private sector only dreams of, what with being funded by the taxpayer.
The org is enforcing the law as written. The law, as written, is fucking stupid. Ergo the enforcement actions that derive from it themselves look fucking stupid.
They are enforcing the law, but why pick out 4chan? Because everyone has heard of 4chan.