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Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

Look at this page: https://www.4chan.org/advertise

It explicitly says that 7% of their users are coming from UK. If UK blocks them, they will loose noticeable part of advertising revenue. If there was no money at stake, they could just ignore Ofcom and sleep well. But they appear to be very agitated about the fact that they may loose their second biggest market.

Honestly, I don’t understand anyone on 4chan side here: they are de facto in UK jurisdiction because they earn money from that user base, so either they comply or they leave. All of this freedom-of-speech and US lawsuit hype is just a distraction circus.

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Note, they don’t earn money from users. They earn money from advertisers.

This is important because if it was advertisers, it would be much easier for UK to have actual power over them, since the UK business actually would be under UK jurisdiction.

>Note, they don’t earn money from users. They earn money from advertisers.

It doesn’t matter. They loose the audience - they loose advertising revenue. The only difference is that UK cannot seize the money to collect the fine (the fine now is the price of the return ticket), but the fine wasn’t big anyway and complete loss of the market has bigger economic consequences. UK doesn’t have power over US corporation, but they have power over their distribution channel and they have full sovereign right to exercise that power.

That assumes UK deploys technical measures to prevent their own citizens from accessing the website, which costs more political capital than fining a corporation. Or makes it illegal to access the site, which is even more unpopular.

The difference is significant.

Realistically, UK is a big market for 4chan, but is 4chan big enough for UK? What share of its 70M+ population will flip their vote because of this specific case? How many people will just switch to Reddit or something else and won’t even connect that block to any political party?

No, it really isn't. Plus the free advertising this gets them will be worth more than any market other than the US.

If they hope that they will get more audience from elsewhere because of this, it certainly explains all the circus.

4chan gets money by selling (with crypto) "passes" to their users. These passes allow users to post using VPNs. Being banned in the UK will increase demand for these passes, probably increasing 4chan's revenue over all.

You can buy passes with a regular credit card

Not these days. If you go through the process of buying one, crypto will be the only option given.

Comply, leave, or fight the law if you think it's stupid.

Lots of laws are stupid. If you think they're stupid, you're allowed to try to fight them.

Well, you’re allowed to try to fight them in some places, some of the time - with often severe consequences if you don’t win.

Yes, sure, they can fight the law - in UK. It’s not what they are doing.

If you think foreign laws directly targeting you are stupid, not only do you have few ways of fighting them, trying to fight them might often be criminalized as well ("foreign interference" laws etc.)

You seem to be under the false impression that 4chan makes money, as in, is profitable. It's very much not. Nor does advertising, much less UK advertising, constitute an important influx of money into the "business".

A rather strange conclusion from my words. I do not assume it’s profitable, but it’s pretty logical that a for-profit organization running a service that is based on user engagement will have its revenue from the sources linked to the audience, be it advertising, subscriptions or donations. If you cut a visible slice of that audience, it’s going to impact the revenue. It’s still not profitable, 10 years after acquisition? May the investors be blessed for their charitable attitude, but it doesn’t change anything.

What makes you think it's a "for-profit organization"? Or that it has investors?

It does have investors according to sources cited by Wikipedia. Whether it’s non-profit or for-profit LLC and on what terms it was acquired doesn’t matter at all.

if the uk wants to be a authoritarian state then do it properly and not this grey area of "you're passively sending packets so you're fined a billion dollars so you block us"

it's worse than china's firewall

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