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Comment by cft | Hacker News Reader

In these games involving companies with no physical presence in the UK, OfCom has only two realistic enforcement strategies:

1. Arrest the founders or officers at the UK border if they attempt to enter.

2. Direct UK ISPs to block access to their services.

Let's see if they are so PR-insensitive that they will want to actually do that.

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Seems like ofcom picked thier targets to create precedent fur using ISP blocks against non compliant companies.

Case law is important in the UK because laws are vaguely written and thier specifics are established in court.

By going after entities that can't comply and don't have a big legal budget like 4chan, they can go through the motions and establish that ISP level blocks against non complying companies are okay.

They can then hit progressively more difficult targets until they get to X and tiktok.

The end goal is obviously directing UK ISPs to block services. This whole game is just performative attempts at enforcement to create a paper trail when they propose the blocks.

3. Ask for extradition.

"No US citizen was extradited for an alleged crime while the person was based in the US"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK%E2%80%93US_extradition_trea...

According to tfa they're based in sweden

libera.chat servers are hosted by volunteers. Most of the libera.chat infra are the the same servers which were switched from freenode in 2021. Existence of the non-profit in Sweden changes nothing, that entity can be closed without any adverse effect for the IRC.

Many flights connect through London.

Right, but that's option 1 (arrest them if they enter the uk).

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