This is not a fictive fine, it's threats of imprisonment, and ignoring the whole thing means having to avoid travelling to or through the UK for life, and that's assuming the UK doesn't try to activate any sort of extradition agreements.
Even without going to prison, that's a permanent and quite significant theft of freedom of movement. If you ever travel abroad, you could end up accidentally booking a transfer through the UK.
No one ends up unintentionally transferring through Russia anytime soon. And likening the legal threats of a foreign nation to a joke from your neighbor makes no sense.
If an entire continent was at stake, this would be a different story. But, in the end, the UK is small in the grand scheme of things. Any website operated outside the UK won't care, and actively demonstrating this is pretty illogical from their part.
Big loss, that destination.
Unfortunately, I don't see any site being blocked that will make these shameless gremlins in power let go of their authoritarian control over the public's lives.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/05/when-trolls-take-on-tyra...
He also has the charisma of a wet sock, which doesn't help.
If there were elections now according to the current projections Tories would get less seats than the Liberal Democrats.
4chan is also the originator of the Pepe the Frog memes, and claims (whether people believe it or not) to have meme-d Trump into the Whitehouse in 2016.
I think neither a murky ideological battle nor a decade-old debt matters much to the president. And it probably matters that the UK made a tariff deal already, so changing terms would be a big act of self-sabotage.
Because they're the only ones who are profiting from this fiasco! /s
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxvnwkl5kgo
Ofcom are basically the UK's Roskomnadzor. Tell them to go fuck themselves with a copy of the OSA.
I'm from the UK and would gladly fuck all of them with a copy of the OSA, but I'd rather that the law were repealed. In the meantime, I'm telling everyone how to use VPNs and Tor Browser, and to never give anyone their real identity details on the internet.
What happens if one of the officers of 4Chan or Gab is on a flight to Paris and the plane is redirected to London? Well, they're going to prison. The UK is a police state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." -Henry Kissinger
I understand what point you're trying to make, but Protasevich would have been a better example. Beware of whose airspace you fly over.
No it isn’t.
> under ___ laws.
A police state is one where the police arrest whoever the government directs them to arrest (rather than enforcing the law). Keir Starmer is not phoning up Police chiefs to get people disappeared.
I would also expect to find that the effect of internet was minimal (in my case because I think the drivers of suicide are mostly socioeconomic), but I'd really like to see a proper study. I'm also aware that there is quite a lot of peer-reviewed evidence that pro-anorexia websites do actually cause harm, and there's an obvious parallel to be drawn.
> Research from over 100 international studies provide evidence that the way suicide deaths are reported is associated with increased suicide rates and suicide attempts after reporting [6,7].
> At the same time the WHO also suggests that positive and responsible reporting of suicides which promotes help-seeking behaviour, increases awareness of suicide prevention, shares stories of individuals overcoming their suicidal thinking or promotes coping strategies can help reduce suicides and suicidal behaviour [6,7,8]
https://cmhlp.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Resource-2-SPIR...
He'd pop into 'law streams' from time to time to talk about cases and discuss newsworthy events out of the courts.
He is as if New Jersey was transmuted into a man (I say that with great affection).
I want to say, and I could be wrong, I became familiar with his name during the Rittenhouse trial. Or maybe the couple high profile trials after the Rittenhouse trial, that were popular while we all waited for covid to be 'over'.
For whatever that's worth
edit: he IS a real lawyer with real clients and real cases. I don't want to diminish anything because I called him a 'youtube lawyer'. I think it's more: A lawyer that sees value in being on youtube from time to time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is important because otherwise UK fines may be enforceable in US courts.
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'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.
klez•3h ago
vorpalhex•2h ago