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.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belarus-forces-vilnius-...
Even more unlikely is the crown exercising the kind of power you're talking about. Never mind that Charles isn't the King of the majority of Commonwealth countries.
The UK is a misguided democracy within the usual group of countries considered "the west", enforcing stupid and broken laws in a highly questionable fashion that presents fundamental questions about jurisdiction in the modern world.
However, it is acting against an entity is cancerous enough that even the defendent is purely challenging (and getting support on) the technical legal grounds in a search for precedent.
Imagine being a US citizen, and suddenly being banned from Texas and Utah. It's not like you were planning on visiting those, right? Just remember to never accidentally take interstate 10, 15, 20, 40, 70 or 80 when driving around, that can't be too hard.
Suggesting it is okay to have arbitrary freedoms taken away because "you wouldn't use it anyway" is a very slippery slope. Who needs privacy and free spech, not like you want to badmouth the eternal supreme leader anyway.
It also very much seems like Nishimura gives a shit by virtue of the active effort he is putting into his legal defense, consuming both time and money.
Edit: and nobody realistically could be
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.
It would be a hassle though.
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...
> Perhaps most troubling, the UK’s approach sets a dangerous precedent for global internet regulation. If every country can claim jurisdiction over any website accessible within its borders, the internet becomes subject to the most restrictive speech laws anywhere in the world.
Another interesting point is that the UK could just ban the websites it finds objectionable, but that'd expose them as a censor, so instead the strategy is to basically force those websites to withdraw from the market voluntarily (or comply), which is a much less revolting story to sell to its population.
First Amendment makes it hard for the government to censor or ban them outright, but onerous child protection requirements gets them to close on their own. Russ Vought:
> …you know what happens is the porn company then says, ‘We’re not going to do business in your state.’ Which of course is entirely what we were after, right?
It's rather simple really; the secret is money.
Only then can you tame a politician.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/fujitsu-uk-sues-department-h...
Our MPs are listening to the faith-based organizations bankrolled by American interests. They are listening to the Catholic Church, the Church of England, and their equivalents in the other faiths (they all condemn "vice"). They are listening to anti-porn organizations. They are listening to "think of the children" groups. They are listening to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. They are listening to Mumsnet. They are listening to censorship-enabling companies. They are listening to anyone with money and an interest in defining power structures to further entrench themselves.
They are listening, just not to the apathetic, individualistic know-it-alls who don't engage in politics and then complain that it's all shit.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
over in the US, getting an MPAA rating is completely voluntary. MPAA rules do not allow it to refuse to rate a motion picture, and even if they did, the consequences would be the same as choosing not to get a rating.
If you don't get a rating in the US, some theatres and retailers may decline to show/sell your film, but you can always do direct sales, and/or set up private showings.
- Votes are not equal. You need to win constituencies to get "a point". If you get enough points, you can form the government. But that means huge parts of sparsely populated areas have votes which count for more than the densely populated parts, where people's votes count for less.
- You don't need an overall majority to win "a point". You just need more than every other candidate in that constituency. That means a government can gain absolute majority power with a very low overall vote share. The current government got 34% of the overall votes, yet won the largest government majority in history.
https://politicaladvertising.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/0...
I love the UK in so many ways, but sometimes it makes it very hard to love.
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
The Geneva Conventions are international humanitarian laws consisting of four treaties and three additional protocols that establish international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war.
What would those have to do with "intelligence contractor leaked our stuff, might be on the Bolivian president's plane, oh no a diplomatic incident"?
https://www.icrc.org/en/article/grave-breaches-defined-genev... GC 4 Art. 147. "Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the present Convention: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, UNLAWFUL DEPORTATION OR TRANSFER OR CONFINEMENT OF A PROTECTED PERSON, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly."
1. Foreign heads of state are definitely protected persons.
2. Foreign heads of state transiting to and from diplomatic meetings are engaged in a protected activity.
3. If these laws apply between enemy nations engaged in declared war, they are even more applicable to countries at peace with one another.
It turns out I'm even more right that I initially thought: this was not only a breach of the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, it was also a breach of the very letter of the law! Regardless, someone doesn't understand the purpose of the Geneva Conventions in the first place, so I'll elaborate...
Edward Snowden himself is irrelevant, it doesn't matter if Osama Bin Laden was on that plane. The fact is that the US and its allies used deception to illegally ground a diplomatic flight, detain a foreign head of state, and engage in an illegal search and seizure.
Furthermore, whether or not the countries involved were even at war is irrelevant. The purpose of the Geneva Conventions are to maintain a minimum set of international ethics that make diplomacy safe for diplomats. If a foreign head of state can be detained or imprisoned, and if his property can be searched or seized, then diplomatic negotiations for anything are now impossible.
It doesn't matter if the reasons for breaking these rules are justifiable or not, the fact is that you're not trustworthy even in a basic capacity that allows for diplomatic negotiation. You're in the same perfidious bucket as Japanese Emperor Hirohito, Saddam Hussein, or Ruhollah Khomeini (Iranian Hostage Crisis).
"Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across."
-Sun Tzu
P.S. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations explicitly forbids detaining diplomats. See articles 27 and 29:
https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventio...
YOU LOSE! YOU GET NOTHING! GOOD DAY, SIR!
So far as I can tell, that claim is your own invention.
Also, according to your own link's link to the full text:
Article 4 - Definition of protected persons
Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.
Nationals of a State which is not bound by the Convention are not protected by it. Nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State, and nationals of a co-belligerent State, shall not be regarded as protected persons while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are.
The provisions of Part II are, however, wider in application, as defined in Article 13 .
Persons protected by the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field of August 12, 1949, or by the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea of August 12, 1949, or by the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of August 12, 1949, shall not be considered as protected persons within the meaning of the present Convention.
So, not what you say.
Even if it was, Morales was not detained by another state, nor did his plane land under what is recognised as "coercion": The aircraft was denied overflight by several European states after rumours that Snowden was aboard, so it diverted to Austria, where it landed voluntarily for refuelling. Austria’s authorities requested (but, in a legal sense, did not compel) inspection; Morales, in a legal sense, consented.
Also, "search and seizure"? Nothing was seized, IIRC?
> The purpose of the Geneva Conventions are to maintain a minimum set of international ethics that make diplomacy safe for diplomats.
Nope, different laws for that. As you say elsewhere, Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Which, importantly, is a different thing than the Geneva Conventions. I mean, you can tell by how most of the words in the name are different…
> YOU LOSE! YOU GET NOTHING! GOOD DAY, SIR!
I see you're new here. Such energy doesn't go down well on this site.
His plane was denied access to airspace. At worst, he would have had to turn around and reroute. They only decided to land right away because of a faulty fuel indicator.
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.
When police show up to your door and ask you to apologize to people for causing distress, and to consider not speaking from now on, you live in a police state. When you have banned political parties and organizations that trigger the mass arrests of peaceful protestors, you live in a police state. People who are comfortable with what is being suppressed never think of their country as a police state. At least until something happens to them or someone they care about, when they suddenly become "activists."
sigh You've not lived in a police state, or more accurately, you've been online too much to actually get context.
In the UK threatening to kill someone has been illegal since at least ~1880 something. Going online an publicly calling for the death of one or more person (which in the eyes of the law is pretty close to sending a good old paper death threat) is not only widely considered a dick move, its illegal.
Now, How do you enforce that? the police investigate, and if its deemed a credible threat, you are visited by the plod. Who most likley go "look mate, don't be a dick".
If you are really being a dick, you might be cautioned (taken to the police station and told "you're being a shit")
The next stage up is appearing in court.
And then you have to be convicted by a jury of your peers, and the burden of evidence is really quite high. ("oh but that mum, she was innocent." I advise you to read all that she wrote, you know the extra bits that the sun can't print)
Its not like you're bundled into the back of a van by masked goons who refuse to identify themselves. Taken to a mass detention centre and not seen for weeks, and then yeeted to an illegal jail.
But why are the police investigating social media?
Now thats a good question. And the answer is: Musk doesn't moderate. Stuff that gets you a visit from the plod is generally against the community standards of social media, even X.
Now to your point here: "When police show up to your door and ask you to apologize to people for causing distress"
I've had a visit from the police, why? because I was young and being an antisocial shit. The police were not actually there to arrest me, and I don't think they could actually if they wanted to. The point was, they were there to make the town liveable for all it's citizens. I was "fucking around", and the police were gently telling me that I'd really not like to "find out".
"OH BUT PERSONAL FREEDOM". Now, the thing is, I was perfectly free to carry on my bad ways. The problem was, those ways, had they descended further, would have resulted in jail time. The choice was mine.
I don't want to live in a country where its acceptable to bully whomever I like, in the guise of personal freedom. Sure, speak your mind, but don't be a dick about it.
And I have not claimed otherwise. during the troubles stuff went south very quickly. What you are doing are conflating political persecution with the censoring of 4chan, an organisation who's adherence to law is flexible at best.
Criminal 2: "Coppers?"
Criminal 1: "Worse. Nannies."
Nah, it's not worse.
> 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 mean there isn't a UK court. There's the supreme court, but one can still appeal to the Hague to get you out of a jam. But yeah, you keep thinking that. Its not like with have a shadow docket going on, undermining the constitution.
> It's a total police state.
I can still, on record call Starmer "a massive fucking prick".
I can do that on TV.
I will not get arrested, I will not have an ICE raid called on me, I won't get death threats.
I won't lose my job[1]
So no, its not a police state, because the judiciary is still working, more or less
[1] not my current job anyway
We used to just out and out shoot them.
We used to demand that they have their voices literally overdubbed by an actor.
We used to round people up and jail them for being too irish.
We used to be in a civil war, up until the 2000s.
You're just having a cyberpunk wet dream. Don't get me wrong, the OSA is an abomination. but you are being a hyperbolic child, especially as actual authoritarianism is happening in the USA, without anything as a peep from the same blowhards talking about the OSA.
There's no such thing. There are many different processes that some people consider democratic and others don't. But "democratic" has no other meaning than rule by the governed. It is not a description of a specific political process. Especially one that bans leading opposition candidates, which is clearly as undemocratic as anything that can occur in government. If a population wants to vote in somebody who is currently in prison for crimes they are obviously guilty of, preventing them from doing it is a direct repudiation of democracy.
Even killing opposition candidates is marginally more democratic, because at least that only lasts for an instant. Saying that people cannot vote for the government of their choice is a restriction on the governed, not a restriction on people who want to govern.
The UK is further from being a police state than the USA is.
And despite what Trump has been doing, both are nowhere near being that.
I mean, UK cops aren't even routinely given firearms… and the cops themselves don't want to change that.
We don't jail people for tweets though.
https://reason.com/2025/10/10/tennessee-man-arrested-gets-2-...
> and the cops themselves don't want to change that.
I think that you will find that there is a minority of UK police who would welcome being armed with deadly weapons.
Here's an article from 2017:
"A national survey carried out by the Police Federation of England and Wales found more than a third of officers supported the idea of routinely being armed, compared to 23 per cent when the last survey was carried out in 2006.
Another 55 per cent said they would be prepared to carry a gun if asked to – up more than 10 per cent."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/armed-police...
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...
SS simply says a) suicide should be your choice, b) dehumanizing people for having suicidal thoughts is bad. Sadly these opinions are so far outside the overton window that suicidal people end up having no choice but to discuss their problems with other suicidal people - likely not a good basis for improvement but the human is a social animal so I'll take it over nothing.
And although SS provides info on how you can kill yourself, it also tells you how you can't kill yourself, and that has apparently saved me from permanent liver damage. So at least for me it has been objectively beneficial - more so than the brainless repetition of "consult a professional" which seems to be the gold standard for suicide prevention these days.
I am a little surprised that you perceive a gap between the advice to "consult a professional" and your a) and b). Do professionals working in this space not accept the validity of your thoughts and feelings, as a basic step? They really should.
For whatever it's worth, I hope you choose to stay with us.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matal_v._Tam
https://www.likelihoodofconfusion.com/legal-publications-ron...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was for anti-terror, but now its being used on pricks like Yaxely-lenon, who Imagine will make much hay from it.
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.
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...
(whether or not that will help is another matter)
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)
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.
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.
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'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.
But that's exactly what 4chan and kiwi farms are doing.
Facebook banned all Canadian news outlets, and they were probably actually making a few bucks from them. I can't imagine that 4chan would care too much about losing UK users. 4% of barely any revenue, maybe? Just ban them all; they're insignificant. The only drawback for UK citizens is that Reform will go up a point or two in the polls from people who prefer the authoritarianism they don't know to the authoritarianism they do, but considering the awful alternatives it's really six of one a half-dozen of the other.
One of the rational reasons people are preferring nationalists is simply because they are less powerful than the neolibs, who all work together against their populations. Better a the dumb local boss you know than a being the local outpost of a faceless world boss.
If you think that's rational, you are wrong. Rationalising, sure, just not rational.
"Divide and conquer" is very much desired by those who want to control you, and thinking "a local authoritarian for local people" will (or even could) eject the influence of the outside world, is a false narrative.
Popular sentiment though, so may well get authoritarian parties some votes.
That could lead to tons of countries having their own internet firewalls similar to China, if that's what they want to do. Which I probably wouldn't like.
But the alternative of being liable for any new legislation, fines, etc, from any country in the world just because I operate a small website on the internet seems at least equally bad.
I don't really oppose gdpr but one of the reasons I vehemently opposed implementing GDPR at my former job is that we were not operating in the EU. Well, we had customers there, but we were an American company operating with American severs. GDPR sets another precident that other countries can make laws about what people from other jurisdictions can do..
Our lawyers said "Do it anyway, just in case".
The side effect of these very many different local regulatory bodies is you start trying to comply with multiple laws, some that can conflict each other - and this costs not just time and money, but the rigidity to stand up and say "No, our elected leaders have decided what the laws of the land are, and we follow them".
And the thing is, many countries do not have good faith laws. The majority of the people in the world live under what Americans and the EU, and the West would call lacking fundamental human rights. Some of these laws are plain BAD (hell, the US and AU even have our own bad internet laws) and some are EVIL.
Google routinely complying with the Chinese government is a great example of them wanting to take the cash first and ask questions later (or not at all). I don't want to work for that company.
I don't really think being a good 'worldwide' citizen can exist when there are conflicting views held by governments about what is right. The fact is some governments are objectively etter than others
I don't really think we aught to be involving ourselves at all with Russian officals, apparatjiks or other government bodies - but we find ourselves in this situation again, like GDPR, Russian officals have set certain rules about how data for russian citizens needs be held.
Of course Russia has no grounds to sue me in America and if it did, do you think a judge would enforce our compliance with laws that hold no water in our countries? Of course not.
Russia wants russians data - on russian servers in russia. The fact is they're probably mostly interested in being able to physically seize - without any due process - russian citizens data from servers which all happen to be in russia. It's a smart law if you're interested in putting people in gulags.
I'd rather lose all russian customers, and also all of the customers in north korea, or whatever else despotic governments that exist that think they can exert pressure on independent companies who don't operate under their jurisdictions and not have to worry about what bullshit they'll come up with next.
None of this to imply that the US and EU, Australia, Switzerland, etcdon't have a bunch of questionable laws and procedures that might not be quite fair or free either, but the world ain't perfect
What happens next is country X decides you must do one thing, and country Y decides you do another, and you come to TECHNICAL problems and BUSINESS problems and ETHICAL problems trying to comply with both.
If you're not in the EU, do not even bother with GDPR.
Rant over
klez•3mo ago
vorpalhex•3mo ago