It's been exceedingly obvious but it's nice to know that Ofcom never thought that anyone would bother to fight back. This is clearly not about public safety but about controlling American corporations.
Parliamentary forces seem to be directly suborning this corruption.
Not exactly. On the surface, it's about kowtowing to pearl-clutching UK NGOs that are empowered by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch's hysterical tabloids; and underneath, the real agenda is about restricting the influence of unsanctioned sites that could influence UK discourse - influence that established UK press barons (like the Murdochs, Lebedev, etc) want to keep very much to themselves.
Is 4chan attempting to unfairly or unduly influence UK "discourse?" Or are they just _contributing_ to it as members of the public on an anonymous forum?
> Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch's hysterical tabloids
Which actually are an attempt to influence UK discourse. The framing errors are interesting.
I could see that last century. But do they even care about influence anymore? Isn't the money all they care about now?
To me, this looks like the culmination of many years of ad hoc censorship breeding cadre of favored censors. They've all grown into a system of expectations where they can just finger frustrating bits of counter-narrative and have it disappeared.
The Powers That Be don't care to hear pesky details about jurisdiction. As such, there is no one around with the temerity to point out the inherent absurdities. So they pursue "offenders" despite the obvious futility, because not doing so means explaining difficult things to people that will not listen.
As I recently wrote[1], there is no metaphysical certitude that Ofcom and its intentions will be forever futile: all that is necessary is for the political vectors to align optimally (as they inevitably will,) and the LEOs of the US would be happy to oblige.
WITH A RAP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ql6tGu9aWg
It’s one thing to be talking about suicide or assisted suicide because you’ve decided it’s right for you and your situation.
It’s another to be dealing with depression from trauma, unable to get help and have no support system, and then be coerced by individuals on forums with ulterior motives.
I’m not saying I am in support of the UKs attempts, but it’s also not helpful to paint everything black and white on either side. Real solutions require dealing with the grays and the details.
edit: And for reference I have spoken to people in the later situations who have found all too many toxic individuals online who will say things like “you should definitely just kill yourself” in the midst of such situations, who after therapy consider those people to have been committing even more trauma (most likely because they get off on the control of another persons life, playing out murder fantasies etc, and who use the internets anonymity to further traumatize people at their most vulnerable)
What they cannot be allowed to do is tell organizations in other jurisdictions that they now suddenly fall under UK jurisdiction.
There are 195 countries in the world. If all of them followed a policy like UK's Ofcom, the internet would be gone in no time and world-wide user-to-user communication would become impossible for legal reasons. It's obviously not a sane position.
a us person could travel to a country x and that x could send this us person to a UK prison? I don't know if doing so would be legal but when the rubber hits the road, each country x is technically sovereign and does not have to honor the first amendment of the US constitution.
So even if it might be frowned upon to extradite foreign (US) nationals in country X (such as Canada or India) to the UK, they could do it anyway to send a message?
The only further question would be if the country is friendly enough with the UK to extradite.
When it's a matter of drug charges or other obviously criminal activity, the US embassy and diplomats don't normally raise a fuss, but for something like this where the person made first amendment protected speech in the US? That'd definitely raise all kinds of hell.
Plenty of US citizens would actively cheer the notion of having a foreign government arrest their political opponents as an end-run around the fact they're not allowed to do it at home.
After all, 1A/"freeze peach" laws should only protect you from your government, right?
I'm not convinced that plenty of US citizens would celebrate a foreign government arresting an American for what would be protected by the 1A in the US. There will always be trolls, of course.
> After all, 1A/"freeze peach" laws should only protect you from your government, right?
If my government has the longest dick of all governments in the world, and knows how to swing it, I'm not so sure.
Traveling is no joke. Americans often act like the world is their playground, but you are subject to the laws of the jurisdiction you're standing in. Traveller beware.
Are they? Is all speech protected? If so, how do you prosecute people who leak secrets?
Yes
> Is all speech protected?
No
> how do you prosecute people who leak secrets?
See above
Pretty much avoid entering Britain or its dependencies or you'll be nabbed on a Commonwealth Warrant and extradited to England.
Anti-blasphemy laws, which is what these laws are, don't care about that either.
E.g. if I involuntarily swing my arm and hit someone in the face as a result of a medical condition I lacked the appropriate mens rea and am not guilty. If I intentionally punch someone in the face while being somehow unaware that I'm not allowed to do that I am guilty.
Hard to see how mens rea would save anyone from being guilty here.
Now, granted, the US is a freer country than the UK is so that doesn't usually matter all that much, but all the US would need to do to nullify its 1A would be to simply permit the UK to enforce its claims of extraterritoriality in US-friendly airspace.
What speech they might be permitted to prosecute would naturally change based on administration.
based.
as someone from a country that had reached the bottom of many slippery slopes in less than ten years, it's very disheartening to see the West following us.
That has been happening for decades at this point. That doesn't make today's violations ok, but neither are they something new. The people of the USA gave up on freedom after 9/11.
Of course it's not literally 'violating the First Amendment', but it sure seems like the kind of thing the writers of Constitution would have tried to protect against if they knew it could happen someday.
Edit: I appreciate the down votes but research him, he has never participated in a real case. He is not a practicing lawyer by any real measure.
I support the cause, but I don't think that's true. RIPE, the RIR responsible for UK, makes available a list of allocations per country. For UK:
https://stat.ripe.net/data/country-resource-list/data.json?resource=gb
Geo-IP databases are mostly accurate, emphasis on mostly.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, mobile roaming traffic uses "home routing", not "local break-out". This means it is routed to the country where the user normally resides, not where they currently are. This means:
- For people visiting the UK (and potentially staying there for a long time, if on a permissive roaming plan), their IP address won't show up as UK despite long-term residence / citizenship.
- British people visiting other countries will still be subject to OSA, even when they should not be.
- People (including British people!) who buy British AirAlo SIMs may not get a British IP. AirAlo often uses SIMs registered in a different country than the one you're visiting, and the "exit node" (P-GW) may be located in a different country altogether. I suspect this last option will become quite attractive if VPN bans ever actually come into effect.
This is pretty much unfixable without major changes in how LTE roaming is conducted worldwide, and the UK isn't important enough to make that happen.
Edit: RIPE actually has documentation on this fallacy specifically https://docs.db.ripe.net/RPSL-Object-Types/Descriptions-of-P...
> “country:” – Officially Assigned two-letter ISO 3166 country code or "EU" (exceptionally reserved). It has never been specified what this country represents. It could be the location of the head office of a multi-national company, where the server centre is based, or the home of the End User. Therefore, it cannot be used in any reliable way to map IP addresses to countries.
You’re right, but I never claimed it did. Even the famously expansive US freedom of speech protection is not absolute.
> Would you be arrested if you told national secrets? What would happen if you told everyone at work (unfounded) that your boss abuses their children?
Yes you would be arrested, which is a freedom of speech issue, however banning this speech, despite harming freedom, is justified by other factors that are more important in these cases.
altogether, if you dont care about following this UK law, whats the need to carr what the UK government does? just dont go there or do business with people who care about the UK government. same as US sanctions and secondary sanctions. the UK at least is a small market
And more to the point, many US states passing or attempting to pass laws which aren't all that different to the UKs OSA. Mississippi's version is in some ways even more onerous to enforce as it requires social networks to age-check all of their users, not just those who want to access adult or "harmful" content. Bluesky notably went along with the OSA but considered Mississippi's demands to be over the line and geoblocked them instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
What's the point exactly? That some US states also did something similar re porn so therefore it's a nothingburger and we shouldn't care about this lawyers campaign to protect the internet from censorship?
By testing from.. a single VPN IP?
And as noted in other comments here he doesn't seem to understand how geo ip databases are maintained. I sure won't be asking this guy to represent me anytime soon.
Lawyer: "I've confirmed that at least one UK IP address is blocked."
Regulators: "We've confirmed that at least one UK IP address is not blocked."
In what world is the correct response "Dear regulators, you're incompetent. Pound sand." instead of "Can you share the IP address you used so my client can address this in their geoblock?"
That would imply that the client actually would like to be contacted every time Ofcom found a leak in the geoblock. Not a good idea imho.
>They’re definitely not treating it like a public safety matter, where they know how to reach us and know that I generally respond within the hour.
He's just pointing out that Ofcom's behavior is inconsistent with Ofcom sincerely believing it's a public safety matter either.
The UK should pound sand.
Is the strategy really just "get new federal laws passed so UK can't shove these regulations down our throats"? Is that going to happen on a timeline that makes sense for this specific case?
Separate from the free speech debate, the international law part of this seems pretty cut and dry. Here's the bolded parts:
So, it appears, as with 4chan, Ofcom has elected to proceed with a mock execution... Ofcom is trying to set the precedent that... you have to follow its rules – even if you’re American and you’re engaged in constitutionally protected speech and conduct. To that end, Ofcom has renewed its previous threats of fines, arrest, and imprisonment, against SaSu and its operators – all Americans.
More pointedly: what is this lawyer actually "representing" these "clients" for? I don't see any mention of any US legal action, and presumably you need to be british to represent people in UK court. Isn't this just activism, not representation?
Jurisdiction? Don't you first have to commit the crime in the jurisdiction in question?
The two may negotiate over that, in which case common sense ideas like "they didn't do it in your territory" may make one side look foolish, which may in fact have a real influence over the outcome of the negotiations.
If they can't come to an agreement, then it may become a matter of whether the "offender" happens to travel somewhere where they can be grabbed. In the end, jurisdiction is about who has the power to enforce their laws. There's no universally-agreed-upon uber-legal system to make it otherwise.
In a nutshell, I'm moderately confident that this will suffice to keep Ofcom away.
It was obvious from the minute that idiots started creating IP location databases in the first place that people would demand that they be used like that... and those demands seem to be winning out.
Also, Britain isn't important enough to make this stick against e.g. an American.
If someone writes me a letter asking a question about material that is prohibited in his own country, that is not my problem. It is his responsibility to comply with local law and that of local government to seize material that is illegal there. They cannot deputize me to act, unpaid and without consent, on their behalf.
That's what happens when you respond to a request after all. (Up to very minor nits, e.g. you might be paying a cloud provider instead of an ISP).
Governments that expect some content or other blocked can damn well do it themselves, in their own legal system. They cannot compel someone else to spend his time, talent, or treasure to enforce their petty rules.
If they go after one of their own for requesting something from me, whatever. If they block me, whatever. I suppose they're within their rights to do that.
The federal government "deputizing" or trying to chill private actors out of speech, out of doing business, etc. is a violation of Americans' first amendment rights; so held SCOTUS last year. No way in h--- are we letting some tinpot foreigner do so.
What you are describing is exactly what is going on here. OFCAM’s final action, if taken, is blocking at ISP level. All of the legal stuff is happening in the UK system.
I’m just sort of curious for your thoughts after learning that.
(Also, I’m curious about the SCOTUS decision, I.e. which one? I used to be a law nerd and got a kick out of reading oral arguments for the first time in years this week, would appreciate more material)
Murthy v. Missouri was generally a loss; 6-3 with Justice Barrett for the majority ruling states lacked standing, which is consistent with the Roberts court's informal policy of dodging. Alito dissented, joined by Thomas and I think Gorsuch, and that is worth a read. The more important one was NRA v. Vullo, a unanimous opinion from Sotomayor. Gorsuch wrote a concurrence as did I believe one other justice.
Governments can do whatever they damn well please in their own territory. Including arresting you if you ever visit because you violated some law that they wrote that applies to people in the rest of the world, or even you violated some law that a friend of theirs (i.e. a country with an extradition treaty) wrote to apply to people in the rest of the world. If those actions compel people to spend their time, talent, or treasure to enforce their petty rules then they can do that.
Whatever "actively reaching out" standard you are imagining doesn't exist in the first place. Even if it did though, you clearly violated it when you sent the reply to the request actively aware that it could go across borders.
SCOTUS (with an emphasis on the US) decisions seem rather irrelevant to non-US actors.
The US will not enforce UK judgements or fines if enforcing them is contrary to the US' own laws, including its Constitution. SCOTUS ultimately decides when that's the case.
So it's really, really relevant to whether a non-US actor like Ofcom can actually collect fines from people inside the US. That's a separate question from what the UK government can do to people from the US who actually enter the UK, and an important one.
Second, where is the person writing the letter from? Mars? They're going to have a hard time finding a place where kidnapping and extortion are legal.
Third, the letter would in fact presumably be aimed at a specific person in a specific country... as would the kidnapping.
The company could be from china or Russia with little interest in diplomatic pandering for such a small incident.
Providing a user a service in exchange for payment is also aimed at a specific person in a specific country.
heck, if no laws can be applied across borders, it could be a website selling the service of fake extortion letters.
And don't mix up "difficult to enforce" with "legal". Constantly changing domains and hiding who is behind the service are efforts to avoid being caught by very real and enforced laws.
"Innocent"? That's a strange word to choose. Who cares what's "innocent"?
> It’s a choice, and has been the default for a long time, but it means one has chosen to speak outside the borders of their own country and that comes with rules, like them or not.
... or it means one has chosen to speak inside the borders of their country, and people outside those borders have chosen to import that speech. Web sites don't lob speech at you willy-nilly.
The bottom line is that that standard is impractical to implement, illiberal in its effects, and just generally a bad idea. For that matter, it's also at odds with most of the ways the world treats trade in physical goods.
Source: https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/
1. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not.
2. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or processor not established in the Union, where the processing activities are related to:
(a) the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union; or
(b) the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union.
3. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data by a controller not established in the Union, but in a place where Member State law applies by virtue of public international law.
Comedically far.
But it's the edges that get you.
I moved home a few years back, connected a new service with the same ISP.
They have an IP pool that is labelled as for one state (Victoria, Australia) but is also used for their services in Tasmania.
So now I have to fight every major website (Google, Amazon, Maxmind, etc) that does GeoIP lookups that I'm not in Victoria, I'm 500-800KM away.
Google was very confused for about 12 months because when I moved I also brought my wifi gear and so it would give me a precise location of my old address because it used wifi geolocation.
Not defending UK's idiotic laws, but this doesn't hold. If you cannot regulate websites outside of the country of origin, then no internet regulation can hold for any subject. Openly selling stolen personal credentials or botnet usage? Piracy? Reselling personal information without disclosure?
So there are effectively three options for internet regulation;
- Require websites to operate region by region with IP blocks for any non-target market. This is much of EU law is applied. If you put an effort to not serve EU costumers, you can skip following EU rules. "comply or leave"
- Any country can regulate any website regardless of origin, like the UK seems to push for. This is an insane proposal and could easily create geopolitical disputes. Great firewall and banning VPNs would be the only proper way to achieve what they seem to aim for.... which i wouldn't put past them by now.
- Give up regulating the internet entirely. Some level of regulation is valuable so I don't think this will ever work. There are simply some things illegal and deplorable enough to require laws.
You’re not going to extradite US site operators, period. Find another approach.
"If country B doesn’t like it, block the mail in question". Saying only the country of origin can regulate activity done in another country creates a legal worm-bucket with vast implications. It's also not how laws work currently in pretty much any other sector than the internet.
IP block should be sufficient to void the laws; That's how other EU laws work. If the UK wants more than than then they should just create a firewall. But saying the internet should be a fully unregulated hellscape is not a sensible position here.
That’s actually how it works? Unless you have an extradition agreement, or military overmatch, or you are willing to expend some diplomatic leverage, you are typically not getting a citizen out of a foreign country. The government complains about this all the time with goods from SE Asia, and sometimes they seize fake designer goods and make a lot of noise about it. But the people making the knockoffs just keep on making them, don’t they?
No Internet regulation can hold extraterritorially. You leave out the obvious and most important case: the country where the Web site or whatever is located enforcing its own laws. Which is actually how all law has mostly worked from day one.
> Openly selling stolen personal credentials or botnet usage? Piracy? Reselling personal information without disclosure?
If you find a jurisdiction where those are all legal, then I guess you just have to block your citizens from reaching it, or punish them if they do. Not particularly tricky.
Internet but not for any other commerce. If you sell products to someone in the EU, you are liable to EU laws about that product category and commercial activity. The internet is the only exception, and that has caused a lot of problems.
IP block is the currently the only reasonable way to apply laws to internet based commerce. It has its flaws in accuracy; but ISPs could easily create a system to make them more reliable for IP lookup. Arguing that websites cannot be regulated outside of country of origin is an insane position to take with even the minimal level of hypothetical reasoning of what that would imply.
UKs laws are dumb, but they should be free to enforce them for websites operating in the UK. And websites should be able to leave the UK to avoid complying. This is a reasonable compromise that is already how both US and EU internet laws operate.
I don't know the state of play now, and I do know that things have gotten more that way over time. But the traditional approach to international product sales is that the importer is responsible. That originally meant the person who physically brought it into the country. As common carriers became more common, it meant the person who ordered the thing. That's occasionally been leavened by some consideration of whether the seller specifically targeted customers in the receiving country. And nowadays there's more of a tendency to start "blaming" sellers in some cases, probably because nowadays "importing" something is often a retail order from a specific consumer, as opposed to somebody bringing in a shipping container on spec to resell. Maybe some of those changes are appropriate, but it's just not true that physical goods have always been treated the way you want Web sites treated here, or even that they're mostly treated that way now.
> IP block is the currently the only reasonable way to apply laws to internet based commerce.
"IP block" works in both directions.
If you want to keep something out of your country, you should be responsible for blocking it, not the other way around. That's not necessarily easy, but it's less costly in total than demanding that every Web site enforce every country's regulation... and it has the advantage of putting the cost of a regulation on the people imposing it, which is where it belongs.
> It has its flaws in accuracy; but ISPs could easily create a system to make them more reliable for IP lookup.
From your use of the word "easily", I conclude that you personally would not be among those responsible for making that work.
> Arguing that websites cannot be regulated outside of country of origin is an insane position to take with even the minimal level of hypothetical reasoning of what that would imply.
First, you can in fact "regulate" by blocking, without trying to extend the reach of your laws outside of your border. Your claim that a regulator is left totally powerless is just false.
Second, in practice, that "hypothetical" is pretty close to what we have now, and even closer to what we had 10 years ago. The world did not end.
> UKs laws are dumb, but they should be free to enforce them for websites operating in the UK
Sure, as long as we recognize that "operating in the UK" properly means "is physically located in or controlled from the UK" and not "happens to be accessible to people in the UK". The latter definition would indeed be insane.
It would need to be set up by an extremely powerful country, either the US or an alliance of smaller countries through international treaty.
It would work as follows:
There'd be a "naughty list." Anybody on the list would be arrested upon entering a participating country. This would include past or current company employees (if employed after the listing date). Companies from participating countries would be prohibited from interacting with listed organizations in any way, under treat of sanctions. This would include VPN, cloud and hosting companies, ISPs, domain registrars, email hosts, payment processors and ad networks. This would provide basic site blocking.
Foreign companies wouldn't be subject to the sanctions, but participating countries would also put them on the list.
Good
What was known and not said when Parliament might have outlawed smoking in Paris is that there was literally nothing they could do to enforce such a law. Today the governments have options, hence the fight here. And many other places.
Basically all countries take that position legally. But there are norms and customs about how often you exercise it (as well as practical questions of power).
Extraterritorial regulation of Web sites is unfortunately in the process of being established as normal, but it's a bad norm. Not as bad as drone striking anybody who lights a cigarette in Paris (which could be made legal), but a bad norm nonetheless.
The First Amendment was created to protect against foreign governments impeding on your speech?
I feel like that's really missing the point of what this amendment is about, at a time when the First Amendment is at greatest threat from the current US government.
I've heard they're arresting 12,000/year for "hate speech" now. Every month they come out with some new way to oppress their populations. Even China sounds like it has more freedom now.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
You're perfectly free to run these websites from the US. We just exercise our right to block these at our UK shores.
Where's the problem?
>The UK regulator has now publicly confirmed that the “mirror” site for my client’s site is not accessible in the UK.
The writer then proceeds to describe the way in which the spinning up of a mirror lead to the site becoming available for people in the UK. And the author protests that:
>The reasons why SaSu had a mirror are SaSu’s alone/none of Ofcom’s fucking business; [...]
The way it is written makes for a string suspicion that SaSu thought they could obviate OSA with a cheeky mirror (standard fare for torrent sites - who also wish to bypass censorship - I gather) and got caught. I can't see why else the author would be so vociferous, nor how the mirror wouldn't block the very same UK addresses as the main-site except by design.
Suicide is illegal here (there is movement on this, thankfully). Helping people do illegal things, also illegal. Facilitating such help, also illegal. There seems no need to stoop to imagining some weird conspiracy or blaming a cabal of shadowy figures.
I guess you could think of it like we treat helping people kill themselves like USA treats UK people facilitating copyright infringement.
If this is your view, do not travel or do business in other countries. It's simple.
There was never any chance that this would fly outside the country, least of all in the USA. Whoever gave Ofcom the extraterritorial power it has to pursue these goals clearly intended to ensure its failure, and for this I am grateful.
It's all total madness, and it's not just the UK there are even more crazy regulations coming from the EU. China, and others in Asia are well known for regulating too. A mess.
They should just hand it back to the king, the democracy experiment has failed there.
Take this case: the law was enacted two years ago by a different government, the regulator follows the law as enacted, and yet no one cares about this little nuance.
In reality, it's a decent technocratic government trying to reverse a decade of mismanagement and fighting about five hundred fires at the same time. It's OK to good.
A some point, if you do not have any relationship with the UK, go as far as blocking its residents but they still want you to abide by their law, aren't they just declaring war on the entire world?
This is something very deranged that have become very common with the world "becoming smaller": somes will go on a rampage for something happening on the other side of the planet. At the same time they will pretend not to notice that their own house in on fire.
Ofcom appears to agree that geoblocking UK residents would satisfy the requirements of this law. They also however appear to believe the OPs clients are simply lying about actually geoblocking UK residents - and Ofcom appear's to be the quasi-judicial entity which decides (at least as a first step).
I can't imagine OP's response to Ofcom that "we aren't doing that, but we won't explain what we were doing when we created the domain you think we created to do that" was particularly convincing.
> aren't they just declaring war on the entire world?
No, that would only happen if they started attempting to enforce the law by going into "the entire world" by force. Just declaring that some foreign entity broke your laws and owes you money and maybe that you'll arrest them if they come to your country isn't an act of war. Acts of war look like drone striking alleged drug smugglers in some other countries territorial waters without that other countries permission.
Further, you're implying this activity is NOT something that the US has historically and regularly done to other countries, including its allies in NATO?
That the US abuses it's position as the primary military power on earth to violate other nation's sovereignty is wrong and might matter "in the final calculus" but doesn't change how wrong this UK action is in isolation. It does bring up another absurdity particular to interactions between the US and UK which is that the US extended an insane amount of courtesy of not "finishing the job" once it was the predominant world power.
It's amusing to see how you can't even seen to fathom that it goes both ways.
Something about this feels off. It’s clearly not in the interest of the UK diplomatically given the current US admin. Are the people on the UK side of the cross-Atlantic CISA/State/Ofcom “counter-misinformation” op still blindly running their scripts as if the US elections never happened? It sure feels that way.
Funny how upset they're getting about this. I suppose they're used to telling the rest of the world what to do instead.
The talk about their constitution is also pretty amusing. Don't they have more important violations, such as descending into a dictatorial state, to worry about? But no, I suppose protecting 4chan and a forum encouraging the mentally unwell to kill themselves is more important.
Thank you
anigbrowl•2h ago
pessimizer•1h ago
The UK (nor the US) has no advantage in providing services, all it can do is demand that other people be prevented from providing them.
jacquesm•1h ago
Given that, shouldn't you be able to answer the question?
narcraft•1h ago
HPsquared•1h ago
Edit: that's not to say it isn't a valid strategy; NK has a big stability buff.
tim333•7m ago
jacquesm•1h ago
anigbrowl•1h ago