Comment by alphazard

Comment by alphazard 5 hours ago

50 replies

What do they seek to accomplish here? There is strong precedent for the US defending the 1st amendment against foreign interests. No UK bureaucrats are going to make a career out of this. Going after a company that can defend itself and can't be intimidated, will prevent them from bluffing successfully against smaller companies, who could realistically be intimidated. If I were working at Ofcom, I would stay away from the large US sites with access to good legal counsel, and instead try to intimidate the long tail that don't.

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.

blibble 3 hours ago

> it doesn't look like these Ofcom guys are playing with a full deck

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...

ofgem: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63805028

  • KaiserPro 2 hours ago

    > staffed by those who couldn't make it as civil servants

    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

    • finghin 2 hours ago

      In the UK and Ireland, a distinction is generally made between public servants, who are paid by government appropriation, and civil servants, who are employed directly by government departments and the organisations they directly control and fund.

    • blibble 2 hours ago

      they're not civil servants, because the the organisations were deliberately created to be separate from whitehall

      (and ministerial interference)

      • moomin an hour ago

        Looked this up. They’re not part of the civil service transfer scheme so I think you are 100% correct. They also in theory have their own corporate structure but since they literally publish documents explaining how to map it to civil service grades I think it’s fair to say the overall experience isn’t that different. But different tenure, different pension, they’re not civil servants.

  • rob_c 2 hours ago

    it's asif we need to reform the system and find a better way...

    • blibble 2 hours ago

      ofwat is shortly to be abolished

      (whether or not that will help is another matter)

mikkupikku 4 hours ago

4chan is a small company with dubious profitability so I doubt they can afford much in the way of lawyers, but it doesn't really matter because they can simply ignore the UK completely. They only accept crypto anyway, so the UK can't even take away 4chan's payment processing in the UK.

bendigedig 2 hours ago

> There is strong precedent for the US defending the 1st amendment against foreign interests.

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.

  • ben_w 36 minutes ago

    > How does this ruling affect the company's right to free speech in the US?

    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.

    • EarlKing 34 minutes ago

      > To put it another way, if 4chan blocked the UK, the UK would be fine with this outcome.

      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.

      • ben_w 27 minutes ago

        I believe the order of escalation here is:

        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 sounds to me like they consider curtailing speech by blocking a website to be one of the last things to try, not the first.
  • EarlKing 35 minutes ago

    Ofcom attempting to enforce it's laws upon a US-resident corporation that has no business presence in the United Kingdom is the very definition of affecting one's right to free speech in the United States. This is why the US has a rich history of case law to draw upon for defining personal jurisdiction. In this case, Ofcom is perhaps hoping to exploit uncertainty regarding personal jurisdiction to impose its law upon foreign citizens who otherwise have no business in the United Kingdom. So, yeah, it definitely affects a company's right to free speech in the US. It affects EVERYONE's right to free speech in the US, and it should not be dismissed simply because 4chan is the defendant.

  • RansomStark 2 hours ago

    The thing about laws are they stop at the border. Unless you are sufficiently powerful that you can ignore the rights of other countries and their people, the UK isn't powerful anymore, but hasn't grasped that concept yet (I'm British, at this point it's just kind of sad).

    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.

  • spacebanana7 2 hours ago

    A lot of the US rules in this area came from UK courts trying to enforce defamation/libel related claims on US authors and journalists.

    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).

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NoboruWataya 4 hours ago

From the article it looks like the fine here is basically for not complying with information requests (rather than a full investigation having concluded that 4chan is in violation of the substance of the Act). Ofcom probably thought 4chan would just respond to the requests by geoblocking the UK, which would have been good enough for them. But once their bluff was called, they really had no choice but to levy the fine. Announcing you are investigating someone for violating the law and then not bothering to fine them when they very clearly ignore your investigation (which is itself a violation of the law) is more destructive to your credibility than anything.

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.

aunty_helen 4 hours ago

4chan are the “think of the children” bad guys to make an example out of.

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.

  • andy_ppp 4 hours ago

    Yes the government have already talked about banning VPNs and government taking copies of your private keys :-/

    • alphazard 3 hours ago

      This is a little wild to think about. It would make infosec impossible in the UK.

      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.

      • subscribed 3 hours ago

        Oh, they'll just introduce mandatory digital ID, and the vpn registration.

        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.

        • nly 29 minutes ago

          Good luck to them.

          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.

      • hamdingers 2 hours ago

        That would be the proposal from IT, and the response from the C-suite will be "that's unfortunate, lay them all off."

    • KaiserPro 2 hours ago

      Urgh, the courts already have the power to compel you to provide private keys.

      It was for anti-terror, but now its being used on pricks like Yaxely-lenon, who Imagine will make much hay from it.

    • Hamuko 4 hours ago

      What private keys? Any private keys?

      • noir_lord 3 hours ago

        No one has seriously discussed banning VPN's - one minister mentioned they where looking it and no one said anything about private keys either as far as I know.

        If I'm wrong someone can drop me a link since I live in the UK.

  • numpad0 3 hours ago

    Yeah, the ultimate goal is to end all user-generated content, first through moderation and then by algorithms, motivated by structural deficiency in commissioned for-profit contents that it is no match against user-generated. And the response sorely needed right now is resurgence of a distributed social media system that do not grossly undermine copyrights.

  • morkalork 4 hours ago

    "They won't comply so these new restrictions are for your own good, citizen"

    • jen20 3 hours ago

      Subject, surely?

      • octo888 an hour ago

        Sigh. It's been 42 years since it was cleared up and that most people became citizens. Can we stop with that remark already

foldr 4 hours ago

I think you’re overanalyzing it. They’re just enforcing the law. You and I may agree that it’s a bad law, but that doesn’t mean that the people in charge of enforcing it necessarily have complex and sinister motives.

  • miohtama an hour ago

    The law is law, but Ofcom wrote the regulation (1000+ pages) themselves with their interest groups. A lot of regulators went through revolving door and are now selling services for complying with Online Safety Act.

  • alphazard 4 hours ago

    I don't agree that wanting to further one's own career is complex or sinister. If the enforcement of laws wasn't aligned with career progress it would be bad for enforcement, including the laws that you and I want enforced.

    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.

    • foldr 4 hours ago

      Sure I mean, people generally want to do their jobs, which in this case means fining sites that don’t comply with the legislation. I don’t see any reason to think that it’s more complex than that. If 4chan doesn’t comply then the site will probably be blocked by UK ISPs, so I don’t think the logic in your second paragraph really goes through.

    • basisword 4 hours ago

      >> When 4chan successfully defends itself

      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.

      • alphazard 4 hours ago

        I'm talking specifically about US companies, which make up the lion's share of popular websites. They are served from the US as a primary location, and the company is incorporated there as well. Modulo CDN hosted assets, there is no presence in the UK.

        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.

      • mytailorisrich 4 hours ago

        If this is deemed illegal in an US court then the OSA will be unenforcebale against US entities in the US (though not sure what's needed to set precedent).

        This is important because otherwise UK fines may be enforceable in US courts.

  • rob_c 2 hours ago

    no, ofcom don't need to be picking the fights they are, they're choosing to support the political arm under the claims of "hate speech" and "ungood bad think"

    • KaiserPro 2 hours ago

      > they're choosing to support the political arm under the claims of "hate speech" and "ungood bad think"

      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.

      • amiga386 2 hours ago

        There is plenty of moderation on 4chan. It actively avoids breaking the laws of the country it's hosted in (the USA). You may not like what's on it, but it's not "extreme".

        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.

  • laughing_man 3 hours ago

    You're underestimating how much thought governments put into things. Bureaucrats wouldn't be showcasing their own impotence with no reason.

    • ToucanLoucan 3 hours ago

      You're overestimating how much thought governments put into things.

      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.

sleepybrett 5 hours ago

[flagged]

  • pqtyw 4 hours ago

    Presumably that was a typo since it seemed like a pretty sane commend otherwise.

    • SAI_Peregrinus 4 hours ago

      Yes, I assume they meant "precedent".

      • alphazard 4 hours ago

        Yes, fixed. I often spell both words wrong and click on the spelling suggestion. Autocorrect got me to the wrong one.