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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 t
by alphazard 1y ago
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.
- sleepybrett 1y ago[flagged]
- pqtyw 1y agoPresumably that was a typo since it seemed like a pretty sane commend otherwise.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoYes, I assume they meant "precedent".
- alphazard 1y agoYes, fixed. I often spell both words wrong and click on the spelling suggestion. Autocorrect got me to the wrong one.
- foldr 1y agoI 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.
- alphazard 1y agoI 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 1y agoSure 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.
- aydyn 1y agoA job is not just robotically following a script. If your actions have negative impact on the goals of your job and you do it anyway, you are bad at your job.
- foldr 1y agoI didn’t make any claim about people being good at their jobs. But I’m not sure why you think that this will have a negative impact on OFCOM’s goals. Imposing the fine is probably just a formal preliminary to having UK ISPs block 4chan.
- aydyn 1y agoIn this case, Ofcom's stated goal (which I admit may be different than their actual goal) is to get overseas companies to comply with their rules. 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- aunty_helen 1y ago4chan 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 1y agoYes the government have already talked about banning VPNs and government taking copies of your private keys :-/
- Hamuko 1y agoWhat private keys? Any private keys?
- noir_lord 1y agoNo 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.
- rob_c 1y agoit's been mulled over and keeps getting brought up again and again, the Overton window has shifted from "go away and come back when you're serious to", "christ how would we comply with that?" https://nordvpn.com/blog/tech-world-angry-with-theresa-mays-internet-regulation-plans/ https://nordvpn.com/blog/tech-world-angry-with-theresa-mays-... If you live here how can you not spot how every govt since they kicked out brown has been pushing for this?
- noir_lord 1y agoI'm aware and it's precisely because it's not a new thing been seeing it for years, I specifically was asking for a citation for this government. 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.
- mikkupikku 1y ago4chan 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.
- NoboruWataya 1y agoFrom 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.
- pogue 1y agoDoes Ofcom actually have the power to restrict a person from traveling to the UK if a fine is levied against a company they work for?
- blibble 1y 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-powerful-water-regulator-to-replace-failed-ofwat-in-drive-to-reset-sector https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jul/21/new-powerfu... ofgem: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63805028 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63805028
- rob_c 1y agoit's asif we need to reform the system and find a better way...
- blibble 1y agoofwat is shortly to be abolished (whether or not that will help is another matter)
- KaiserPro 1y 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 1y agoIn 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.
- bendigedig 1y 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.
- spacebanana7 1y agoA 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).
- RansomStark 1y agoThe 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.
- 1y ago
- m463 1y agoI wonder if it more like "ofcom fines 10,000 offenders", then "press reports on controversial and vocal offender 4chan"
- motbus3 1y agoThey will basically block 4chan off UK network and that will be the beginning of the internet split, which, in a world endangered again by the narrative construction will be yet another step for one-sided truths and the verge of yet another war.