One I remember was a site hosting streams of the 2022 football world cup. Or a number of Iranian-affiliated news sites just last year. Or canadian-based gambling websites in 2021.
People going "Those Crazy Brits! Thank God That'll Never Happen Here!" seem pretty ill-informed.
"In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment."[0]
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"Companies – wherever they're based – are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different," she said.
"The UK is setting new standards for online safety. Age checks and risk assessments are cornerstones of our laws, and we'll take robust enforcement action against firms that fall short."
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Quite frankly she seems completely out of touch with her own argument. The UK can certainly legislate away tobacco sales, for instance; they can't go after tobacco producers in a foreign state. 4Chan operates in the US and is a US company. They have no jurisdiction over it, even if their citizenry can access it; it's on them to block that access if they don't like it. Unless they're also implying that the US government should be allowed to go after UK companies that don't follow it's free speech regulations because American citizens can access them.
Precedent in the US is that courts do in fact have jurisdiction over a foreign website's owner if the owner "purposefully availed itself of the U.S. forum or purposefully directed its activities toward it", a test which is less demanding than it sounds. [1]
And US has taken advantage of this to go after foreign websites such as Megaupload, BTC-e, Liberty Reserve, etc.
Therefore, if there were a US law requiring companies to follow free speech rules, it could potentially be enforced against foreign website owners. But no such law currently exists. The First Amendment itself only applies to the US government (and to companies working on behalf of the US government). There is also the SPEECH Act, which, among other provisions, creates a cause of action where if someone sues a US person in a foreign court over their speech, they can sue back in US court. But only for declaratory judgement, not damages or an injunction. The goal is mainly just to prevent US courts from enforcing judgements from the foreign court in such cases.
[1] https://tlblog.org/how-to-find-personal-jurisdiction-over-fo...
Not even China and North Korea whine about or send fake “fines” to offshore entities. They just block their sites and move on with life.
The fact that's technically hard to do (at least without going full-on CCP) doesn't change the situation. Attempting to fine a foreign entity for doing something that breaks no laws in the foreign entity's jurisdiction is just risible.
It is amazing that these guys don't see the irony of monkeying totaliterian states policies, in term of surveillance and censorship.
Tribalism is awful for societies. There’s a reason Russia put so much effort into amplifying it in the west.
But unlike physical imports, there's a sense that blocking these imports is an affront to base philosophical freedom in a way that prohibiting physical imports isn't.
It would serve UK legislators well to explore that tingling sense some more before they consider any further efforts in this direction, but that's just my two pence.
And the UK... each time it delivers there.
They are bound by UK law exactly as much as they are bound by Venutian or Mars law.
And honestly this is more than they really should even have to do. I think it does go above their obligation. They're doing Offcom a favor here, they don't even have to figure out how to block it themselves.
But they have no legal basis to fine 4chan.
CCP "Great Firewall" style.
The reality is this will seriously chill speech broadly across the country regardless of either of those outcomes, and the technical costs of enforcement will be steep.
VPN take up in the UK is around 20-25%
Mother Britain will be happy to make an example out of them if Uncle Sam doesn't intervene.
There is a famous quote regarding this nature of British parliamentary sovereignty that is taught to every law student in the UK: "If Parliament enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence" - Ivor Jennings.
The UK isn't going to get a cent from that but the leadership is banned from entering the UK for the foreseeable future.
Doing this a lot as a country is how you achieve pariah status and losing a bunch of trade, though.
Not at all. But if they do enter, they might find difficulty leaving.
If I buy something illegal off of AliExpress, the US government won't and can't do squat to the seller. If they decide to enforce the law, they'll go after me.
OFCOM&co is about overseas data going to you.
It already sounds like Ofcom is likely to lose lawsuits about this, as they do not have jurisdiction in the U.S., where 4chan is hosted.
How would Ofcom even have a lawsuit to lose? Are they going to file it in the US? Of course not, USA courts will tell them to pound sand.
They'll just advise the UK government to block 4chan nationwide. Which is really what they want to do anyway.
> Data shows that nearly 80% of the top 100 pornography sites in the UK now have age checks in place. This means that on average, every day, over 7 million visitors from the UK are accessing pornography services that have deployed age assurance.
I would have expected that most people would switch to other pornography sites that don't have age checks rather than doing an age check. But apparently that isn't the case. (Or their data is misleading. People in the UK who are using VPNs presumably can't be easily identified as British.)
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to include links as a new user but Pornbiz posted an article showing AV lost them 90% of traffic. There's a BBC article where researchers found AV compliant sites were decimated on their top traffic ranking on Similarweb. And I working in the industry saw our traffic drop by 99.9% during our AV test.
Users don't use VPN, they certainly don't upload ID... they just go to noncompliant sites. Don't believe UK government's gaslighting.
> or requiring Internet Service Providers to block a site in the UK.
Ah, that's what they want.