4chan fighting for us all! Bravo.
People here seem to be thinking this a UK/Europe-specific phenomenon, but there's plenty of examples of the US "seizing" sites that were never hosted in the USA either, and even put pressure on countries to extradite people involved even if they never broke any laws in the country they're living in.
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.
USA doesn't block websites. The FBI will seize domains after some judicial review and a court order. That's about it.
And you can use cctlds to bypass this too
I think people here are also more fond of 4chan than the average citizen, and also in general rather fond of technological freedom of anything. Makes sense, being players basically in the team about to get a red card. Like it or not, the global internet became a convenient way to skirt local laws and I don't see any reason why exempting something in one place only because it originated in some other place. Is now enforcing a law "the CCP way"? Should internet be kept lawless only because... internet?
£450k? - Quick, we must show we've done something.
> or requiring Internet Service Providers to block a site in the UK.
Ah, that's what they want.
They probably don't even expect 4chan to pay up - they just want them gone.
Yeah. Nobody thinks they will pay the fine, it just shows non compliance.
4chan doesn't need age checks, everyone knows there are only five year olds on it. :-p
Those were FBI agents. Expect a knock on your door any time now.
Twenty five years old :-p
This part is somewhat surprising to me:
> 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.)
Yeah, that is ABSOLUTELY a lie.
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.
The first part is true but the second sentence seems dubious to me. Did they compute that from the previous visitor numbers or something?
UK fining an American company for this is absurd. 4Chan isn't breaking any laws. You can make it illegal for your own citizens but you can't regulate a foreign business. UK citizens should fight for the right to free speech though.
While I agree it seems absurd, this is how the UK's unwritten constitution works - the UK Parliament is not restricted to legislating just for the territory of the UK. Of course it can only realistically enforce within UK borders, but it can pass whatever legislation it wishes.
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.
How is this different than, for example, the US fining TikTok? https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-ftc-record-fine-childrens...
This is false. You of course can regulate and fine a foreign business. That's how trade regulations work.
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.
> the leadership is banned from entering the UK for the foreseeable future
Not at all. But if they do enter, they might find difficulty leaving.
Trade regulations apply to the importer, which might also be the exporter if they have a local presence, but also may not be.
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.
How about the EU imposing GDPR restrictions on non-eu companies?
It should only affect companies that have a presence in Europe, as in an office or some entity.
Depends on whether those businesses want to do business with the EU
The GDPR is about your data being handled overseas.
OFCOM&co is about overseas data going to you.
I think that's different because I have a positive personal opinion of the GDPR and a negative personal opinion about what the UK is doing. Therefore the GDPR is good and this is bad. It's really quite objective.
Amateurs. Russia has fined Google more than the GDP of the entire planet. Odds of collecting are about the same.
Odds of collecting some 4chan execs travelling abroad are a lot higher, though
4chan's lawyer, who has been engaging with this well since the beginning, has clearly advised his clients, who have no intent of ever going to the UK, to not go there. In addition, Ofcom does not have the ability to collect them through the EU itself. They must go to the UK.
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.
> Ofcom is likely to lose lawsuits about this, as they do not have jurisdiction in the U.S.
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.
Ofcom doesn’t really wanna block websites though, they want websites to either comply or block themselves, both of which legitimizing Ofcom’s extraterritorial enforcement.
4chan is still a thing? I thought it died long ago. Perhaps I grew up.
[dead]
It is, it didn’t, and you didn’t.
4chan's lawyer's response:
"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]
The lawyer is great on Twitter, he's not only defending 4chan, he's on a crusade to prevent this stuff in the future and trying to get bills passed in the US.
The directors and officers better not transit through Heathrow without giving the current whitehouse admin a hefty donation first.
Mother Britain will be happy to make an example out of them if Uncle Sam doesn't intervene.
It's unfortunate that the US lawyers did not cite the reply given in Arkell v Pressdram.
Arkell v Pressdram was in response to a civil claim that never reached a court, so slightly different. I take the wider point though.
As shown in that same article, they also responded:
>>>
"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."
<<<
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.
> 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...
> even if their citizenry can access it; it's on them to block that access if they don't like it
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.
Their goal is to create a presedent so they can start applying it to platforms they don't like. Its happening all over Europe not just the UK and the plan is clear. They want to repress discourse that is not officially sanctioned.
The real goal it to start banning US sites like fb,aws etc so that Europe starts building their own
They can try to set whatever precedent they like. But US courts won't accept the argument, so it'll just stay a fee that accumulates on some paper ledger.
> 4Chan operates in the US
And the UK... each time it delivers there.
The UK can block whatever they want if they'd like to become an authoritarian firewall state.
But they have no legal basis to fine 4chan.
I disagree. It's no different from selling to a foreign buyer by sending the product in the mail. You're not doing business in their country, and it's the buyer's responsibility to adhere to their local laws about imports, not yours.
4Chan has blocked the entire UK IP range. They do not host any infrastructure there.
They are bound by UK law exactly as much as they are bound by Venutian or Mars law.
> 4Chan has blocked the entire UK IP range.
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.
Speaking as a UK citizen: you're exactly right. If the UK wants to prevent 4chan from being imported into the UK then it needs to block it at the border as it would for physical goods.
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.
I hope they do block it.
And we shall call it "the Great Firewall of the UK".
It is amazing that these guys don't see the irony of monkeying totaliterian states policies, in term of surveillance and censorship.
The UK, like Australia and many of its other offshoots has always had a bit of a totalitarian streak.
They’re going to keep ignoring these issues because the wrong people are pointing them out. The enemy must always be wrong.
Tribalism is awful for societies. There’s a reason Russia put so much effort into amplifying it in the west.
So, the Great FUK for short?
It's very much a rock-and-a-hard-place situation. "It's an import", so they have to respond to it like they'd respond to imports...
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.
> 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.
UK ISPs do block some domains though.
Which does nothing to block 4chan, because everyone knows what a VPN is and how to get one.
The same UK politicians are now pushing to block VPNs. Hence the great firewall talk which they are trying to skirt by fining US companies.
Unlike other websites though, VPNs are generally banned from posting on 4chan, which would definitely hurt traffic.
Right, but it shows their mindset. They're not letting China comparisons stop them from doing anything. It's not about the technology. In their mind, it's about the purpose and the legitimacy of any censorship.
And now we'll watch the UK take the logical next step which is for the government to mandate that all ISPs in the country block 4chan.
CCP "Great Firewall" style.
We've had Hadrian's firewall blocking certain piracy sites for years.
Already have the makings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_th...
You'd be amazed at the times I've argued with people on HN that free speech infringement by the UK government has grown rampant, only for them to enact the next draconian law a month later.
UK is trying to be like Russia and China, where a minder will show up at your door if you post something the government doesn't like. Then people online will defend it because the investigation didn't turn into a full criminal charge or they say the people simply deserved it.
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.
Same. The responses are consistently "but they only restrict bad speech"
Most Brits already have a VPN to beat off so the effect will be negligible.
And then they'll make VPNs illegal
Not everyone is as pornsick as you seem to think. Your own circle of mastrubators, perhaps. But not most British people.
"Most" is probably not accurate. I can't imagine the average middle aged individual in the UK has a VPN they use regularly. I'd be pleasantly surprised if that was the case.
The average middle aged individual probably doesn't read 4chan.
VPN take up in the UK is around 20-25%