Ofcom is currently threatening a Canadian forum that exists to help people with depression. Ofcom claims that geoblocking blocking the UK is "insufficient":
> I've also gone back to Ofcom explicitly telling them the UK was now geoblocked (twice now) and I received a response that this was insufficient.
Good news/bad news, our current leaders are far too incompetent to successfully plan and execute a regime change operation. Bad news is they're stupid enough to try anyway and have a lot of weapons.
Ofcom could do it too if they had like 25 aircraft carriers and 2 of the 3 largest air forces on the planet, the best intel network, the most advanced tools, the backing of a $25T economy, the…
I didn't see it that way. It seems like NGOs and IGOs have been pushing for internet restrictions for a long time. There has suddenly been a push for age restrictions allegedly because of abuse material. This happens annually. Some international group claims there needs to be something draconian abolishing encryption, or some other privacy invading measure to stop child abuse and help security. The laws are 1000s of pages and appear out of nowhere and we're expected to believe it's organic and that politicians are deeply concerned about the issue.
So it really wouldn't be hard for the same legal framework that restricts age to happen in the US. It just takes compliance on our part. The UK is just one tentacle of the legal bureaucracy. It wouldn't surprise me if a bill appears called the Online Child Safey Act or something like that soon and it happens to coincide with a bunch of issues Ofcom raises in this lawsuit.
> It seems like NGOs and IGOs have been pushing for internet restrictions for a long time. There has suddenly been a push for age restrictions allegedly because of abuse material. This happens annually.
we’re seeing some good evidence the most recent pushes were secretly funded and directly written by meta, the corporation. [0][1]
according to the link in there,
> Rep. Kim Carver (R-Bossier City), the sponsor of Louisiana's HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her.
and they’ve put as much as 2 billion dollars into it. and yes, that’s billion, with a B.
corporations openai, meta, and google were absolutely backing the push for the age verification bill in california and ohio. [2][3][4]
Reading the original research and stripping away the motives implied by the bot, the data is aligned with another interpretation. Namely that Meta is going with the flow and using the opportunity to push for regulation that impact its interests less, while affecting its competitors more.
The original research is riddled with baked in conclusions, and has not been verified independently. Its also mostly LLM generated.
> and they’ve put as much as 2 billion dollars into it. and yes, that’s billion, with a B.
The original report that cited the $2 billion number was AI generated slop. The $2 billion number wasn't from Meta, it was from Arabella Advisors.
The AI-generated report showed only about $20-30 million in lobbying efforts per year across all lobbying.
Even the Show HN post was full of AI slop, claiming things like "months of research" when the Claude-generated report showed it began a couple days prior.
So please stop repeating this AI generated junk. It dilutes any real story and the obvious falsehoods make it easy for critics to dismiss.
India is considering these bans. I suspect every country in the world is thinking of them.
I work in safety, and you are right in that this comes up every year. The pressures have been building up and it’s coming to a head. However:
0) Techlash is a thing, and HN regularly underestimates the vehemence and anger behind it.
1) There IS an organic component, driven by voters globally.
2) It is also meta and governments, taking advantage of a crisis to further their ends.
Governments globally are tending towards authoritarianism. Tech firms impact most of the world, but are barely responsive to even the American government.
Voters around the world are increasingly terrified of what tech is doing, while tech is entirely unresponsive to their concerns. Tech is very firmly the bad guy today, when it used to be the “good guy” in the 90s.
So governments are more than happy to be seen as putting tech in its place, while gaining more power for themselves.
A few anecdotes about how bad the safety side is: NDAs are so prevalent and tech is so averse to customer support, that safety teams have no formal signal sharing methods.
The number of requests to recover accounts, point out fraud, or even to address CSAM, that go through WhatsApp, slack, discord, etc. is heart breaking.
To be blunt, it’s a Kafkaesque fuck up that the whole world is stuck in, and people are pissed.
Not so slowly. They've gone from a more or less respectable smaller country to more or less politically, culturally, and economically irrelevant in less than 10 years. I even question whether it's rational to allow them to have nukes; they should probably be required to give them up to some country that has a shot at remaining a stable and predictable geopolitical entity over the next century.
Their cultural decline seems to have definitely accelerated recently. Even 10-15 years ago it seemed like there was so much more British influence in the media, a lot more films and television set in Britain. It seems like the London Olympics were a kind of last hurrah. Even here in Australia which has always historically had more British influence than anywhere else it's receded - there's very little focus on their internal politics, much more on the politics and culture of the United States, even more than you'd expect given the population difference.
There are two kinds of "isolationism". In the first, the person becomes a hermit refusing to interact with anyone.
In the second, a cult grabs hold of the person and isolates them from their families and loved ones so they can brainfuck them. And, I suspect this has happened to the UK. England doesn't want to be a land for the English, because to do so would make them racist. They have strength in their diversity. Blah blah blah. And the English can't be allowed to talk with anyone else or they might realize how fucked-in-the-head all that nonsense is. They are under the spell of a cult, not as individuals, but collectively. And that cult won't be done with them until it's taken everything from them and coerced them to sign a "billion year contract". And to top it off, you're blaming it on them.
Don't mistake Brits' general disinterest in engaging with foreigners whose perspective on the UK begins and ends with lecturing us on "England for the English" with us not being able to talk with anybody else...
Except that diversity doesn't lead to strength, it leads to division which ultimately leads to weakness. Unity is what brings strength, but we can't have unity, since the plebs need to be kept divided so they'll be too busy bickering amongst each other, to realize the political and financial class is robbing them blind. United people are dangerous for the elites.
> They are under the spell of a cult, not as individuals, but collectively.
It's irrational to allow anyone other than yourself to have nukes. That's the whole point of having them, and the reason why nobody is going to bother asking for permission. No country with any self respect wants to end up becoming another Venezuela.
North Korea is still standing and even got Trump to play diplomacy. Only reason Iran got attacked is the fact they didn't have nukes yet.
Venezuela showed everyone what happens when you're a toothless country. USA shows up at your door uninvited, fucks your shit up, takes your oil and kidnaps your president for good measure, just to tack on some extra humiliation.
Don't get me wrong, Maduro deserved an even worse fate than what he got. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. It's still a cautionary tale for nations worldwide. It can happen to you. China continues to erode the economic power of the USA. They could very well discover one day that their military might is all they have left. Who's to say they won't suddenly decide to capitalize on their advantage before it evaporates?
As Venezuelan nothing angers me more than someone naming Maduro as our president, and that in some way I should feel bad about it. The guy and his government were pure evil.
You guys should have been the ones to personally get your hands on him. Hope you're doing alright now. Situation is far from perfect but at least one tyrant is gone.
It should be UNSC acting on the arrest warrant from Den Haag sending the president snatchers, but that version of world police didn’t live up to expectations, so back to big shaitan ut goes
The UK has been declining for at least 50 years, it isn't a new phenomenon. It's only really relevant culturally; after all EU countries are forced to speak English or they wouldn't be able to communicate, even after the UK's departure from the Union and some unsuccessful attempts at increasing the place of French.
Not having the UK in the EU makes English a better choice, not a worse one. It was one of those things where the UK had a 'home court advantage'. This is one of the strangest fringe benefits and of course there were some countries that tried to jockey for position but fortunately that didn't go anywhere.
While it's the defacto public language (and the one of the required languages). These days all EU communication is done though either the translation service or governmental variants of it making it pretty much irrelevant due to most official languages being served (there seem to be some exceptions but they are minor in the grand scheme of things).
Not that I necessarily disagree but rationality doesn't enter into it. I mean Pakistan is probably less stable than the UK but I guess they're allowed to have nukes now?
I don't personally like their government but at this point they certainly have the appearance of long term social and political stability. More than most western countries for the time being.
I've been hearing that since the 1990's when it first started to become apparent that their economy was on track to overtake the rest of the world within a few decades.
It hasn't happened yet. Is there something you perceive as especially problematic now, as opposed to the last 30 years?
Totalitarianism aside, I'm not sure about the stability either. Personally I suspect Xi Jinping's reign will end with some kind of bang, either an economic one or something relating to invading Taiwan.
Taiwan's biggest problem is that the average age is currently ~45 and in 15 years it will be ~55. It's going to be hard to keep the economy going once half the country's retired.
Yes obviously. We would erase President Xi and his family as well. What are they going to do, cross the Pacific? Our total willingness to do is unconditional.
> Totalitarianism aside, I'm not sure about the stability either. Personally I suspect Xi Jinping's reign will end with some kind of bang, either an economic one or something relating to
Given that the nukes that the UK has is Trident, which is a US system that the UK cannot use without US cooperation [0], it seems entirely appropriate that the USA gets to decide if the UK has nukes.
[0] Yes, the UK can fire them without US approval, but the actual hardware is maintained and supported by the USA, and they have to be shipped to the USA regularly for maintenance. If the USA decided that the UK should not have nukes, there's not a lot the UK could do about it, the Trident system would have to be scrapped entirely and replaced with some completely different system. Which the UK doesn't really have the capability to do and it would cost a fortune to acquire that capability.
That's only the delivery method, the warheads are UK-designed and built.
So yes, if the US withdrew support then the existing nuclear program would be pretty fucked for a while, but the US couldn't unilaterally de-nuclearise the UK.
Who else on the planet would have the effective power to possibly even think about who should and shouldn't have them, while plausibly being able to do anything about it?
Then you're in no position to throw rocks. The US is currently humiliating itself on the world stage in a fashion that makes Brexit look positively sage in comparison.
Given how the situations w.r.t Ukraine & Iran escalated, the US is the only country that has specifically and publicly demonstrated it's inability on both counts.
We can't give Ukraine their nukes back because they were decommissioned (and they were rotting at the time), but there'd be no nation more deserving.
Corollary: no individual nation is able to shoulder such responsibilities.
This is an entirely delusional twitter-brain take.
Despite its problems, the UK is still a sixth largest economy, a cultural powerhouse (how many Hollywood actors are British?), with a lot of soft power, a capable and currently renewed nuclear arsenal (Astraea and Dreadnought are on track), a globe-spanning network of alliances (from AUKUS to Japan deploying to the UK first time in their history to being one of the closest and most unwavering allies for Ukraine), and a constitutionally healthy and adaptive system of government (we just passed another constitutional change and it's not a big deal, we can just do that).
Frankly, this meme stinks of projection. Going from a shining city on a hill to a place where public executions by state backed paramilitaries are just another partisan talking point, that starts Special Military Operations with no plan or goal, that threatens to annex territory of its allies in about a year is an achievement. I guess projecting this free fall on the UK makes living through it more bearable.
The Yanks see in the UK their own inevitable decline. The British Empire disappeared, and every time they turn on the TV and see their retarded paedophile in chief struggling to express even one single coherent thought, they must surely know they are witnessing the end of their own empire.
They're just lashing out, emperor has no clothes, their empire is collapsing, and those who are paying any attention at all, are fully aware of it. All they have left is to go on the internet and shit on Europe for daring to regulate their precious social media companies (that elsewhere they generally admit we would be better off without). They are desperately clutching onto this tech-company-based nationalism. It's absolutely pathetic.
>Despite its problems, the UK is still a sixth largest economy, ... Going from a shining city on a hill to a place where public executions by state backed paramilitaries are just another partisan talking point, that starts Special Military Operations with no plan or goal, that threatens to annex territory of its allies in about a year is an achievement.
Why would you use the economy to defend the UK's status and then point to a bunch of non economy stuff to try to knock the US? The US is the largest and has been for awhile. Isn't that what mattered to you? Plus, pointing out that a bunch of prominent UK residents leave to participate in US industry hardly seems a point in favor of how well the UK is doing.
They didn't put it very well but they're right that being the 6th largest economy, and likely to become the 5th or 4th quite soon puts a hole in the "economically irrelevant" accusation.
It's not "knocking the US", it's an example of the (likely, projected) decline. The size of the economy is an example of why "irrelevant" is delusional. Two different points.
The "prominent UK residents" don't "leave" the UK. Benedict Cumberbatch lives in London, despite constantly starring in Hollywood films. It's an example of the UK culturally punching way above its weight in proportion to its population.
> it's an example of the (likely, projected) decline
Again, you just used the present size of a nation's economy to argue that a nation isn't in decline when someone was talking about the ongoing decline of a nations politics, economy, and culture. It seems odd to me you're able to, for other countries, understand that the present moment can be viewed with both historical and likely future context.
>The "prominent UK residents" don't "leave" the UK. Benedict Cumberbatch lives...
Plenty move, but that wasn't the point I think anyone was making. If I wanted to say they were moving to the US, I would have said that instead of "leave to participate in US industry". And all of that ignores that the original commenter was talking about the decline of British media rather than saying that they're aren't talented Brits. It's not like they they're saying the UK had a bunch of great actors ten years ago and they suddenly died. Them working in American industry rather than the UK producing it own is, I'm pretty sure, the sort of point the commenter you replied to was making.
It’s kind of sad to read your arrogant and xenophobic rantings. I’m not sure you’re really down for the sort of inclusive and open minded discussion that normally takes place here.
Living here the decline is tangible. And this is West Oxfordshire; not one of the poorer parts of the country.
An example in microcosm: a local village suffered road flooding due to failed maintenance of water pipes. Our rent-seeking privatized water company effected the minimum repair required by regulation.
The next section of old pipe burst almost immediately, flooding the road further for most of January, utterly destroying the surface, through the road base in many places. Even at a crawl it's difficult to avoid tyre damage.
Over a month later the water repairs were effected. Then shortly after some local roadwork notification signs were put up.
Those expecting repairs to the moonscaped road were disappointed: instead the relentless bureaucracy of British local government installed traffic calming measures on top of the broken road, as the work had already been booked and could not be stopped by any means as even basic roadworks lack any degree of dynamism in their execution.
All this still needs to be made right. These small scale failures will compound and compound until the entire state is drowned in the consequence of its incompetence.
> An example in microcosm: a local village suffered road flooding due to failed maintenance of water pipes
Your example only compares against the UK past.
It has zero relevancy because it says nothing about relative change against other countries.
Anecdotally for the USA, I went to New Orleans last year, and I was stunned at the rotting infrastructure. Coming from New Zealand, the USA seems to be trying to copy the trajectory of Argentina.
Then again, I see serious problems in my hometown (e.g. sewage treatment plant) and country (e.g. big problems with rail, ferry, air, electricity, 3 waters). Apart from the societal issues that it seems all countries are facing.
I know what a rebuilt city looks like, because I come from one. Hurricane Katrina was 2005. Christchurch Earthquake was 2011. In my opinion, my home town has recovered better and faster from destruction than New Orleans has.
I also live within a floodzone. There is a high probability I will learn how we deal with flooding in the future (different flooding - shallower and lacking the winds and hopefully better pre-planning for avoiding harm).
> everything looked brand new
Absolutely not, to me.
And the conversation is regarding infrastructure. A bunch of Christchurch infrastructure is brand new.
Fyi, this is not true. California has them but they are not routine, and are a function of internal political dysfunction that is quite unique to California. The grid here is still extremely fragile, and vulnerable to e.g. cyberattack and other disasters, but let's not get carried away.
We need to recognise the difference between the GP rant and what you're describing. The austerity is undeniably still reverberating through the country. It will take years for this ship to turn around, although it is being turned around. For example, in just about a month we're getting European-style rents with the Renter's Rights Act, which is transformational. We can and should do better, and everyone can contribute to solving those issues, but after a decade of nothing the necessary changes are finally being implemented.
But the rant is entirely counterfactual. Britain is a very rich country with beautiful and recovering nature, a healthy and educated population, one of the more capable armies in Europe, a functioning deterrent, and a relatively healthy political system. We just got two new parties becoming credible threats to the "main" two (regardless of the parties' views, the political competition itself is a much healthier situation than the American duopoly)! We just abolished hereditary peers, which is a constitutional change (and it can just be done)! Below the everyday media noise, we're doing alright as a democracy.
The UK is still a respected "brand" in most of the world despite what chronically online people say. British education is the most sought-after in many countries for example.
I would normally agree but if you see Brexit and the kind of "people" that are getting ready to take over power (Reform UK), I do have to say I understand some of this sentiment.
> they should probably be required to give them up to some country that has a shot at remaining a stable and predictable geopolitical entity over the next century.
I really hope this wasn't posted by an American....
These are the "duties" Ofcom is demanding of site owners and operators:
- to conduct a suitable and sufficient illegal content risk assessment;
- to use proportionate measures to prevent individuals encountering priority illegal content;
- to use proportionate systems and processes to minimise the length of time priority illegal content is present;
- to swiftly take down illegal content when it becomes aware of it;
- to specify in its terms of service how individuals are to be protected from illegal content; and relating to content reporting and complaints procedures in relation to illegal content.
Reads to me like they're legally prescribing that all web content is to be automatically fed into AI models in order to assess the content's appropriateness and "risk", and then "swiftly" censor the content if it's deemed too risky or illegal.
That's the only method that will scale, can be done "swiftly" and won't have the government kicking down your door if someone posts something illegal on your platform while you're sleeping or on vacation.
It means you have to do your paperwork so you can’t then pretend you “didn’t know” csam can exist on your website when repeatedly pointed out.
As far as regulation goes this is pretty light and allowing. It’s more annoying than not having any laws at all sure, but zero regulation regime failed (from the point of view of powers that be).
Next on the escalation ladder is govt writing the rules for you that you either take or leave
I don't get it. Shouldn't this be done at the ISP level? (Well, arguably it should not be done at all, but...)
Otherwise each company, everywhere in the world, no matter how small, has to follow the arbitrary demands of every nation state? How does that make any sense?
It’s really kind of unfortunate that people ignore the fact that the ruling powers seem to always follow the same MO, yet everyone falls for it over and over again; first they go after the dregs that they’ve made beyond the pale for pearl clutching polite company, e.g., I think over a year ago, when the German government first went after Gab followed by something like, if not Ofcom itself.
I don’t recall the outcome exact outcome or what has happened since, but I think Gab basically told them off in a similar way, i.e., “ummmm, this is America, silly Europeans” and may have even submitted the foreign demand letters to Congress and for whatever reason may have still geo-blocked the UK and at the same time has blocked VPN IPs because they found it effective at blocking pornography and the bad actors who emanated from a certain country. The effect though is that they’ve effectively barred the UK from participating in free speech in America if that’s still the current state of things. I suspect that is exactly what the tyrannical forces have worked out too, and which is why they’re demanding something other than just geo-blocking.
If you agree to VPN blocking, you effectively enforce the geo-block as well as unmasking users for five-eye de facto domestic surveillance. But they only came after those horrible horrible “Nazis” that insist on their rights to free speech, “…and I did not speak out.”
The point is, regardless of what one thinks of Gab, the powerful and tyrannical elements clearly go after those the mainstream population hates due to the two minutes of hate, so to say, which people have been conditioned to loathe; where the tyrants refine their tactics and the strategy, and practice and normalize the process for when they are ready to go after the mainstream populace… which seems to be approaching. And then the mainstream people are shocked and surprised because they believe it all came out of nowhere, when they just ignored it all along.
This of course is not just limited to the digital realm, the tyrannical forces will always come after scapegoats, and the exposed and low hanging fruit, or and even deliberately cause the “troublemakers” to identify themselves so they can be tracked, monitored, and picked off if need be.
This is not new, and people seem to fall for the same tricks over and over and over.
The fact that unsympathetic targets are the first to be targeted need not be viewed as strategic. Other targets would be defended, which is a reason not to target them. Unsympathetic targets lack defenses and are therefore most likely to be targeted, all other things being equal.
We grant fully that it’s a slippery slope, ofc. But is the end of the slope in mind at the outset? Maybe, but not certainly.
I don't think it needs to be seen as "strategic", beyond that most effective people start with a proof of concept that is low risk. You are right, being pragmatic is surely the primary motivation to follow that pattern, but that too is inherently strategic. The strategy being; plan, test deploy the process, measure responses, adjust, redeploy, etc. We know this inherently strategic process even if it is a bit different outside of software development.
> People really should turn to medical professionals and not internet strangers for help.
For your own safety, you are to only discuss your health with NHS certified healthcare providers and no one else. Doing so with others can lead to unprovoked, unsanctioned and dangerous anecdotes, advice and memes. Worse, you might find community and make friends with people who have similar life experiences, which can distract from your state sanctioned treatment plan. This extends to your friends and spouse, they might mean well, but they are not medical professionals.
Your health is your private matter, let's keep it that way!
Looking through that article, one of the examples is "The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post."
"The wife of a Conservative councillor has been jailed for 31 months after calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire."
This is pretty clear incitement to violence.
The UK has problems, but it's not very useful to throw all of these cases together to make a big number, it really rather undermines the point.
(edit - looking at the video posted in a sibling comment is enlightening. The number actually convicted of anything is around ~400 and this includes a lot of direct incitement to violence, stalking and all sorts. Which are similarly illegal in the US. The US right-wing talking points are as usual a load of crap.
None of which is to say I think the UK has things right, and that number of arrests is clearly a problem in itself, but as usual the "OH MY GOD look at what's happening over there! Muh free speech!" from the US commenters is hypocritical and myopic)
> We’re not a police state like the US, there’ll be no action unless there is irrefutable proof, of which they’ll have none and can acquire none unless the person readily admits it.
A gf asked to go on a trip to England/Ireland and I told her I will go to Brazil or Colombia before I go to the UK. Im not going to risk getting in trouble because I made a post online or discussed immigration or trans people in the wrong way according to them.
> "Im not going to risk getting in trouble because I made a post online or discussed immigration or trans people in the wrong way according to them."
This is a mis-truth which has been spread by Joe Rogan and his ilk. Political speech is very much protected in UK law. You won't get in "trouble" if you make posts against immigration or trans people. J.K. Rowling and Ricky Gervais certainly haven't been locked up.
Yes, there have been cases, such as the infamous Cowley Hill School case where Hertfordshire police arrested a couple over their posts in a school WhatsApp group. However, such arrests are illegal and in that case the police had to apologise and pay compensation.
What will get you in trouble in the UK is threatening violence against people or posting hate speech that encourages others to do so. But this is also true in the USA and in most countries.
> Political speech is very much protected in UK law
With "protected political speech" being defined as which flavour of the established, incompetent elite you prefer this year.
People have been arrested in the UK for holding blank signs within vicinity of Palestine marches. People have been arrested over protesting Charles' coronation. To say nothing of thousands of people arrested every year over tweets.
Political speech is basically criminalised in the UK at this point. This is not an establishment worth any of our respect.
> arrested in the UK for holding blank signs within vicinity of Palestine marches.
Got a source on this one?
Supporting Palestine in the UK has never been illegal. Supporting the specific group "Palestine Action" has been as they were for a while a proscribed terrorist organisation due to what was (IMHO) some property crimes committed against defense contractors by some of their members. Totally wrong, and has now been struck down in the courts, but saying "you can't support palestine" is also wrong.
> Thousands of people arrested every year over tweets.
The source I saw on this one had clear examples of violent threats and calls to set buildings full of people on fire, so I'm not sure this is clear either.
> You won't get in "trouble" if you make posts against immigration or trans people.
Not to say anyone would actually get in trouble for just some opinion posts, but I don't know why you went with "against" here, I think "for" is the more likely one to make the current UK (or US) government upset.
> What will get you in trouble in the UK is threatening violence against people or posting hate speech that encourages others to do so. But this is also true in the USA and in most countries.
The line is quite thin and ambiguous though. If they want to get someone they will and find that various remarks “encourage violence”.
Almost any opinion that isn't nice can be argued to encourage violence.
I just went there as German and it actually went really smooth. They just asked me why I'm visiting and I said to visit a friend/tourism, took less than 2 minutes. So I think this is FUD
That's usually how it goes with the US as well but every now and then they decide to search someone's electronic devices.
Of course AFAIK this can happen pretty much everywhere at this point so your only hope is being a citizen of a country that doesn't allow it for locals (such as the US) and then not traveling. Or wipe your devices prior to traveling.
In those countries, you'll probably have more to fear for your physical security from non-governmental threats than the other way around.
But given the increasingly dystopian state of many countries worldwide, you may also encounter difficulties related to administrative burden and systems with not enough human oversight and override for exceptional situations.
Nobody was arrested. Plenty of people got fired from private sector jobs. Your employer not wanting to be associated with your terrible behavior isn't the same as the government jailing people for the "wrong" opinion.
From "Retired cop jailed for 37 days over Charlie Kirk meme sues, saying his First Amendment rights were violated"[1]:
> A retired Tennessee law enforcement officer was held in jail for more than a month this fall after police arrested him over a Facebook post of a meme related to the September assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Okay, here goes. You can tell when someone is acting in bad faith when they talk about a law that has been in force and enforced since the 1960s is something new.
Laws can be in existence for decades before they are weaponized against people.
It's illegal to have most eBay/Amazon bulbs on your car because they are not DOT approved.
If someday they start impounding cars crossing state borders with light bars, fog lights, and LEDs of races they don't want in that state... Someone like you will say "you're just making stuff up, that law has been on effect since 1961."
>Ofcom really thinks that their laws apply globally.
Ofcom is probably full of non technical people who have been given a specific set of (stupid) instructions including that if its on the internet, its a product being sold to the UK.
“Parliamentary supremacy means that Parliament can legislate for all persons and all places. If it enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence.”(Ivor Jennings)
It is also accepted that enforcement can be an issue if the law is an absurd overreach (like the UK criminalising smoking in the streets of Paris).
I think it's good that the UK is trying this right now. It's bound to set a precedent, and the UK isn't powerful enough for that precedent to be in favor of the idea that you have to follow other countries' laws if you're on the internet. Doubly so with Trump II making freedom of speech and overbearing European regulations a political issue.
If America introduced a law like this, especially the strong, late-aughts, pre-Trump America, I bet most countries would just cave in, just like most caved in when copyright and AML/KYC laws were concerned. Hell, Swicerland basically abolished anonymous bank accounts, something which the country was famous for, just because the US wanted them to. I don't think we'll see a similar resolution here.
I mean, IP meant a lot more in 2006 than in it does now in 2026. The IP economy has basically died, so of course IP/Data based trade deals no longer make sense.
Like most matters concerning the UK: unless your feet are touching their territory, the correct response to their actions, inactions, or very existence, is: "fuck off"
Well they technically do, parliamentary sovereignty means that the UK can, "legislate to ban smoking on the streets of Paris." There are no limits to what laws they can write, even ones that are out of their jurisdiction, absurd, or unenforceable.
These departments are full of delusional maniacs, that at home are doormats and nobodies, but once they cross the floor of the department, they think they own the world. They sit by the desk and think who's day they can ruin today.
Meanwhile the UK is gnawed by corruption, scams and whatnot, yet there is no one able to do anything about. But harassing some Canadian forum? First to serve!
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 offshore gambling websites in 2021.
People going "Those Crazy Brits! Thank God That'll Never Happen Here!" seem pretty ill-informed.
I have worked for a company that was threatened by the US to not offer services to several countries or face criminal charges in the US. I'm talking about a saas nothing strange.
We were too small and bent, also US customers were 30% of the total which made it a non choice.
You're serving US customers. You are doing business in the US, and therefore you are subject to US law. What about when a customer requests a refund, do you just pretend US consumer protection laws don't apply to that customer? Or to turn your logic around, can American corporations do business in Europe while just completely ignoring the GDPR and all other European laws?
Laws are not a buffet. You choose to do business in a market, you've opted to be regulated in that market.
You are absolutely free to sell your services to whoever you want, but the US is equally free to refuse to allow you to operate domestically if you're breaking their laws (and otherwise make your life difficult if you e.g. rely on US banking infrastructure). If you want to do business in Iran, don't expect to do business in the US.
You may be interested to learn about the EU Blocking Statute which is designed to protect EU companies from certain US sanctions:
> The European Union does not recognise the extra-territorial application of laws adopted by third countries and considers such effects to be contrary to international law.
(yes the irony is palpable)
> The blocking statute prohibits compliance by EU operators with any requirement or prohibition based on the specified foreign laws.
It is illegal to comply with certain US sanctions in the EU. This is most likely what GP
is talking about.
Zero difference. If someone is selling children's toys, and 30% of her customers are in the US, and then it turns out her toys are made entirely of lead and asbestos, should she not face US criminal penalties?
You choose to do business in a jurisdiction, you bind yourself to their laws. That means all laws, not just ones you like, or think that are relevant to your business. Laws are not a buffet.
Don't do business in jurisdictions where you feel like you cannot comply with domestic law. No one is requiring you to do business in the US. People choose to do business in the US so they can profit from US customers, and that's totally fine, but doesn't come with some magical immunity to US law.
1. This isn't about business but charges. There's no way in hell US can e.g. prosecute non us citizens from trading with Cuba e.g. the embargo applies to US individuals and companies. The rest of the world, e.g. European countries, have normal relations with Cuba and nobody gives two damns about the embargo.
2. The same thing happens in reverse and applies to US companies doing business overseas.
Anyone who sells to my enemies is my enemy. You yourself can be subject to embargoes.
Francesca Albanese cannot do banking with banks from her own country because the US said so. Read: third parties that have relations with the US are barred from doing business with you or else risk being blacklisted too.
> This isn't about business but charges. There's no way in hell US can e.g. prosecute non us citizens from trading with Cuba
Sure it can. It can do whatever it wants in its domestic courts. Turkmenistan can prosecute you and me right now for failure to pay insufficient deference to dear leader. Whether this impacts us in any way is the actual question. We presumably do not want to do business in Turkmenistan. But the OP wants to do business in the US. Ergo, the OP is subject to US law, irrespective of what he thinks US law should look like or what its limits ought to be.
OP doesn't have to do business in the US at all and be completely and utterly untouched by US law - he won't be extradited anywhere unless the offence in question is also an offence in his own country, which as you point out, the Cuban embargo (etc) isn't. This is how you and I stay safe from the many Turkmenistani indictments hanging over us.
This is not a case of someone bravely standing up for justice and freedom, this is a case of someone wanting to profit from US customers but somehow have total immunity from US law. And I'd respectfully point out that if the countries were reversed, and we were talking about e.g. Russia, the European countries would be apoplectic about anyone doing business there. Imagine a Brazilian company selling drone motors to Russia. Can its executives expect to travel freely through the EU without fear of arrest? Do business in the EU?
> In any case, since you're unaware, Canada and EU have legislation that prohibits Canadian and European companies from obliging with US embargo of Cuba. That is, I can face criminal charges in Europe or Canada for refusing services to Cuba.
Yet almost everyone in those countries falls inline with US law because frankly the US is the exception and it's laws de facto apply in Canada and the EU.
Uhhh... the person whose company has 30% of its customers in the US. See above.
> You sound like the lunatic president you have
> You're the usual case thinking US is an exception to the rules, where it can dictate it's terms beyond its borders and get away with the opposite.
Cool. I'm not American. I'm literally just quoting International Private Law (aka Conflict of Laws) to you. And I'm doing so while being careful to give other examples from other countries.
I've literally not once said I approve of any of these laws. But this seems to be the difference between you and me - I don't bend the rules to get to outcomes I like. You sell to Cuba, or you sell to the US. Do I like that? No. Is that the law? Yes. One would not be very effective in international business if they failed to realise this kind of thing.
> You're the usual case thinking US is an exception to the rules
And, conversely, I think you're the usual case in trying to make the US a unique big bad, when they're doing absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in this area, and certainly nothing that Europe doesn't constantly do when it regulates for foreigners and foreign businesses trying to interact with or through the EU. (Something the EU does more of, proudly and loudly, than anyone else on Earth.)
I think one advantage is you can directly appeal a court ruling. To challenge an administrative order you need to sue the government. In some cases, you need to sue the government in a separate trial first, in order to get permission to start suing them for cause in another one.
Another advantage as the other reply has mentioned is that courts have broad authority but must narrow the effect of their rulings to the minimum necessary to address the suit. In this case it would certainly lead to 4Chan being blocked by UK ISPs by order of a UK court. I think even 4Chan would be fine with that.
The US arrested and imprisoned the bosses of multiple UK-based gambling sites that were not only legal in the UK – they were listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Yes. Hollywood is mad, but piracy sites are still up and unblocked. Book publishers are mad, but Anna's Archive persists on CCTLDs.
The US by and large doesn't censor websites even if the content is illegal in the US. They'll get a warrant and seize servers or domains if it's in the country, or maybe poke international law enforcement for cooperation, but it doesn't really extend beyond that.
> It is further ordered that all ISPs (including without limitation those set forth in Exhibit B hereto) and any other ISPs providing services in the United States shall block access to the Website at any domain address known today (including but not limited to those set forth in Exhibit A hereto) or to be used in the future by the Defendants (“Newly Detected Websites”) by any technological means available on the ISPs’ systems. The domain addresses and any Newly Detected Websites shall be channeled in such a way that users will be unable to connect and/or use the Website, and will be diverted by the ISPs’ DNS servers to a landing page operated and controlled by Plaintiffs (the “Landing Page”).
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?
Of course, because they're not proposing "apply our laws in our country" they are proposing "apply our laws in another country". If you want to enforce this law you need to do it the CCP way (punish your ISPs for alllowing it into the country and monitor your citizens for accessing it) because you don't have the jurisdiction to enforce it otherwise. Let's not forget how many UK criminals have made fun of Kim Jong Un's haircut and are getting away with it because the UK is such a lawless place that doesn't enforce DPRK law.
If a country has media or broadcast standards laws, and you distribute or broadcast content in that country that violates those laws, that’s on you. The country can just fine you if you chose not to comply. Just the same as they would if you were doing it while living in that country. You’re not obliged to care about the fine if you don’t live there and never intend to travel there. But if you do then you’re going to be subject to their laws at that point, for violating those laws when you distributed that content in that country.
Then why doesn't the US seize the domains of the Iranian government? They should be able to just seize every .ir domain, if your accusation is correct. The fact is it isn't. It looks that way because most people blindly choose .com without thinking about what country the TLD registry is located in.
>However, a lawyer representing the company - which has previously said it won't pay such fines - has responded to the demand with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster.
>The latest image is not the first picture of a hamster lawyers for 4chan have sent in reply to Ofcom
amazing. same energy as the pirate bay telling dreamworks to sodomize themselves. i cant help but laugh at the absurdness of it.
> Messages sent to 4chan's press email went unreturned. One of the two dozen or so alleged moderators purportedly exposed in the hack wrote back using their 4chan email address to say that the site had released a "video statement." The user then pointed Reuters to an unrelated, explicit four-minute video montage. A request for further information was followed by a link to a different video with similar content.
Unlike TPB founders who were convicted in 2009 because copyright infringement also violates swedish law, the 4chan lawyers are correct that they are breaking no U.S. law. 1A provides broad protections.
The response from Ofcom doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
If you are to sell a toy in the UK you must be a British company. (and must pay VAT and comply with British safety standards).
If a consumer buys from overseas and imports a product then they do not have British consumer protections. Which is why so much aliexpress electrical stuff is dangerous (expecially USB chargers) yet it continues to be legally imported.
Just, no british retailer would be allowed to carry it without getting a fine.
That’s not really true. The Ofcom representative said “not allowed” not “unable to”. Even if cocaine is legal in my country, I’m “not allowed” to sell it to British consumers by the power of the British authorities. The British authorities may not have legal authority in my jurisdiction but they can take action in their own, including issuing penalties and stopping my deliveries at the border.
If we want to base the argument on technical nuance, 4chan are sending their packets to the U.K. just as the cocaine dealer would be sending packets (of cocaine) to their buyers in the U.K.
They're replying to an externally-established connection. The packets they're sending are going to a local router.
If you posted cocaine from your cocaine-legal country to an address where it was illegal, and you followed all the regular customs labelling rules, I'm not sure you should be liable. And you shouldn't be extradited either. Even the UK demands that extradition offences would have been criminal had they been committed in the UK. Now I'm sure in practice, you'd find yourself in trouble immediately but I don't think it's fair.
The ramifications of laws like this is everyone needs to be Geo-IP check every request, adhere to every local law. It's not the Internet we signed up for.
I would strongly disagree with that, in the sense of the layer of communication that 4chan operate at. I would argue that 4chan aren't sending packets to the UK any more than I'm currently sending my keystrokes to wherever you are reading this from - these actions are performed at a different layer.
If the UK wants to block packets from across the pond, they should (but I hope they don't) do it via a Great Firewall, rather than expecting random foreign websites to do it for them.
I think (but am not sure) that there are long established postal laws in most territories about sending “obscene” material through the mail. I think this was used to prosecute pornography publishers in earlier times. BUT you needed to (a) intercept mail and (b) have a good reason and (c) get a warrant to open (interfere with) that mail.
Possessing pornography was a separate issue which may or may not be allowed. Typically (I think) authorities went after publishers not consumers - because they were easier targets to pin down.
Which would seem to imply that if you’re sending encrypted traffic at the request of a recipient the as a publisher of “obscene” material then unless you are delivering very clearly illegal content to a user then you should not prosecuted.
I haven’t got a single source for anything I’m saying, so I might be entirely wrong - I’m simply going off half-remembered barely-facts. So please do argue with me!
The destination of the packet where it is sent, just as a toy sent from the U.S. to a customer in the U.K. is sent to the U.K. rather than the local Fedex store.
The user mails you a box with a note that says "1kg of 4chan packets pls", and a prepaid return label to an address local to you. You put the packets in the box and kick it down the street to its "destination". Job done as far as you know.
The place you sent the box then repacks it and mails it to the UK. Somehow the UK thinks that you and only you have broken the law.
It is easier than that: in Germany for example swastikas are forbidden. But they don't prosecute or fine web pages served in other countries. Or books for that matter. In some countries communist symbology is prohibited, yet they don't fine US web pages for having them. And don't forget the Great Firewall: China blocks pages, and get along with some webs to tune what they serve. But you can publish Tiananmen massacre images in your european hosted web, and they don't fine you: it is their problem to limit access, and they understand it.
France stopped Yahoo! from selling nazi memorabilia in France (because it's illegal to do that in France). This actually went through the US courts and they agreed, mostly [0].
It's kinda voluntary, though, there's no international agreement about this.
Just to clarify for casual readers: there’s no blanket ban on swastikas in Germany. You can use it for satire or historical reasons. You’re going to find a lot of swastikas on the German Wikipedia for example.
This isn't strictly true, major magazines like Der Spiegel can use it for 'satire' or some such nonsense, it's basically at the whim of those in power as CJ Hopkins learned, his satirical use resulted in him being perversely punished, but state aligned magazines get a pass.
Imagine this scenario, a major G7 country declares:
All bytes sent to a computer on their soil count as a transaction on their soil.
And the end client being on a VPN is not a defence UNLESS the website owner attempts to verify the user's identity.
Immediately have to pay local taxes, conform to local laws.
Unless you keep all your assets in the US and never fly abroad, our shady website operator is exposing them self to real risk of being snatched by police somewhere or having their assets seized.
The only thing stopping that from happening is the trade agreements the Americans have put in place, the very trade agreements everyone's now looking at and thinking 'what are these really worth?'.
Yeah, it's fantasy and it won't happend but it could.
The internet is not free, it runs on sufferance of a bunch of governments and some, like China, already lock it down.
The more America, who probably gains the most from it right now, plays with fire, the more risk something like this crazy scenario happens.
Another more plausible scenario is countries simply start repealing safe harbor laws. End of YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/etc. in those countries overnight.
This is basically a mutually assured destruction scenario.
The US is not going to let all US companies get fined out of retaliation, so there would be more retaliation from the US against the EU, and everyone else. In the end everyone loses, except for China, which as you mentioned is not stupid enough to play these games and decided to simply pick a lane.
China locks down the Internet and blocks foreign players (to varying levels of success). They don't reach overseas to prosecute foreign executives or fine Meta for not removing Party-critical content from Facebook. Of all the parties that could be involved in this censorship drama, China is somehow the most honest.
You realize that the EU has had tariffs on US goods for a very long time right? I'm not saying tariffs are good, but its hypocritical to protest against behavior in which you are currently engaging.
I know the tariffs are the bad thing of the moment (and they certainly are capricious), but I don't think you understand how much worse things can get.
> Another more plausible scenario is countries simply start repealing safe harbor laws.
It already happened via GDPR to some degree. CJEU ruled in December that platforms can qualify as controllers for personal data published in user-generated advertisement. The given reasoning was basically that the platform determined the means and the purposes of the processing.
Due to that they can be liable for article 82 damages.
Howard Marx was arrested in Spain and extradited to the US on RICO charges by the DEA for something like this. It seemed like extraterritorial action by the US when I read about it.
LOL, classic. Everyone thinks they are the one being picked on. Plenty of people would argue that what you say here is actually the polar opposite of what happens on HN.
The people who think incest porn should be banned are loud and proud in their beliefs. They’ll put up posters, tell their MPs, respond to surveys, and appear in political debates.
The people who support incest porn are a lot less talkative.
As such our windsock government with no strong beliefs does what the survey says is most popular.
The people who think incest porn should be banned are loud and proud in their beliefs. They’ll put up posters, tell their MPs, respond to surveys, and appear in political debates.
The people who support incest porn are a lot less talkative.
I think there is an argument to made the pornography in general is harmful.
But to single out one single type of porn strikes me as... very odd. Maybe politicians can list, explicitly, all the other porn genres they find acceptable or agreeable to them, as a kind of compare and contrast exercise.
> So-called "barely legal" pornography and content depicting sexual relationships between step-relatives are set to be banned amid efforts to regulate intimate image sharing.
> Peers agreed by a majority of one to ban videos and images depicting relationships that would not be allowed in real life.
> They also agreed by 142 votes to 140, majority two, to bring intimate pictures and videos of adults pretending to be children in line with similar images of real children.
The same principles apply around the world. The U.S. recently invaded a sovereign nation and abducted its democratically elected leader because that leader was ostensibly involved in shipping cocaine to the U.S.
So what? The only reason the U.S. did this is because it can. What will the UK do when 4chan tells its online regulator to go suck a d***, send in James Bond?
The only election for the president that matters is the electoral college. What the citizens are voting on is a referendum to choose the electors (and in some states it is not binding). You might try to argue that the referendum was rigged somehow, but rigging the electoral college voting is even less plausible.
Trump was talking about how Elon campaigned for him for a month in Pennsylvania and said he knows all about the voting counting machines in Pennsylvania.
Even if Musk did something in Pennsylvania, Trump still would have won the electoral college vote.
I think the good faith argument is that Musk confirmed they were secure so that the election wasn't stolen from Trump. But frankly Musk is too much of an idiot to steal an election or make sure it is secure so I don't know how to take it...
Then somebody needs to let the government know, because the relevant 1981 act is "[a]n Act to make fresh provision about citizenship and nationality". In that 'British subjects' are a quite limited subset of citizens. Most British people are citizens, not subjects.
It depends. If it causes anxiety to someone, it is illegal. Pictures of drugs could fall into this category.
> Current law allows for restrictions on threatening or abusive words or behaviour intending or likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress or cause a breach of the peace, sending another any article which is indecent or grossly offensive with an intent to cause distress or anxiety,
I don't wish to fall down the rabbit hole of trying to defend U.K. laws so I'll keep this short. You're being intellectually dishonest. That page does not back up your assertion. You have said "If it causes anxiety to someone, it is illegal" but the page says "intending or likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress" which has a different meaning.
This is a meaningless standard since anyone can claim they were alarmed or distressed and there's no way to invalidate such a subjective claim. I can say I'm alarmed by your comment, does that mean it's valid for Ofcom to fine you?
Again, that's not what the law states. The law is not broken when someone is alarmed or distressed by a comment. The law is broken if you post something that is "likely or intending to" which is not judged by the victim. If you walk into a police station in England and tell them that this comment on Hacker News alarmed and distressed you, it doesn't matter, it is up to the legal system to judge my intent, i.e: whether my comment was "likely to" or "intending to" cause alarm and distress.
Whether you agree with the law or not, it is important to be accurate when discussing it. The U.S. vs. U.K. (not) free speech law discussion online so often seems to frame them as fundamentally different, but they are on the same spectrum. The go-to example of the limits of free speech in context of the U.S. legal system is "Shouting fire in a crowded theater". The U.K. laws are the same in principle but a little further along the spectrum.
That's a horrific law. Criticizing certain religions and institutions are likely to offend many people. Criticizing a politician or criminal or bureaucrat is quite likely to cause distress to them and their supporters.
> The go-to example of the limits of free speech in context of the U.S. legal system is "Shouting fire in a crowded theater". The U.K. laws are the same in principle but a little further along the spectrum.
They are completely different in principle. The principle in the US is preventing the inciting of violence or a situation that could cause physical injury to others. In the UK it has become about protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it.
Like I said, it is a spectrum. You draw the line at physical violence, an entirely arbitrary line, whereas the U.K. goes further and continues to emotional violence.
And before you argue that there is no such thing as emotional violence: do you agree that some emotional harm can be worse than some physical harm? I'd much rather be punched than subjected to the worst emotional trauma I've experienced in my life.
> In the UK it has become about protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it.
I'm not going to defend U.K. laws but it is patently absurd to say something like this is in the context of a conversation about U.S. vs. U.K. free speech laws when the U.S. courts allow schools to ban certain books because of "protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it". Heaven forbid a Florida student learns about homosexuality, won't anyone think of the parents?
> You draw the line at physical violence, an entirely arbitrary line, whereas the U.K. goes further and continues to emotional violence.
It must appear as a spectrum to you because you've been taken in by propaganda used by authoritarians and fundamentalists to justify using actual violence and censorship to crush dissent and criticism.
There is no such thing as emotional violence. It's hurt feelings. There is no "before" about it, and we don't need to agree on anything, you're just wrong.
> And before you argue that there is no such thing as emotional violence: do you agree that some emotional harm can be worse than some physical harm? I'd much rather be punched than subjected to the worst emotional trauma I've experienced in my life.
Non sequitur.
A society where people are reliant on the government to protect them from having their feelings hurt by hearing other people's opinions is not a good or sustainable one.
The other thing is that I guarantee you this is totally selectively enforced and prosecuted, which is a hallmark of these kinds of authoritarian laws. People whose thoughts and opinions are considered verboten or threatening to the regime I'm sure have little or no protection of their feelings and sensibilities when they are insulted by other people's opinions and comments.
> I'm not going to defend U.K. laws but it is patently absurd to say something like this is in the context of a conversation about U.S. vs. U.K. free speech laws when the U.S. courts allow schools to ban certain books because of "protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it". Heaven forbid a Florida student learns about homosexuality, won't anyone think of the parents?
I don't know what point you are trying to make here or if you know what freedom of speech is. Government schools and government education bureaucrats developing policies about curriculum and teaching materials doesn't seem to offer useful commentary about freedom of speech, so I really don't know how to respond to your question.
This whole episode is a charade to do exactly that while claiming they are morally superior to China because the UK does it “for the children” while China does it because they are just evil authoritarians.
It's depressingly true; it seems the UK really heading quickly towards a Great Firewall, they've been looking to control VPN use [1] and the top most read article on BBC News right now is yet another public sector cover up of children being sexually abused. [2]
No, I think it is you who is confused. The GP's point is that the BBC article isn't accurate or honest. You seem to have assumed the information in the link was accurate when the proof the GP implied was that the link isn't accurate.
I remember I bought some pills online one time (neutroopics type) they came from like India and were intercepted by customs/I got a letter. It's funny my roommate at the time bought em and didn't get intercepted so was odd.
In hindsight it is dumb to buy random pills and take em.
Commenting on Europe has gotten really lax the last year or so. People kinda will just say whatever pops into their head and it’s some drive-by claim that they haven’t thought about for a second past it popping into their head, presumably because it’s become normalized. (i.e. “but everyone knows Europe goes too far”)
Sometimes it self resolves - as you contributed here, yes, countries limit and interfere and fine other countries businesses, all the time!
I don’t know what yours means though. What electrics are made in the UK? How are they over engineered?
I think they mean the fact that UK plug sockets are earthed, and contain a mechanism that prevents you from shorting live and neutral with a bent fork, even though those safety mechanisms are rarely the last line of defence (hence "over-engineered"… you can probably tell that I disagree with that assessment).
Particularly if AliExpress is paying local VAT and import taxes (or at least dealing with the import paperwork) or even less if it’s from one of their local (UK/EU etc) warehouses
In theory you can still sue for a faulty product under UK consumer protection laws if it was sold by an international retailer, of course enforcement is "difficult".
I used to go on a curated version of 4Chan via Telegram. Yes there is a lot of racism (although it flies in every direction, between every ethnicity you could imagine) but there is also (due to the anonymous nature) some genuinely interesting discussions. I remember one thread about aircraft carriers being of no use being debated by US and UK submarine officers.
There are also some genuinely funny bits. There was a guy in Greece who had found out that as long as he never graduated, he could live a basic life for free at university. His nickname was Dormogenes.
It is the freedom that comes from being anonymous.
To mock and ridicule, yes. to speak your mind, sure, But first and foremost to discuss between true equals, because you can only be judged by what you write, because the value you are bringing to the discussion comes from your words and not from your reputation as the real-world human you are.
Being free to discuss controversial topics without having repercussion to your job or family (which is why doxxing was so frowned upon back then)
Being free to do some stupid childish fun, just for laughs.
Something we still had when it was just forums, even though we did have accounts they did not represent our whole persona, and we could be different people on different platform.
Something that was almost lost for good when normies invaded the internet due to social networks. It's not completely lost yet, and we must fight to keep it.
Unless it was someone else larping as him, as recent as feb this year he posted that he's still living there (apparently got an extension or something). He was arrested, but he got released within a few days.
there is a great clickhole headline that your comment reminds me of
"Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point"
4chan has produced some hilarious/interesting stuff, and they have also driven people to suicide. i suppose it is up to everyone individually to make the value judgement there.
I mean that's pretty vacuously true, since (the community of) "4chan" is a subset of (the total population of) "humanity in general," but it's a stronger and more interesting claim to make about the subculture in question.
If anything, the person you were replying to was intentionally describing how 4chan is less dissimilar to humanity in general than its typical portrayal, so responding with a dismissal that that makes them just the same as everyone else is really just affirming their point.
Whether the data is arriving on a wire, a physical hard drive, DVD, or book, doesn’t really change anything.
It is the role of customs to inspect the physical goods (i.e. physical light) that crosses the border. Especially since these are fiber connections the UK themselves chose to install. 4Chan did not ask to be served to the UK.
North korea and China for example have built extensive infrastructure to inspect and reject imported data.
"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]
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.
> 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.
On the contrary, both of those are very active in going after people who operate websites they don't like from overseas, and/or their family members (who are often easier to get at). They just don't publish legal notices around it.
[sigh] and this is the first (mandated) step in that process. The UK don’t expect 4chan to pay the fine, which means, once the period to pay has expired, they’ll just be blocked instead.
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.
Oddly that's Zuck doing that. And weirdly, the law would only apply to app stores. I think that's a separate movement from what the UK is doing though. That US law is designed to hamstring Meta's competition not restrict political speech but it can be abused the same way I think.
There is no "US law" there are 45+ pending or passed pieces of state legislation, along with the federal Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) that's yet to be passed.
The PACs that push the one specific law you're talking about also push laws in other states, and federally, that are very, very different and draconian.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And then the children of the admin are traveling somewhere and get yoinked as leverage by the UK/EU/Brazil/Whoever and all of the legal arguments in the world won't do you any good. There is only one law that matters in the real world as much as so many westerners want to put their head in the sand about it.
They did not because they were in the honeymoon with the US. They were buying weapons and expensive American services in exchange for security. This era is over.
Today building social network or a cloud provider is a trivial exercise. If the financial incentive is there (aka ban of US services), they will pop out like mushrooms.
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.
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.
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.
Thinking that you are operating in the UK because a UK user can theoretically send packets to you, is similar to thinking a corner store in Japan is operating in the UK because a brit can theoretically get on a plane and fly there to shop.
I run a site in the US and have zero intention of implementing GDPR or geoblocking anyone. If the feckless EU bureaucrats don’t want me serving Europeans, they can either block me or convince their citizens to stop requesting things from my servers. Beyond that, they can fuck off.
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.
We don't have any pro-free-speech political parties, nor a written constitution unfortunately.
I mean there are parties that say they like free speech, but it never extends to the sort of speech they disagree with, or by people of the wrong colour/religion/gender etc.
"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.
Russia is leading the pack in banning VPNs, and they're, surprisingly, getting pretty good at it. They caught my naive attempts at trying to use Tailscale, WireGuard and OpenVPN immediately. People in government are laughing at the populace struggling to bypass their whitelists, blocks and slowdowns, directly saying that "you can have your VPN, it just won't work, and you will never access anything beyond our Russian sites again. Have fun.". Currently trying to find a way around it using some of the new VPN protocols that popped up trying to bypass the Roskomnadzor DPI, and maybe, I certainly hope, that I will even succeed, but either way they're showing that it's technically feasible.
I really hope for all the people in the UK that your country doesn't go down this route.
> "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.
So the UK plans to fine Parisian bars that serve alcohol to British under-18s in France on holiday?
When DoorDash or whatever courier comes to a restaurant, they pick up “order number”. That order number is in essence just private IP. Courier translates it to address=public ip.
It follows that the restaurant writes the address on every delivery. Do they ID each recipient?
In the original example the Parisian bars sells and sends the alcohol.
You’ve modified that to introduce a proxy, DoorDash, that now sells and sends the alcohol. If DoorDash sells it they’re the ones in trouble in your example.
It is relevant. There's a material difference between shipping material overseas and shipping it (and handling it) within the destination country.
If someone mails $ProhibitedItem at a USPS to the UK, then it's the job of local UK police and/or customs to reject the parcel if it is prohibited. It's the UK's problem, de facto if not de jure, because the sender is out of reach.
If someone with a UK subsidiary and local processing center mails $ProhibitedItem to their center and delivers it to someone in the UK, then that's more than the UK's problem.
Absolutely yes. If a government thinks there is stuff for sale its citizens should not be allowed to buy, they don’t stop county x making it or selling it. They block the thing from entering their country.
If the government thinks there are ones and zeros on the internet it’s citizens should not be allowed to see, they should block them from entering the country.
If that were true why is everyone so irritated by this? Just ignore it in that case. But for those people that may want to become subject to British jurisdiction in future or do other business there in future, they will take requests from Ofcom seriously.
Laws apply to actions in the country, they’re not based on citizenship.
If you go to Amsterdam and sleep with a hooker, you didn’t break a law by doing that: despite prostitution (specifically purchasing sex) being illegal in many western countries.
Laws apply to whatever they say they apply to. Limiting their scope to actions in the country, or at least giving precedence to similar foreign laws, is at least as much about the practicalities of enforcement as a matter of principle.
For example, Finland claims jurisdiction over crimes where the action itself or its relevant consequences happen in Finland or the victim is a Finnish citizen, permanent resident, or legal entity. Then there are plenty of rules and exceptions detailing what those principles mean in practice.
That’s not always true, and increasingly less so, particularly the Australians and the crime of child sex tourism. I am sure it’ll be expanded to hate crimes and disturbing the peace laws as well and from there used as a political cudgel to suppress opposition to government policies. At least for now you have to be a citizen of the country but the UK has stated an intention to extradite US citizens for online hate crimes.
Manuel Noriega and “el Chapo” Guzman were both convicted of crimes they committed outside the US but that caused other people to commit crimes inside the US.
Traveling to countries for child sex abuse is illegal and severely punished, although it appears that the law is about the traveling with intent, and not (officially) about the actions that take place overseas: https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/extraterritor... .
Commonwealth countries have extraterritorial jurisdiction. I don't know that it's ever been enforced for something so relatively petty as intoxication or prostitution, but it is nevertheless the law. (Obligatory IANAL though.)
Normally its considered legal to sell but not legal to buy.
Prostitution is primarily conducted by women, and this is a way for them to still seek protection and healthcare while still technically criminalising the practice.
Interestingly if you go to Canada and legally smoke weed then try to go to the US a month later, you can get denied because you did something that is perfectly legal in Canada, but not the US
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.
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.
People keep saying this and it a profound misunderstanding of how the world works.
Nobody likes USA. Nor is that required. It is irrelevant. International politics do not run on emotions. As long as USA is capable of enforcing its will, USA's view will be the one that matters. You may dislike it, but that is what it is.
You don't need to, I have worked with multiple clients that faced this very option.
And yes, the choice was still to do business with US in every case, but I can tell you 100% it was far from a crystal clear easy decision and that the camel is breaking.
> You can make it illegal for your own citizens but you can't regulate a foreign business
The us does that regularly. There's thousands of companies that cannot do business with entities from countries like China or they can face criminal charges in US.
A former company I had as a client, EU based SaaS faced this.
But to be clear, those businesses wanted to make money from the US market. In the case of 4chan, they don't make money from the UK. Somehow, this important distinction keeps getting ignored. You want to sell in the UK market, you have to follow their rules. Same with the US. Somehow the British government doesn't seem to understand this.
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.
I may have a positive personal opinion of the GDPR, but I ignore all GDPR requests for the website I have that you can just visit, because I don't want to be seen as doing business that makes me subject to GDPR
Or these are oranges and apples, and your perspective is simply blurred because you are starting a fight whenever someone wants you to put up your glasses.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I honestly only go there for the same reason and directly after big news. DLSS5's announcement was the first time I went in nearly a year. I wanted to find trolls and I did, and the whole flamewar was the best digital popcorn I had in months.
Germany tried earlier to fine American companies for online posts using a law called "NetzDG".
Gab refused to pay the fine, and it was over.
> The enforcement notice itself highlights the structural tension. Despite acknowledging Gab’s US address, the German government asserts authority to pursue collection, including formal enforcement proceedings, without identifying any German subsidiary or office.
> The payment instructions route funds directly to the German federal treasury, showing that the action is punitive rather than remedial.
> Germany’s approach also reveals the paper trail behind modern censorship enforcement. The fine stems not from a specific post or statement, but from alleged failure to comply with aspects of NetzDG. That procedural hook enables broader regulatory reach, transforming administrative requirements into a mechanism for speech governance.
4chan is already on most of the adult content filters used in the UK at ISP level (along with other such egregious offenders against childhood purity as archive.org) meaning that an explicit request to remove the filter is often required to access it... That it has taken this long to implement a universal block at the ISP level shows that the motive is something other than 'protecting the innocent'.
Meanwhile Google.com shows all manner of depravity if you click “safe search: off”.
I realize there’s a carve out in the legislation for search engines but if the goal is to stop little Timmy finding pictures of an X being Yd up the Z then it is a resolute failure.
The only thing that works with children is transparency and accountability, be that the school firewall or a ban on screen use in secret.
Yep. Just like most of my tax money, it's going to some clown-show just so they can get permission to ban a website where 69% of internet users how to skate through with use of a VPN.
4chan creates another TLD on another IP, just like TPB and the whole show starts again.
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 doesn’t really wanna block websites though, they want websites to either comply or block themselves, both of which legitimizing Ofcom’s extraterritorial enforcement.
> Last month Pornhub restricted access to its website in the UK, blaming the introduction of stricter age checks, and said its traffic had fallen by 77%.
assumedly the rate of consumption hasn't dramatically changed, so the OSA's immediate result has been either the decentralisation of porn providers (towards those small enough to dodge the law for now and be less exacting) or the mass adoption of proxies; I assume the former is the path of least resistance
this is notably the opposite of the feared outcome (which I suspect may be closer to the long-term effect) that the bar to meet the requirements would be so high (possibly involving hiring a lawyer) that smaller social/porn sites get regulated out of existence (see ie. https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lobsters_needs_your_help...)
Sadly what has actually happened is that many niche interest discussion forums have shut their doors due to fears of regulatory repercussion and fines.
Probably a significant part of this is people experiencing friction in trying to access this, realising that they don't actually need to consume pornography, and having this break the cycle of compulsion. Which is the most positive outcome really.
It does seem like if the UK wants to do content filtration (blocking noncompliant websites) they will need to own up to it and set up a China-style firewall, rather than hoping they can badger the service providers into doing it for them.
If they blocked RT, they can block 4chan if they so choose. Why would they expect a company that does not target the British audience to have any concern for British laws?
People used to tell kids to not go to a shady part of town while they spent their afternoons outside unsupervised. Can parents not tell kids to not go to certain websites? We still went to the shady part of town and the kids will still go to 4chan but at least we don't need to give away freedoms. Such erosion of freedom for the common person because parents can't have an awkward conversation is irritating.
I'm moving away from that line of thinking. We can discuss how poorly formulated this law is, and the implications for privacy of internet control bills, and the resulting eroding of our freedom of speech. It's correct to be suspicous of attempts to regulate the internet. But I'm becoming increasingly convinced that "for the sake of the children" such measures are necessary. The reality is that most kids these days have basically zero restrictions on internet exposure, and it's frying their brains[1]. Casual warnings from parents won't cut it. Not that they don't have the ultimate responsibility, but as in every other area of child rearing, they need help from the wider society they live in.
[1] I'm not going to quote studies, but plenty exist. I think it's pretty self evident to everyone here how bad internet can be for the mental health even of adults, let alone children with developing minds.
Recently in the U.S. news a parent was convicted of murder because they facilitated making weapons to their child who then committed a school shooting. They didn't give their child weapons and tell them to go do it, they just didn't keep them away. This is a good trend that I hope continues and will actually help prevent school shootings. Parents are responsible for their children. If children are frying their brains due to Internet exposure, similarly it's the parents fault, and they should be held liable for child abuse in the same manner as if they committed other negligence.
Someone at school has parents who aren't watching their children and allowing them unrestricted Internet access? This is where the bounty-hunter private-right-of-action morality-police laws that seem to be gaining traction can be put to some actual good use instead of, for example, hunting down trans people in Kansas. If someone's child is showing other children inappropriate material because their parents are negligent, the other parents should be able to take those parents to court and recover damages if they can collect evidence. Once parents are fined for letting their children roam with an unrestricted Internet connection it'll stop pretty quick.
> they need help from the wider society they live in.
Help that is not material support (e.g. paying hospital bills, babysitting, etc.) is usually interference.
> I think it's pretty self evident to everyone here how bad internet can be for the mental health even of adults
Agreed, but I can handle myself on the internet (my parents did their job and I am also not a dog and know the difference between a screen and a real object), and shouldn't be tracked with verification nonsense because someone else can't.
4chan is probably one of the least brain damaging sites kids can go to these days. It has porn and stupid memes, true. But so does google if you turn the safe search off. It's the corporate run sites and services with ai powered recommendation engines that are the most problematic. Infinite scroll sites like reddit or tiktok are what really fucks up your brain. I used to frequent 4chan as a kid back in the day when it was truly a wild corner of the internet and I turned out just fine.
Hard disagree. I think the control should stay with the parents where it already is. They can decide whether or not to put protections in place or whether or not to hand them a device at all.
We don't put protections on kids walking out the front door, and there's plenty of theoretical dangers there too. Let the parents educate their children.
The evidence shows they don't have sufficient control. Parents these days clearly are unequal to the task, i'm passing no judgement just observing.
>We don't put protections on kids walking out the front door
My view is that we most certainly ban and/or heavily discourage children from entering certain places and talking to random strangers. There are many safeguards in the real world, there is simply not enough in the internet.
I don't say this lightly. I am very firmly against the nanny state, and i feel equally strongly in parental rights. I've made comments in the past against these laws but i feel it's the only way forward. The only question that remains is how to best implement such policies to minimize the inevitable erosion of our privacy.
> The evidence shows they don't have sufficient control.
What evidence is that? Who gets to say what's sufficient?
Unless there is a high probability that an alleged lack of control will negatively other people than the family in question, I don't think it should be the government's business to police.
I do. I also grew up on 4chan because I didn’t have an involved parent, and I lived in the suburbs where finding friends to just “go outside and play” wasn’t an option. Consuming that content was genuinely hurtful and probably forever altered my psyche. I have the means and knowledge, in technical skill and life experience, to know how these things work, and protect my kids from that. Most people don’t.
4chan was pretty cool, one of the best sites there ever was. It has had the most impact on the internet. Reddit is basically few guys wanting to make money off of a PC 4chan, and we know the impact Reddit has. The content Reddit had for YEARS was basically recycled 4chan, the topics of certain subreddits were totally inherited from 4chan boards, while losing the main cool thing about 4chan, anonymity.
Haven’t you considered that the fact you were exposed to these things made you who you are today am able to say that with conviction. If you had been shielded from the reality on human extremism you would not.
Vouched, because this was going to be my counterpoint as someone who had the same circumstances as the grandparent.
Despite the enormously heinous stuff I've seen on that site, it has made me a better writer, developed my critical thinking skills, and given me a perspective on the world and its people that wouldn't have existed without.
It also introduced me to many different things and developed my taste beyond measure.
The massive downside, that I suspect the grandparent still wrestles with, is integrating all of depravity of humankind into a coherent world view without falling into cognitive dissonance between the idealized and constructed world with an onslaught of information on the actual reality of it.
It's sort of like looking into the Epstein files and having to decide one's reaction to them:
- crushed by despair at the state of things leading to nihilism and depression
- deciding to ignore it all, and continuing to go on about one's life without integrating it
- acceptance, normalization, and corruption
- a secret fourth option that reaffirms you, using that news as fuel for whatever ends in the hope you can improve the world even if just a little bit, despite how ugly it is
Should 4chan or something similarly extreme be recommended reading for children/adolescents to understand the horrors of the world then?
I would bet that some young people will be as reflective and independently minded as you were to integrate the material into their experience and be better off for it. Some (like me, because I was thin-skinned) won't and it will stress them out or traumatize them instead. Does that make them lesser human beings for not being capable of bettering themselves from seeing the unfiltered truth on their own?
For all the benefit of 4chan, and I do say there is some benefit only after having grown into an adult with better critical thinking skills and years of therapy, it self-selects for a certain type of poster capable of lurking enough, following the norms and having a thick skin. Not everyone will clear that bar and it's unreasonable to think that all young people will turn out like yourself having immersed themselves in it. Some could end up wasting a lot of time baited into petty arguments, or worse.
Or this should be done at point of sale, like we do with all controlled substances.
We don't sell bottles containing alcohol and then expect to filter the alcohol out if the child wants to drink from it. We have two different bottles: alcoholic bottles and non-alcoholic bottles. If you are a child, you cannot purchase the former.
Stop selling unrestricted computing devices to children. Require a person to be 18+ to purchase an unrestricted internet device. Make it clear that unrestricted internet access, like alcohol and nicotine (and the list goes on) is harmful to children. That resolves 90% of the problem.
And lets be fair, the problem isn't the children. Children want what all their peers have. The problem isn't their peers. The problem is the parents. Give the spineless parents a simpler way to say no to their children, and the overall problem goes away.
Don't use 4chan, but great job standing up to the continued attack on Free Speech. I hope more people contact their representatives/senators and get them to stop the non-stop attack happening here in the states too.
a lawyer representing the company - which has previously said it won't pay such fines - has responded to the demand with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster.
We really need a Statesternet. People will be able to verify their identity to buy a special device which will encrypt/decrypt their traffic, and people in the UK will not be able to purchase one. The device will use GPS to confirm that it's only operating in the US.
> 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.
There's always people that say it's the parents responsibility to monitor their kids. But as a parent, you either give your kids full access to the internet or nothing. The fault lies with the OS companies Google, Microsoft, Apple. They do a terrible job with parental controls. They make it very hard to setup, they're confusing and hard to use plus they barely work. I think they just do it as a checkbox for marketing or regulatory purposes. That's where I'd like to see regulation.
OS makers should not be in the business of enforcing censorship. If you want to shield your children from the "horrors" of the internet either use proper parental control software, or don't allow access at all like you said until your kids are mature to understand what's going on
The onus is on the parent to the be parent. Not the tech industry, and especially not the government.
If the solution is parental control software, that also puts onus on operating systems to present the means for such software to work properly.
This does not mean the OS should censor, it might mean the OS offers a censorship interface.
At least we seem to agree the solution lies with better tools for parents.
Ironically, the UK already has ISP level implementations to filter adult/illegal content that seem to work in most cases as intended. The lobby for this legislation came from groups concerned about matters more prevalent on large social media platforms who will barely be touched by the new regulations.
The answer is a computer the child must sit down and use in front of the family. Steve Jobs ruined the world with the invention of the iPhone, and whoever else is responsible for the more generic smartphone. Now parents use one to quieten their children and governments use it to surveil us all.
If you think about it, it's the Internet Service Providers in the UK who choose choose to allow this US content into the UK. Why go after 4chan?
The ISPs could just shut down the BGP protocol and set up their own ICANN alternative with their own DNS system which is completely separate from the US one. So it's the UK government's choice to allow this content to the UK, not 4chan's. Or they could just put up a China-style great firewall.
Modern 4chan is just a shadow of its former self. Back in the day it was a popular place on the internet where anyone could just go to and post. No verification, no captchas, minimal moderation and rules. This led mostly to chaos and illegal content being posted but sometimes that true freedom of speech and forced equality bred original, interesting discussion and hilarious memes. It was a place without points, nicknames, profiles where people could share their honest thoughts on any topic. Truly beautiful corner of the internet that I'll always remember fondly.
These days everything on the internet is controlled and monitored. Modern 4chan is hosted on cloudflare and is without any doubt "pozzed". Any illusion of real anonymity has dissolved a long time ago. Lots of bots there too. You missed it by at least 15 years.
Europeans are following the wrong path on regulating the internet. Instead of calling it internet safety and annoy people, they should just make those services and the people running them liable for the damages.
The same goes for the freedom of speech. Europeans should make it legal guarantee instead of trying to build walls around speech. So when X or 4Chan etc deletes a post, it may lead to freedom of speech fines if deletion wasn't justified. Tha same for the algorithm, if a post that doesn't break the rules is discriminated by the algorithm, a hefty fine should apply.
Suddenly we will have companies that keep their business clean and no claim for moral high ground.
I agree but you have to understand that a lot of European (leaders) still have WW2 in the back of their head.
For them there're far worse things than giving up some freedoms.
One can agree or disagree with this but Europe's actions are far more understandable if you see where they're coming from.
From what it's worth, the younger generation doesn't seem to see this the same way so whatever censure Europe introduces today will most likely be temporary.
> One can agree or disagree with this but Europe's actions are far more understandable if you see where they're coming from.
I think you're falsely attributing this to WW2. Free speech is simply just not part of European culture in the way that it is a part of american culture. The ideal of "free speech" regardless of how well that ideal is implemented in practice is something that is much more instilled in US culture than European culture.
They simply do not give a shit the same way that the US claims it gives a shit about free speech. To them its an afterthought. Nothing to do with WW2 and the trauma of it.
Worth pointing out the modern American conception of freedom of speech is super recent. It only really became a thing in the 1970s. Before then, restrictions on porn, film, even written materials on controversial subjects like abortion could and were regulated.
It's very weird, all these online laws and regulations seems like its an attempt to reduce the cost of policing by making the platforms a police force and I don't like that. If nazis gather on a platform, go get them or keep eye on them. It's even better than pretending that there are no nazis because you were able to silence them. Known cunts are much easier to deal with than cunts undercover, seriously why push people undercover? Let them speak, if that speech increases their numbers then you must work on your speech.
I agree but you have to understand that a lot of European (leaders) still have WW2 in the back of their head.
Then they do not understand how or why WWII started. Few people are really interested or care about this - it's treated more as a kind of Aesopian Fable than a historical event.
I am more cynical than you however, I suspect the Eurocrats who use WWII as a censorship justification know full well it has nothing to do with WWII.
> I've also gone back to Ofcom explicitly telling them the UK was now geoblocked (twice now) and I received a response that this was insufficient.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1rk690v/i_ru...
Ofcom really thinks that their laws apply globally.
How silly of them. Obviously, only the US jurisdiction can do that.
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/middle-east/2026/03/18/bloc...
The cries of a long-since-dead empire slowly fading into geopolitical irrelevance.
So it really wouldn't be hard for the same legal framework that restricts age to happen in the US. It just takes compliance on our part. The UK is just one tentacle of the legal bureaucracy. It wouldn't surprise me if a bill appears called the Online Child Safey Act or something like that soon and it happens to coincide with a bunch of issues Ofcom raises in this lawsuit.
we’re seeing some good evidence the most recent pushes were secretly funded and directly written by meta, the corporation. [0][1]
according to the link in there,
> Rep. Kim Carver (R-Bossier City), the sponsor of Louisiana's HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her.
and they’ve put as much as 2 billion dollars into it. and yes, that’s billion, with a B.
corporations openai, meta, and google were absolutely backing the push for the age verification bill in california and ohio. [2][3][4]
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45244049
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/13/california-advances...
[4] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/meta-google-back-differe...
The original research is riddled with baked in conclusions, and has not been verified independently. Its also mostly LLM generated.
The original report that cited the $2 billion number was AI generated slop. The $2 billion number wasn't from Meta, it was from Arabella Advisors.
The AI-generated report showed only about $20-30 million in lobbying efforts per year across all lobbying.
Even the Show HN post was full of AI slop, claiming things like "months of research" when the Claude-generated report showed it began a couple days prior.
So please stop repeating this AI generated junk. It dilutes any real story and the obvious falsehoods make it easy for critics to dismiss.
I work in safety, and you are right in that this comes up every year. The pressures have been building up and it’s coming to a head. However:
0) Techlash is a thing, and HN regularly underestimates the vehemence and anger behind it.
1) There IS an organic component, driven by voters globally.
2) It is also meta and governments, taking advantage of a crisis to further their ends.
Governments globally are tending towards authoritarianism. Tech firms impact most of the world, but are barely responsive to even the American government.
Voters around the world are increasingly terrified of what tech is doing, while tech is entirely unresponsive to their concerns. Tech is very firmly the bad guy today, when it used to be the “good guy” in the 90s.
So governments are more than happy to be seen as putting tech in its place, while gaining more power for themselves.
A few anecdotes about how bad the safety side is: NDAs are so prevalent and tech is so averse to customer support, that safety teams have no formal signal sharing methods.
The number of requests to recover accounts, point out fraud, or even to address CSAM, that go through WhatsApp, slack, discord, etc. is heart breaking.
To be blunt, it’s a Kafkaesque fuck up that the whole world is stuck in, and people are pissed.
It's 90% corporate lobbying with a "do gooder" varnish
In the second, a cult grabs hold of the person and isolates them from their families and loved ones so they can brainfuck them. And, I suspect this has happened to the UK. England doesn't want to be a land for the English, because to do so would make them racist. They have strength in their diversity. Blah blah blah. And the English can't be allowed to talk with anyone else or they might realize how fucked-in-the-head all that nonsense is. They are under the spell of a cult, not as individuals, but collectively. And that cult won't be done with them until it's taken everything from them and coerced them to sign a "billion year contract". And to top it off, you're blaming it on them.
Except that diversity doesn't lead to strength, it leads to division which ultimately leads to weakness. Unity is what brings strength, but we can't have unity, since the plebs need to be kept divided so they'll be too busy bickering amongst each other, to realize the political and financial class is robbing them blind. United people are dangerous for the elites.
> They are under the spell of a cult, not as individuals, but collectively.
Similar issue in Germany and other nations.
Venezuela showed everyone what happens when you're a toothless country. USA shows up at your door uninvited, fucks your shit up, takes your oil and kidnaps your president for good measure, just to tack on some extra humiliation.
Don't get me wrong, Maduro deserved an even worse fate than what he got. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. It's still a cautionary tale for nations worldwide. It can happen to you. China continues to erode the economic power of the USA. They could very well discover one day that their military might is all they have left. Who's to say they won't suddenly decide to capitalize on their advantage before it evaporates?
Is there a nuke authority that I did not know about who decides who should and should not have nukes?
Which country do you believe could possibly qualify for such an impossible task?
You could've said that exact same thing about the US just 10 years ago when Obama was president.
It hasn't happened yet. Is there something you perceive as especially problematic now, as opposed to the last 30 years?
That’s a pretty big aside.
Allow them to have nukes, who are you lol
[0] Yes, the UK can fire them without US approval, but the actual hardware is maintained and supported by the USA, and they have to be shipped to the USA regularly for maintenance. If the USA decided that the UK should not have nukes, there's not a lot the UK could do about it, the Trident system would have to be scrapped entirely and replaced with some completely different system. Which the UK doesn't really have the capability to do and it would cost a fortune to acquire that capability.
The UK and France have long had a project 'on the shelf' to substitute the missiles with the French M51 ballistic missiles.
They don't want to do it, they'll do it if they have to.
So yes, if the US withdrew support then the existing nuclear program would be pretty fucked for a while, but the US couldn't unilaterally de-nuclearise the UK.
The US.
Who else on the planet would have the effective power to possibly even think about who should and shouldn't have them, while plausibly being able to do anything about it?
We can't give Ukraine their nukes back because they were decommissioned (and they were rotting at the time), but there'd be no nation more deserving.
Corollary: no individual nation is able to shoulder such responsibilities.
NATO is bad for the world so any one fighting it are pretty cool. Which seems to be Russia and Korea.
So the Straights of Hormuz are totally reopened, right? Any day now?
That’s a pretty specific high bar when we’ve destroyed most of their navy, Air Force, etc, all within a couple of weeks.
Surrendered.
Despite its problems, the UK is still a sixth largest economy, a cultural powerhouse (how many Hollywood actors are British?), with a lot of soft power, a capable and currently renewed nuclear arsenal (Astraea and Dreadnought are on track), a globe-spanning network of alliances (from AUKUS to Japan deploying to the UK first time in their history to being one of the closest and most unwavering allies for Ukraine), and a constitutionally healthy and adaptive system of government (we just passed another constitutional change and it's not a big deal, we can just do that).
Frankly, this meme stinks of projection. Going from a shining city on a hill to a place where public executions by state backed paramilitaries are just another partisan talking point, that starts Special Military Operations with no plan or goal, that threatens to annex territory of its allies in about a year is an achievement. I guess projecting this free fall on the UK makes living through it more bearable.
[0] https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/visualizatio...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
They're still in the same cluster of countries by GDP as the #3 country so falling from #4 to #6 doesn't look so drastic.
They're just lashing out, emperor has no clothes, their empire is collapsing, and those who are paying any attention at all, are fully aware of it. All they have left is to go on the internet and shit on Europe for daring to regulate their precious social media companies (that elsewhere they generally admit we would be better off without). They are desperately clutching onto this tech-company-based nationalism. It's absolutely pathetic.
Why would you use the economy to defend the UK's status and then point to a bunch of non economy stuff to try to knock the US? The US is the largest and has been for awhile. Isn't that what mattered to you? Plus, pointing out that a bunch of prominent UK residents leave to participate in US industry hardly seems a point in favor of how well the UK is doing.
The "prominent UK residents" don't "leave" the UK. Benedict Cumberbatch lives in London, despite constantly starring in Hollywood films. It's an example of the UK culturally punching way above its weight in proportion to its population.
Again, you just used the present size of a nation's economy to argue that a nation isn't in decline when someone was talking about the ongoing decline of a nations politics, economy, and culture. It seems odd to me you're able to, for other countries, understand that the present moment can be viewed with both historical and likely future context.
>The "prominent UK residents" don't "leave" the UK. Benedict Cumberbatch lives...
Plenty move, but that wasn't the point I think anyone was making. If I wanted to say they were moving to the US, I would have said that instead of "leave to participate in US industry". And all of that ignores that the original commenter was talking about the decline of British media rather than saying that they're aren't talented Brits. It's not like they they're saying the UK had a bunch of great actors ten years ago and they suddenly died. Them working in American industry rather than the UK producing it own is, I'm pretty sure, the sort of point the commenter you replied to was making.
I feel like we're reading different posts.
An example in microcosm: a local village suffered road flooding due to failed maintenance of water pipes. Our rent-seeking privatized water company effected the minimum repair required by regulation.
The next section of old pipe burst almost immediately, flooding the road further for most of January, utterly destroying the surface, through the road base in many places. Even at a crawl it's difficult to avoid tyre damage.
Over a month later the water repairs were effected. Then shortly after some local roadwork notification signs were put up.
Those expecting repairs to the moonscaped road were disappointed: instead the relentless bureaucracy of British local government installed traffic calming measures on top of the broken road, as the work had already been booked and could not be stopped by any means as even basic roadworks lack any degree of dynamism in their execution.
All this still needs to be made right. These small scale failures will compound and compound until the entire state is drowned in the consequence of its incompetence.
Your example only compares against the UK past.
It has zero relevancy because it says nothing about relative change against other countries.
Anecdotally for the USA, I went to New Orleans last year, and I was stunned at the rotting infrastructure. Coming from New Zealand, the USA seems to be trying to copy the trajectory of Argentina.
Then again, I see serious problems in my hometown (e.g. sewage treatment plant) and country (e.g. big problems with rail, ferry, air, electricity, 3 waters). Apart from the societal issues that it seems all countries are facing.
I also live within a floodzone. There is a high probability I will learn how we deal with flooding in the future (different flooding - shallower and lacking the winds and hopefully better pre-planning for avoiding harm).
> everything looked brand new
Absolutely not, to me.
And the conversation is regarding infrastructure. A bunch of Christchurch infrastructure is brand new.
Texas, California (the richest state lmao), Puerto Rico, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi etc
But the rant is entirely counterfactual. Britain is a very rich country with beautiful and recovering nature, a healthy and educated population, one of the more capable armies in Europe, a functioning deterrent, and a relatively healthy political system. We just got two new parties becoming credible threats to the "main" two (regardless of the parties' views, the political competition itself is a much healthier situation than the American duopoly)! We just abolished hereditary peers, which is a constitutional change (and it can just be done)! Below the everyday media noise, we're doing alright as a democracy.
I really hope this wasn't posted by an American....
Britain does not have colonies. You might be thinking of the British overseas territory but the total population of those islands is less than 400,000
That's the only method that will scale, can be done "swiftly" and won't have the government kicking down your door if someone posts something illegal on your platform while you're sleeping or on vacation.
You need to buy it from compliance companies which lobbied for the law in the UK, run by ex regulators.
https://x.com/moo9000/status/1950866445186818209?s=20
As far as regulation goes this is pretty light and allowing. It’s more annoying than not having any laws at all sure, but zero regulation regime failed (from the point of view of powers that be).
Next on the escalation ladder is govt writing the rules for you that you either take or leave
Just 2 months ago Italy tried to ban domains globally too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46555760
Otherwise each company, everywhere in the world, no matter how small, has to follow the arbitrary demands of every nation state? How does that make any sense?
I don’t recall the outcome exact outcome or what has happened since, but I think Gab basically told them off in a similar way, i.e., “ummmm, this is America, silly Europeans” and may have even submitted the foreign demand letters to Congress and for whatever reason may have still geo-blocked the UK and at the same time has blocked VPN IPs because they found it effective at blocking pornography and the bad actors who emanated from a certain country. The effect though is that they’ve effectively barred the UK from participating in free speech in America if that’s still the current state of things. I suspect that is exactly what the tyrannical forces have worked out too, and which is why they’re demanding something other than just geo-blocking.
If you agree to VPN blocking, you effectively enforce the geo-block as well as unmasking users for five-eye de facto domestic surveillance. But they only came after those horrible horrible “Nazis” that insist on their rights to free speech, “…and I did not speak out.”
The point is, regardless of what one thinks of Gab, the powerful and tyrannical elements clearly go after those the mainstream population hates due to the two minutes of hate, so to say, which people have been conditioned to loathe; where the tyrants refine their tactics and the strategy, and practice and normalize the process for when they are ready to go after the mainstream populace… which seems to be approaching. And then the mainstream people are shocked and surprised because they believe it all came out of nowhere, when they just ignored it all along.
This of course is not just limited to the digital realm, the tyrannical forces will always come after scapegoats, and the exposed and low hanging fruit, or and even deliberately cause the “troublemakers” to identify themselves so they can be tracked, monitored, and picked off if need be.
This is not new, and people seem to fall for the same tricks over and over and over.
Even if you agree that this should be done for the currently stated reasons, the precedent is horrifying.
To quote Snowden, we're building the infrastructure of mass surveillance. (And then hoping nobody's going to come along and use it.)
We grant fully that it’s a slippery slope, ofc. But is the end of the slope in mind at the outset? Maybe, but not certainly.
People really should turn to medical professionals and not internet strangers for help.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
https://youtu.be/lUsO8ny_Dhg?si=FOPqCS2NKOZBQKg8
For your own safety, you are to only discuss your health with NHS certified healthcare providers and no one else. Doing so with others can lead to unprovoked, unsanctioned and dangerous anecdotes, advice and memes. Worse, you might find community and make friends with people who have similar life experiences, which can distract from your state sanctioned treatment plan. This extends to your friends and spouse, they might mean well, but they are not medical professionals.
Your health is your private matter, let's keep it that way!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB3WVygAM8I
Looking through that article, one of the examples is "The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post."
But if you dig into what happened - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3wkzgpjxvo
"The wife of a Conservative councillor has been jailed for 31 months after calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire."
This is pretty clear incitement to violence.
The UK has problems, but it's not very useful to throw all of these cases together to make a big number, it really rather undermines the point.
(edit - looking at the video posted in a sibling comment is enlightening. The number actually convicted of anything is around ~400 and this includes a lot of direct incitement to violence, stalking and all sorts. Which are similarly illegal in the US. The US right-wing talking points are as usual a load of crap.
None of which is to say I think the UK has things right, and that number of arrests is clearly a problem in itself, but as usual the "OH MY GOD look at what's happening over there! Muh free speech!" from the US commenters is hypocritical and myopic)
Are you talking about the same UK where people get harassed by the police for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-crime_hate_incident ?
This is a mis-truth which has been spread by Joe Rogan and his ilk. Political speech is very much protected in UK law. You won't get in "trouble" if you make posts against immigration or trans people. J.K. Rowling and Ricky Gervais certainly haven't been locked up.
Yes, there have been cases, such as the infamous Cowley Hill School case where Hertfordshire police arrested a couple over their posts in a school WhatsApp group. However, such arrests are illegal and in that case the police had to apologise and pay compensation.
What will get you in trouble in the UK is threatening violence against people or posting hate speech that encourages others to do so. But this is also true in the USA and in most countries.
With "protected political speech" being defined as which flavour of the established, incompetent elite you prefer this year.
People have been arrested in the UK for holding blank signs within vicinity of Palestine marches. People have been arrested over protesting Charles' coronation. To say nothing of thousands of people arrested every year over tweets.
Political speech is basically criminalised in the UK at this point. This is not an establishment worth any of our respect.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/no-freedom-of-s...
Got a source on this one?
Supporting Palestine in the UK has never been illegal. Supporting the specific group "Palestine Action" has been as they were for a while a proscribed terrorist organisation due to what was (IMHO) some property crimes committed against defense contractors by some of their members. Totally wrong, and has now been struck down in the courts, but saying "you can't support palestine" is also wrong.
> Thousands of people arrested every year over tweets.
The source I saw on this one had clear examples of violent threats and calls to set buildings full of people on fire, so I'm not sure this is clear either.
The group itself offered training courses on Ho to sabotage the U.K. military
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/palestine-ac...
I wonder what would happen in the US with such a group
Not to say anyone would actually get in trouble for just some opinion posts, but I don't know why you went with "against" here, I think "for" is the more likely one to make the current UK (or US) government upset.
The line is quite thin and ambiguous though. If they want to get someone they will and find that various remarks “encourage violence”.
Almost any opinion that isn't nice can be argued to encourage violence.
Not sure how often that happens coming to the UK, yet.
Of course AFAIK this can happen pretty much everywhere at this point so your only hope is being a citizen of a country that doesn't allow it for locals (such as the US) and then not traveling. Or wipe your devices prior to traveling.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/maga-traveler-dragged-o...
But given the increasingly dystopian state of many countries worldwide, you may also encounter difficulties related to administrative burden and systems with not enough human oversight and override for exceptional situations.
> A retired Tennessee law enforcement officer was held in jail for more than a month this fall after police arrested him over a Facebook post of a meme related to the September assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/17/politics/retired-cop-jail...
You are entirely incorrect.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/17/politics/retired-cop-jailed-o...
Of course, "touch grass" works just as well.
Curious time to complain about the UK doing this (*points broadly eastwards*)
Ofcom is probably full of non technical people who have been given a specific set of (stupid) instructions including that if its on the internet, its a product being sold to the UK.
And enforceable. Let them fail but they have money behind them,
It is also accepted that enforcement can be an issue if the law is an absurd overreach (like the UK criminalising smoking in the streets of Paris).
If America introduced a law like this, especially the strong, late-aughts, pre-Trump America, I bet most countries would just cave in, just like most caved in when copyright and AML/KYC laws were concerned. Hell, Swicerland basically abolished anonymous bank accounts, something which the country was famous for, just because the US wanted them to. I don't think we'll see a similar resolution here.
Oh well, the uncensored web from my NL VPN still looks the same.
We can move much faster then they can legislate.
Then they came for vpn clients but I used free software
Then they came for the payment methods but I used bitcoin
Then they blocked UDP at the isp but I used satelites doe linked elsewhere
Then they just came for me but nobody cared as nobody else was affected
They learned from the US
They made the whole world British so the British laws applied everywhere.
Not only is this enforceable, it has been enforced, and people have been assassinated without charge for this crime.
The size of ones military expenditure does not determine whether a foreign government can kill you, specifically.
Meanwhile the UK is gnawed by corruption, scams and whatnot, yet there is no one able to do anything about. But harassing some Canadian forum? First to serve!
What, Ofcom is trying to restrict viewing outside UK?
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 offshore gambling websites in 2021.
People going "Those Crazy Brits! Thank God That'll Never Happen Here!" seem pretty ill-informed.
We were too small and bent, also US customers were 30% of the total which made it a non choice.
The kind of vague phrasing that makes one immediately suspicious. What were these 'several countries'? Iran? Cuba? North Korea?
> also US customers were 30% of the total which made it a non choice
You're literally operating in the US then. It's obvious US laws would apply if you're serving US customers.
It doesn't matter which those were, we were obliged to respect laws of the European country we were incorporated, not US ones.
Laws are not a buffet. You choose to do business in a market, you've opted to be regulated in that market.
You are absolutely free to sell your services to whoever you want, but the US is equally free to refuse to allow you to operate domestically if you're breaking their laws (and otherwise make your life difficult if you e.g. rely on US banking infrastructure). If you want to do business in Iran, don't expect to do business in the US.
> The European Union does not recognise the extra-territorial application of laws adopted by third countries and considers such effects to be contrary to international law.
(yes the irony is palpable)
> The blocking statute prohibits compliance by EU operators with any requirement or prohibition based on the specified foreign laws.
It is illegal to comply with certain US sanctions in the EU. This is most likely what GP is talking about.
https://finance.ec.europa.eu/eu-and-world/open-strategic-aut...
You choose to do business in a jurisdiction, you bind yourself to their laws. That means all laws, not just ones you like, or think that are relevant to your business. Laws are not a buffet.
Don't do business in jurisdictions where you feel like you cannot comply with domestic law. No one is requiring you to do business in the US. People choose to do business in the US so they can profit from US customers, and that's totally fine, but doesn't come with some magical immunity to US law.
1. This isn't about business but charges. There's no way in hell US can e.g. prosecute non us citizens from trading with Cuba e.g. the embargo applies to US individuals and companies. The rest of the world, e.g. European countries, have normal relations with Cuba and nobody gives two damns about the embargo.
2. The same thing happens in reverse and applies to US companies doing business overseas.
Anyone who sells to my enemies is my enemy. You yourself can be subject to embargoes.
Francesca Albanese cannot do banking with banks from her own country because the US said so. Read: third parties that have relations with the US are barred from doing business with you or else risk being blacklisted too.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-12-28/the-comp...
Sure it can. It can do whatever it wants in its domestic courts. Turkmenistan can prosecute you and me right now for failure to pay insufficient deference to dear leader. Whether this impacts us in any way is the actual question. We presumably do not want to do business in Turkmenistan. But the OP wants to do business in the US. Ergo, the OP is subject to US law, irrespective of what he thinks US law should look like or what its limits ought to be.
OP doesn't have to do business in the US at all and be completely and utterly untouched by US law - he won't be extradited anywhere unless the offence in question is also an offence in his own country, which as you point out, the Cuban embargo (etc) isn't. This is how you and I stay safe from the many Turkmenistani indictments hanging over us.
This is not a case of someone bravely standing up for justice and freedom, this is a case of someone wanting to profit from US customers but somehow have total immunity from US law. And I'd respectfully point out that if the countries were reversed, and we were talking about e.g. Russia, the European countries would be apoplectic about anyone doing business there. Imagine a Brazilian company selling drone motors to Russia. Can its executives expect to travel freely through the EU without fear of arrest? Do business in the EU?
Yet almost everyone in those countries falls inline with US law because frankly the US is the exception and it's laws de facto apply in Canada and the EU.
Uhhh... the person whose company has 30% of its customers in the US. See above.
> You sound like the lunatic president you have
> You're the usual case thinking US is an exception to the rules, where it can dictate it's terms beyond its borders and get away with the opposite.
Cool. I'm not American. I'm literally just quoting International Private Law (aka Conflict of Laws) to you. And I'm doing so while being careful to give other examples from other countries.
I've literally not once said I approve of any of these laws. But this seems to be the difference between you and me - I don't bend the rules to get to outcomes I like. You sell to Cuba, or you sell to the US. Do I like that? No. Is that the law? Yes. One would not be very effective in international business if they failed to realise this kind of thing.
> You're the usual case thinking US is an exception to the rules
And, conversely, I think you're the usual case in trying to make the US a unique big bad, when they're doing absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in this area, and certainly nothing that Europe doesn't constantly do when it regulates for foreigners and foreign businesses trying to interact with or through the EU. (Something the EU does more of, proudly and loudly, than anyone else on Earth.)
Sleep well! (It's the morning here.)
They also force ISPs to block IPs [0].
I feel trying to say that's not "blocking websites" is playing games with words, and the results are functionally the same to the "average" user.
The fact that the US effectively claim juristiction over the root DNS system is a more a geopolitical power thing rather than a legal restriction.
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/us-court-orders-every-isp-in-the-un...
Ofcourse, everybody ( well, outside the UK ) are OK if UK orders UK ISPs blocks sites for their customers.
Another advantage as the other reply has mentioned is that courts have broad authority but must narrow the effect of their rulings to the minimum necessary to address the suit. In this case it would certainly lead to 4Chan being blocked by UK ISPs by order of a UK court. I think even 4Chan would be fine with that.
This is different than 4chan allowing UK viewers to access the website at all.
Country A has a law that says X is illegal, and tries to enforce it against companies in country B where X is legal.
Whether either case is reasonable is a different question, though.
The US by and large doesn't censor websites even if the content is illegal in the US. They'll get a warrant and seize servers or domains if it's in the country, or maybe poke international law enforcement for cooperation, but it doesn't really extend beyond that.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/judge-rules-ever...
If a country has media or broadcast standards laws, and you distribute or broadcast content in that country that violates those laws, that’s on you. The country can just fine you if you chose not to comply. Just the same as they would if you were doing it while living in that country. You’re not obliged to care about the fine if you don’t live there and never intend to travel there. But if you do then you’re going to be subject to their laws at that point, for violating those laws when you distributed that content in that country.
It's fucking stupid that an American site that is afforded free speech protection in its own country has to deal with the UK acting like a tyrant.
>The latest image is not the first picture of a hamster lawyers for 4chan have sent in reply to Ofcom
amazing. same energy as the pirate bay telling dreamworks to sodomize themselves. i cant help but laugh at the absurdness of it.
> Messages sent to 4chan's press email went unreturned. One of the two dozen or so alleged moderators purportedly exposed in the hack wrote back using their 4chan email address to say that the site had released a "video statement." The user then pointed Reuters to an unrelated, explicit four-minute video montage. A request for further information was followed by a link to a different video with similar content.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/notorious-i...
If you are to sell a toy in the UK you must be a British company. (and must pay VAT and comply with British safety standards).
If a consumer buys from overseas and imports a product then they do not have British consumer protections. Which is why so much aliexpress electrical stuff is dangerous (expecially USB chargers) yet it continues to be legally imported.
Just, no british retailer would be allowed to carry it without getting a fine.
Ofcom has a bad handle on web requests. Clients connect out. 4chan et al aren't pushing their services in anyone in the UK.
If you posted cocaine from your cocaine-legal country to an address where it was illegal, and you followed all the regular customs labelling rules, I'm not sure you should be liable. And you shouldn't be extradited either. Even the UK demands that extradition offences would have been criminal had they been committed in the UK. Now I'm sure in practice, you'd find yourself in trouble immediately but I don't think it's fair.
The ramifications of laws like this is everyone needs to be Geo-IP check every request, adhere to every local law. It's not the Internet we signed up for.
If the UK wants to block packets from across the pond, they should (but I hope they don't) do it via a Great Firewall, rather than expecting random foreign websites to do it for them.
Is it “different” then?
Being serious here.
Possessing pornography was a separate issue which may or may not be allowed. Typically (I think) authorities went after publishers not consumers - because they were easier targets to pin down.
Which would seem to imply that if you’re sending encrypted traffic at the request of a recipient the as a publisher of “obscene” material then unless you are delivering very clearly illegal content to a user then you should not prosecuted.
I haven’t got a single source for anything I’m saying, so I might be entirely wrong - I’m simply going off half-remembered barely-facts. So please do argue with me!
The place you sent the box then repacks it and mails it to the UK. Somehow the UK thinks that you and only you have broken the law.
It's kinda voluntary, though, there's no international agreement about this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!
EU doesn't believe in human rights or freedoms.
Therefore they're actually transacting that business on UK/EU soil.
Didn't the US use this argument to prosecute and extradite the Mega founder?
I wonder if the UK/EU will reverse uno the US's stance and start extraditions on US CEOs.
Imagine this scenario, a major G7 country declares:
All bytes sent to a computer on their soil count as a transaction on their soil.
And the end client being on a VPN is not a defence UNLESS the website owner attempts to verify the user's identity.
Immediately have to pay local taxes, conform to local laws.
Unless you keep all your assets in the US and never fly abroad, our shady website operator is exposing them self to real risk of being snatched by police somewhere or having their assets seized.
The only thing stopping that from happening is the trade agreements the Americans have put in place, the very trade agreements everyone's now looking at and thinking 'what are these really worth?'.
Yeah, it's fantasy and it won't happend but it could.
The internet is not free, it runs on sufferance of a bunch of governments and some, like China, already lock it down.
The more America, who probably gains the most from it right now, plays with fire, the more risk something like this crazy scenario happens.
Another more plausible scenario is countries simply start repealing safe harbor laws. End of YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/etc. in those countries overnight.
The US is not going to let all US companies get fined out of retaliation, so there would be more retaliation from the US against the EU, and everyone else. In the end everyone loses, except for China, which as you mentioned is not stupid enough to play these games and decided to simply pick a lane.
China locks down the Internet and blocks foreign players (to varying levels of success). They don't reach overseas to prosecute foreign executives or fine Meta for not removing Party-critical content from Facebook. Of all the parties that could be involved in this censorship drama, China is somehow the most honest.
The US are already playing this game. Can you not see that?
It already happened via GDPR to some degree. CJEU ruled in December that platforms can qualify as controllers for personal data published in user-generated advertisement. The given reasoning was basically that the platform determined the means and the purposes of the processing.
Due to that they can be liable for article 82 damages.
But US=Good and Europe=Bad on hn
LOL, classic. Everyone thinks they are the one being picked on. Plenty of people would argue that what you say here is actually the polar opposite of what happens on HN.
The people who support incest porn are a lot less talkative.
As such our windsock government with no strong beliefs does what the survey says is most popular.
The people who support incest porn are a lot less talkative.
I think there is an argument to made the pornography in general is harmful.
But to single out one single type of porn strikes me as... very odd. Maybe politicians can list, explicitly, all the other porn genres they find acceptable or agreeable to them, as a kind of compare and contrast exercise.
> So-called "barely legal" pornography and content depicting sexual relationships between step-relatives are set to be banned amid efforts to regulate intimate image sharing.
> Peers agreed by a majority of one to ban videos and images depicting relationships that would not be allowed in real life.
> They also agreed by 142 votes to 140, majority two, to bring intimate pictures and videos of adults pretending to be children in line with similar images of real children.
There's actually a 200+ page government review of pornography https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/creating-a-safer-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_interventio...
Let's say they did. Would you be saying "So what?" then too?
Maduro on the other hand...
Even if Musk did something in Pennsylvania, Trump still would have won the electoral college vote.
I think the good faith argument is that Musk confirmed they were secure so that the election wasn't stolen from Trump. But frankly Musk is too much of an idiot to steal an election or make sure it is secure so I don't know how to take it...
You can be against freespeech restrictions in Britain and the 2024 Trump Administrations braindead military and foreign policy.
If I attack either, I am not taking the people in the countries whose politicians make the decisions.
Legally speaking, British people are subjects, not citizens.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1981/61/contents
> Current law allows for restrictions on threatening or abusive words or behaviour intending or likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress or cause a breach of the peace, sending another any article which is indecent or grossly offensive with an intent to cause distress or anxiety,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd...
Whether you agree with the law or not, it is important to be accurate when discussing it. The U.S. vs. U.K. (not) free speech law discussion online so often seems to frame them as fundamentally different, but they are on the same spectrum. The go-to example of the limits of free speech in context of the U.S. legal system is "Shouting fire in a crowded theater". The U.K. laws are the same in principle but a little further along the spectrum.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
> The go-to example of the limits of free speech in context of the U.S. legal system is "Shouting fire in a crowded theater". The U.K. laws are the same in principle but a little further along the spectrum.
They are completely different in principle. The principle in the US is preventing the inciting of violence or a situation that could cause physical injury to others. In the UK it has become about protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it.
And before you argue that there is no such thing as emotional violence: do you agree that some emotional harm can be worse than some physical harm? I'd much rather be punched than subjected to the worst emotional trauma I've experienced in my life.
> In the UK it has become about protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it.
I'm not going to defend U.K. laws but it is patently absurd to say something like this is in the context of a conversation about U.S. vs. U.K. free speech laws when the U.S. courts allow schools to ban certain books because of "protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it". Heaven forbid a Florida student learns about homosexuality, won't anyone think of the parents?
No it really isn't.
> You draw the line at physical violence, an entirely arbitrary line, whereas the U.K. goes further and continues to emotional violence.
It must appear as a spectrum to you because you've been taken in by propaganda used by authoritarians and fundamentalists to justify using actual violence and censorship to crush dissent and criticism.
There is no such thing as emotional violence. It's hurt feelings. There is no "before" about it, and we don't need to agree on anything, you're just wrong.
> And before you argue that there is no such thing as emotional violence: do you agree that some emotional harm can be worse than some physical harm? I'd much rather be punched than subjected to the worst emotional trauma I've experienced in my life.
Non sequitur.
A society where people are reliant on the government to protect them from having their feelings hurt by hearing other people's opinions is not a good or sustainable one.
The other thing is that I guarantee you this is totally selectively enforced and prosecuted, which is a hallmark of these kinds of authoritarian laws. People whose thoughts and opinions are considered verboten or threatening to the regime I'm sure have little or no protection of their feelings and sensibilities when they are insulted by other people's opinions and comments.
> I'm not going to defend U.K. laws but it is patently absurd to say something like this is in the context of a conversation about U.S. vs. U.K. free speech laws when the U.S. courts allow schools to ban certain books because of "protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it". Heaven forbid a Florida student learns about homosexuality, won't anyone think of the parents?
I don't know what point you are trying to make here or if you know what freedom of speech is. Government schools and government education bureaucrats developing policies about curriculum and teaching materials doesn't seem to offer useful commentary about freedom of speech, so I really don't know how to respond to your question.
It's a wonder why AliExpress flies under the radar. I assume it's impossible to keep up with it all.
The UK's comically over-engineered electrics are no match for some of these plug-in-and-die sketchy USB chargers from the Far East.
DiodesGoneWild on YouTube does teardowns of many of these incredibly poorly constructed deathtraps.
For Tiananmen Square substitute Rape Gangs.
It's depressingly true; it seems the UK really heading quickly towards a Great Firewall, they've been looking to control VPN use [1] and the top most read article on BBC News right now is yet another public sector cover up of children being sexually abused. [2]
[1] https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/uk-govern...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyzy0y20qlo
> top most read article on BBC News right now is yet another public sector cover up
Do you not see a tiny little bit of contradiction here (regardless of your mis-characterisation of the second link)
In hindsight it is dumb to buy random pills and take em.
Sometimes it self resolves - as you contributed here, yes, countries limit and interfere and fine other countries businesses, all the time!
I don’t know what yours means though. What electrics are made in the UK? How are they over engineered?
I’m at +4, so, I’m doubting it’s unreadable…
This comment is comically pointless.
I am not sure it is legal to import dangerous electrical equipment to the UK.
It may be unenforced, that doesn't make it legal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,...
I used to go on a curated version of 4Chan via Telegram. Yes there is a lot of racism (although it flies in every direction, between every ethnicity you could imagine) but there is also (due to the anonymous nature) some genuinely interesting discussions. I remember one thread about aircraft carriers being of no use being debated by US and UK submarine officers.
There are also some genuinely funny bits. There was a guy in Greece who had found out that as long as he never graduated, he could live a basic life for free at university. His nickname was Dormogenes.
To mock and ridicule, yes. to speak your mind, sure, But first and foremost to discuss between true equals, because you can only be judged by what you write, because the value you are bringing to the discussion comes from your words and not from your reputation as the real-world human you are.
Being free to discuss controversial topics without having repercussion to your job or family (which is why doxxing was so frowned upon back then)
Being free to do some stupid childish fun, just for laughs.
Something we still had when it was just forums, even though we did have accounts they did not represent our whole persona, and we could be different people on different platform.
Something that was almost lost for good when normies invaded the internet due to social networks. It's not completely lost yet, and we must fight to keep it.
I remember him. Sadly he got evicted in the end. F.
"Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point"
4chan has produced some hilarious/interesting stuff, and they have also driven people to suicide. i suppose it is up to everyone individually to make the value judgement there.
As has Reddit, Facebook, etc.
Bad things occasionally happening on a platform doesn't make the platform/site inherently bad.
If anything, the person you were replying to was intentionally describing how 4chan is less dissimilar to humanity in general than its typical portrayal, so responding with a dismissal that that makes them just the same as everyone else is really just affirming their point.
It is the role of customs to inspect the physical goods (i.e. physical light) that crosses the border. Especially since these are fiber connections the UK themselves chose to install. 4Chan did not ask to be served to the UK.
North korea and China for example have built extensive infrastructure to inspect and reject imported data.
"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]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624330lg1ko
>>>
"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.
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.
On the contrary, both of those are very active in going after people who operate websites they don't like from overseas, and/or their family members (who are often easier to get at). They just don't publish legal notices around it.
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.
The PACs that push the one specific law you're talking about also push laws in other states, and federally, that are very, very different and draconian.
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.
They have had decades to do this. They have not.
Risk aversion and Regulation are the heart of the issue.
Same things that have flattened the American housing market for the last 30 years.
Today building social network or a cloud provider is a trivial exercise. If the financial incentive is there (aka ban of US services), they will pop out like mushrooms.
And the UK... each time it delivers there.
But they have no legal basis to fine 4chan.
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.
this isn't true
https://x.com/prestonjbyrne
So it's clearly operating globally.
Country flags are a major feature of the board.
If I offer a service in US I still have to respect US law, it doesn't matter that I'm based in Luxembourg or New Zealand.
The same applies in reverse.
E.g. many US news outlets never cared to implement gdpr and geoblocked European users from accessing their websites.
Mother Britain will be happy to make an example out of them if Uncle Sam doesn't intervene.
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.
The UK government has been openly doing this for a couple of years by now.
I mean there are parties that say they like free speech, but it never extends to the sort of speech they disagree with, or by people of the wrong colour/religion/gender etc.
VPN take up in the UK is around 20-25%
I really hope for all the people in the UK that your country doesn't go down this route.
So the UK plans to fine Parisian bars that serve alcohol to British under-18s in France on holiday?
It’s like fining Parisian bars to hand over alcohol to couriers without checking to whom couriers will deliver it.
Couriers = all involved network providers.
It follows that the restaurant writes the address on every delivery. Do they ID each recipient?
You’ve modified that to introduce a proxy, DoorDash, that now sells and sends the alcohol. If DoorDash sells it they’re the ones in trouble in your example.
If someone mails $ProhibitedItem at a USPS to the UK, then it's the job of local UK police and/or customs to reject the parcel if it is prohibited. It's the UK's problem, de facto if not de jure, because the sender is out of reach.
If someone with a UK subsidiary and local processing center mails $ProhibitedItem to their center and delivers it to someone in the UK, then that's more than the UK's problem.
If the government thinks there are ones and zeros on the internet it’s citizens should not be allowed to see, they should block them from entering the country.
If someone from the UK calls me on the phone and I start reading them posts on 4chan, is the UK going to fine me too?
I don't think UK law governs foreign companies' overseas operations based on the nationality of the customer though, no.
Laws apply to actions in the country, they’re not based on citizenship.
If you go to Amsterdam and sleep with a hooker, you didn’t break a law by doing that: despite prostitution (specifically purchasing sex) being illegal in many western countries.
For example, Finland claims jurisdiction over crimes where the action itself or its relevant consequences happen in Finland or the victim is a Finnish citizen, permanent resident, or legal entity. Then there are plenty of rules and exceptions detailing what those principles mean in practice.
Manuel Noriega and “el Chapo” Guzman were both convicted of crimes they committed outside the US but that caused other people to commit crimes inside the US.
Traveling to countries for child sex abuse is illegal and severely punished, although it appears that the law is about the traveling with intent, and not (officially) about the actions that take place overseas: https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/extraterritor... .
No countries have extraterritorial jurisdiction.
Some countries have a lot of influence over the local jurisdiction outside of their own territory.
The UK doesn't have much influence like that.
But if the UK has any minesweepers, I bet this could all be sorted out with a few phone calls.
According to what? Laws can be whatever a country says, so long as they have the mechanism to enforce it.
See: the US using special forces to kidnap Maduro
That was very clearly illegal and has nothing to do with laws.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
Prostitution is primarily conducted by women, and this is a way for them to still seek protection and healthcare while still technically criminalising the practice.
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.
Trump is merely a huge accelerator of an existing trend.
Nobody likes USA. Nor is that required. It is irrelevant. International politics do not run on emotions. As long as USA is capable of enforcing its will, USA's view will be the one that matters. You may dislike it, but that is what it is.
And yes, the choice was still to do business with US in every case, but I can tell you 100% it was far from a crystal clear easy decision and that the camel is breaking.
You can only push so much.
The us does that regularly. There's thousands of companies that cannot do business with entities from countries like China or they can face criminal charges in US.
A former company I had as a client, EU based SaaS faced this.
Sure they can. It’s unlikely they can do anything about it though.
You don't need to apply gdpr when serving non European users.
OFCOM&co is about overseas data going to you.
https://27bslash6.com/overdue.html
Gab refused to pay the fine, and it was over.
> The enforcement notice itself highlights the structural tension. Despite acknowledging Gab’s US address, the German government asserts authority to pursue collection, including formal enforcement proceedings, without identifying any German subsidiary or office.
> The payment instructions route funds directly to the German federal treasury, showing that the action is punitive rather than remedial.
> Germany’s approach also reveals the paper trail behind modern censorship enforcement. The fine stems not from a specific post or statement, but from alleged failure to comply with aspects of NetzDG. That procedural hook enables broader regulatory reach, transforming administrative requirements into a mechanism for speech governance.
https://reclaimthenet.org/gab-refuses-to-pay-germanys-fine-c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...
I realize there’s a carve out in the legislation for search engines but if the goal is to stop little Timmy finding pictures of an X being Yd up the Z then it is a resolute failure.
The only thing that works with children is transparency and accountability, be that the school firewall or a ban on screen use in secret.
”screens where I can see ‘em!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
https://www.scribd.com/document/117922444/the-pirate-bay-res...
I'm pretty sure in one they responded saying their lawyer was alseep in a ditch and would reply when he woke up lol
4chan creates another TLD on another IP, just like TPB and the whole show starts again.
Instead of, why don't we. The UK government.
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.
assumedly the rate of consumption hasn't dramatically changed, so the OSA's immediate result has been either the decentralisation of porn providers (towards those small enough to dodge the law for now and be less exacting) or the mass adoption of proxies; I assume the former is the path of least resistance
this is notably the opposite of the feared outcome (which I suspect may be closer to the long-term effect) that the bar to meet the requirements would be so high (possibly involving hiring a lawyer) that smaller social/porn sites get regulated out of existence (see ie. https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lobsters_needs_your_help...)
There's no way anyone sensible would give over their identity to dodgy websites. It's easier to just pretend to be in a different country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71209929/4chan-communit...
Please report to the closest police station
Miniluv
Doesn't really seem like there's an anti-authoritarian party available to us either.
[1] I'm not going to quote studies, but plenty exist. I think it's pretty self evident to everyone here how bad internet can be for the mental health even of adults, let alone children with developing minds.
Someone at school has parents who aren't watching their children and allowing them unrestricted Internet access? This is where the bounty-hunter private-right-of-action morality-police laws that seem to be gaining traction can be put to some actual good use instead of, for example, hunting down trans people in Kansas. If someone's child is showing other children inappropriate material because their parents are negligent, the other parents should be able to take those parents to court and recover damages if they can collect evidence. Once parents are fined for letting their children roam with an unrestricted Internet connection it'll stop pretty quick.
> they need help from the wider society they live in.
Help that is not material support (e.g. paying hospital bills, babysitting, etc.) is usually interference.
> I think it's pretty self evident to everyone here how bad internet can be for the mental health even of adults
Agreed, but I can handle myself on the internet (my parents did their job and I am also not a dog and know the difference between a screen and a real object), and shouldn't be tracked with verification nonsense because someone else can't.
That means making it possible for parents to actively block bad websites, and making that hard to circumvent.
We don't put protections on kids walking out the front door, and there's plenty of theoretical dangers there too. Let the parents educate their children.
>We don't put protections on kids walking out the front door
My view is that we most certainly ban and/or heavily discourage children from entering certain places and talking to random strangers. There are many safeguards in the real world, there is simply not enough in the internet.
I don't say this lightly. I am very firmly against the nanny state, and i feel equally strongly in parental rights. I've made comments in the past against these laws but i feel it's the only way forward. The only question that remains is how to best implement such policies to minimize the inevitable erosion of our privacy.
I don't like it, but that's how it is.
What evidence is that? Who gets to say what's sufficient?
Unless there is a high probability that an alleged lack of control will negatively other people than the family in question, I don't think it should be the government's business to police.
Despite the enormously heinous stuff I've seen on that site, it has made me a better writer, developed my critical thinking skills, and given me a perspective on the world and its people that wouldn't have existed without.
It also introduced me to many different things and developed my taste beyond measure.
The massive downside, that I suspect the grandparent still wrestles with, is integrating all of depravity of humankind into a coherent world view without falling into cognitive dissonance between the idealized and constructed world with an onslaught of information on the actual reality of it.
It's sort of like looking into the Epstein files and having to decide one's reaction to them:
- crushed by despair at the state of things leading to nihilism and depression
- deciding to ignore it all, and continuing to go on about one's life without integrating it
- acceptance, normalization, and corruption
- a secret fourth option that reaffirms you, using that news as fuel for whatever ends in the hope you can improve the world even if just a little bit, despite how ugly it is
And so on.
I would bet that some young people will be as reflective and independently minded as you were to integrate the material into their experience and be better off for it. Some (like me, because I was thin-skinned) won't and it will stress them out or traumatize them instead. Does that make them lesser human beings for not being capable of bettering themselves from seeing the unfiltered truth on their own?
For all the benefit of 4chan, and I do say there is some benefit only after having grown into an adult with better critical thinking skills and years of therapy, it self-selects for a certain type of poster capable of lurking enough, following the norms and having a thick skin. Not everyone will clear that bar and it's unreasonable to think that all young people will turn out like yourself having immersed themselves in it. Some could end up wasting a lot of time baited into petty arguments, or worse.
We don't sell bottles containing alcohol and then expect to filter the alcohol out if the child wants to drink from it. We have two different bottles: alcoholic bottles and non-alcoholic bottles. If you are a child, you cannot purchase the former.
Stop selling unrestricted computing devices to children. Require a person to be 18+ to purchase an unrestricted internet device. Make it clear that unrestricted internet access, like alcohol and nicotine (and the list goes on) is harmful to children. That resolves 90% of the problem.
And lets be fair, the problem isn't the children. Children want what all their peers have. The problem isn't their peers. The problem is the parents. Give the spineless parents a simpler way to say no to their children, and the overall problem goes away.
they have literally no power over things outside their own land borders and people are right to tell them to piss off.
This nonsense, and yet they allow GBNews to keep spewing propaganda and violate almost all broadcast standards that Ofcom is supposed to enforce.
Ofcom has today fined 4chan £450k for not having age checks in place
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47442838
> 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.
The onus is on the parent to the be parent. Not the tech industry, and especially not the government.
At least we seem to agree the solution lies with better tools for parents.
"proper parental control software" doesn't exist for a lot of the platforms.
I'm a millennial, I had access to porn as a kid, that's 25 years ago.
What's the deal with it?
The biggest issues are social media related, not by seeing how people exchange body fluids.
If you think about it, it's the Internet Service Providers in the UK who choose choose to allow this US content into the UK. Why go after 4chan?
The ISPs could just shut down the BGP protocol and set up their own ICANN alternative with their own DNS system which is completely separate from the US one. So it's the UK government's choice to allow this content to the UK, not 4chan's. Or they could just put up a China-style great firewall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...
I haven't thought about it at all since the last time I looked there maybe about 2 years ago.
Still looks shit.
What's the enduring appeal?
These days everything on the internet is controlled and monitored. Modern 4chan is hosted on cloudflare and is without any doubt "pozzed". Any illusion of real anonymity has dissolved a long time ago. Lots of bots there too. You missed it by at least 15 years.
> or requiring Internet Service Providers to block a site in the UK.
Ah, that's what they want.
Other places have 'hate speech' laws that severely erode it. Genuine criticism or discussion of certain topics is forbidden.
The same goes for the freedom of speech. Europeans should make it legal guarantee instead of trying to build walls around speech. So when X or 4Chan etc deletes a post, it may lead to freedom of speech fines if deletion wasn't justified. Tha same for the algorithm, if a post that doesn't break the rules is discriminated by the algorithm, a hefty fine should apply.
Suddenly we will have companies that keep their business clean and no claim for moral high ground.
For them there're far worse things than giving up some freedoms.
One can agree or disagree with this but Europe's actions are far more understandable if you see where they're coming from.
From what it's worth, the younger generation doesn't seem to see this the same way so whatever censure Europe introduces today will most likely be temporary.
I think you're falsely attributing this to WW2. Free speech is simply just not part of European culture in the way that it is a part of american culture. The ideal of "free speech" regardless of how well that ideal is implemented in practice is something that is much more instilled in US culture than European culture.
They simply do not give a shit the same way that the US claims it gives a shit about free speech. To them its an afterthought. Nothing to do with WW2 and the trauma of it.
Then they do not understand how or why WWII started. Few people are really interested or care about this - it's treated more as a kind of Aesopian Fable than a historical event.
I am more cynical than you however, I suspect the Eurocrats who use WWII as a censorship justification know full well it has nothing to do with WWII.
You need to learn the difference between Europe the continent and the EU the political union. The two are not interchangeable.
The British continued to be European post 2020