I may be reading too much into the editorialized writeups about Ofcom but even their statements imply they thought they were just going to impose their laws globally and that other countries would line up to help them do it?
This quote from the court is amazing:
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution
Indeed. Who could have predicted this?
Which raises the scarier question of why they tried this at all? Was the defeat a planned showing to justify future action to justify more control of the internet, as Preston Byrne speculates? Are they using this as a demonstration of why internet censorship is the only solution? It’s hard to imagine why they thought they were going to get anywhere with this case, unless failing was the goal
1. 4chan actually lost its case in the US District Court on 15 September 2026. (sauce: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-court-dismisses-...
The judge dismissed its lawsuit against Ofcom for lack of jurisdiction, because Ofcom was protected by foreign sovereign immunity.
2. The judge's comments were obiter dicta observations that were not necessary to decide the case, rather than a binding ruling that Ofcom's actions were unconstitutional, making the headline somewhat selective, it's hardly the defeat of a giant regulatory system. Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.
We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here:
Cuba. ABC being hassled over Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk. The White House restricting reporting. Ending support for public broadcasting. Book bans, the CLOUD act, the TIKTOK DIVESTITURE fercrissakes. Sanctions on the ICC.
They have tariffs on foreign double standards because it's a key export business.
Please point out where Jimmy Kimmel did that. I'll help, here's a transcript:
https://www.readtpa.com/p/read-the-jimmy-kimmel-monologue-th...
If you think that is not worth attempting to get a host taken off the air for (at least for a while), I don't think you understand how dangerous amplified disinformation can be.
Now consider that one is a comedian and the other is a news outlet, what does that tell you about your argument.
They specifically argued that they are an entertainment broadcaster in court defending Tucker’s show.
Maybe there is some demonstrable difference to size and scale of willful dishonestly among outlets.
2. CNN settles out of court in defamation lawsuit
[1] https://apnews.com/article/cnn-guilty-defamation-afghans-137...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us/cnn-settles-defamat...
Of course, they were also correct. But these quoted statements are primarily about intention and motive, not really arguing (or even speculating particularly strongly) that the shooter actually was MAGA.
Incidentally, this does not seem like particularly dangerous misinformation at all. MAGA supporters are probably the safest group in America (it is, after all, not a safe country for anyone).
That's the important part here, touch grass.
- they blame the left/some minority group for literally just about every violent act ever
- they say it in most instances, including this one, with zero evidence
- they say it, as in this instance, not to get to the truth, but to score political points> touch grass
cringe
Correct, but this update is in regards to Ofcom's evidence of 20th October in front of the parliamentary select committee to which they have to report, and at which they conceded that their ability to make legally binding cross-jurisdictional enforcement actions is limited when faced with the laws of another country. The wording she used is in fact very interesting: "If foreign courts decide to... try and get in our way, there will be a point at which we have to accept that we won’t be able to recover that money."
>Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.
They have taken on the case pro bono.
2. It's not really obiter dicta because it's a district court order it's not something you cite, really as binding precedent. But if you read between the lines, the court is only dismissing Ofcom because it is part of a sovereign, which means it cannot maintain it's other position. The judge was making it clear he thought Ofcom needed to stop. The ruling is addressed to the parties not really to a future court. If I were Ofcom's lawyer, I wouldn't be celebrating this.
American double standards have nothing to do with this case and it's just a sort of throw in everyone seems to need to mention here. So what? Are they good or bad? If you think they're bad to extend jurisdiction, then take the win.
Long arm jurisdiction is the opposite of what happened here. That's where you pull people into US courts that might not be US citizens for things that happened not in the US. Somehow that implies that foreign companies should be able to reach into the US and bug people in the US not doing anything in their own country? Oh, but USA bad so you scored that point.
I think you're just seeing Lincoln's hat in the clouds.
Everyone on HN apparently thinks they have a law degree.
well yeah. whats good for the goose is good for the gander. if the US wants to go bug people in their own countries, even going so far as to murder a bunch of people to kidnap a sitting president of a country, youre gonna get others looking to do it in response, and as the US loses its privileged position on the world stage, its gonna have to start complying
This is only true if, to quote the article being responded to:
>Unless Ofcom is prepared to sail a British invasion fleet here and land ground troops
> [...], the CLOUD act, [...]
The CLOUD Act doesn't do what you think it does. Here's a comment from a while ago with more detail [1].
The CLOUD Act bypasses traditional MLAT procedures, faced significant civil liberties opposition (EFF), and resolved a genuine jurisdictional dispute, not a mere drafting oversight. Claiming that data location is irrelevant ignores foreign laws and national sovereignty. Explaining why the US wants extraterritorial powers doesn't establish that it should have them.
And then you didn't. Don't throw 'obiter dicta' to the rubes and then completely fumble your distraction with the incoherent legerdemain of 'double standards.' Show some art, at least.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-court-dismisses-...
In a UK court, of course.
Damages awarded for libel/slander in UK courts are outsized super pay days, and many a foreign sheikh or business mogul has tried to establish that the matter under question was made known to UK citizens and therefore UK has jurisdiction, because the damages will beat anything awarded anywhere else in the World.
Weirdly, Trump has argued that this was damaging to his election chances (reminder: he won the election he's arguing about), and in a jurisdiction that the BBC can show the material wasn't available in, at least not legally and through their enablement.
As a result, even the BBC's critics in the UK (of which there are many), are seeing this as just a grifter trying to shakedown an organisation he doesn't like the reporting of, because he can't do it to a US network without getting into a first amendment quagmire.
In the UK, an alleged defamatory statement is presumed false and the defendant needs to prove it is true, and that burden is unusually low compared to most other jurisdictions, and certainly much lower than in the US where the burden is on the accuser to prove the statement is false.
Is clipping a video together to create a lie "speech"?
The BBC admitted a mistake. The error was reported by an internal BBC investigation, not because Trump's team complained (it is highly unlikely they saw it originally, because it was an UK broadcast).
The BBC makes thousands of hours of video annually. You can't expect perfection, or to sue them for billions of $CURRENCY for every mistake.
The mistake in this case was to make their quite reasonable case (that Trump encouraged the violence of January 2021) very slightly more emphatically than was perhaps justified.
Trump of course showed his disapproval of the violence by pardoning all the rioters, including those convicted of injuring police with weapons.
Their mistake was to twist Trump's speech to make it say the actual opposite of what he did say.
They are notorious for their left wing bias by right-wing commentators and for their right-wing bias by left-wing commentators. By law they are neutral.
> Their mistake was to twist Trump's speech to make it say the actual opposite of what he did say.
I don't see how you can argue that. His speech involved 70 minutes of falsely claiming that the election was stolen (how's that for twisting the truth?) and encouraging his supporters to march on the Capitol. He wasn't stupid enough to explicitly call for violence, but the implication was there.
The circumstantial evidence supports this: the actual ensuing riots and violence, Trump refusing to condemn it, and then pardoning the rioters.
If he sues in Britain, then it will be run under British law.
Is it protected if you are challenging a UK company in the UK?
It is, the government can not prevent or punish people speaking on the basis that the government decides it was misleading.
A civil dispute between private parties is entirely different though. One can be found liable for misleading speech that causes damage to another party.
> The president is trying to throw his weight around because he thinks his fans will like it. He's an idiot.
Aside, using civil courts to attack opponents is certainly a problem, but in USA it favors the speaker a compared to a lot of other countries. In US the plaintiff has to prove the speech is false and for public figures that there was malice. Which in my opinion goes a bit too far and gives media corporations more power over politicians and other public matters. I think the public figure stipulation is reasonable and important to allow private citizens to discuss politicians and public matters so that's good, but I think there should be a counter to that which requires organizations reporting the news to have more duty to report truth and not mislead.
You guys are basically Russia in denial at this point. Carried on by the momentum of your products that is heading straight for a massive disruption by AI.
Is that also the case with the common Brit or American?
That was most of the point. America and the UK have become the evil twin of Western Freedom™ and still believe they're better, or know they've fallen but can't/won't do anything.
When you see a litany of bad shit like in one of the GP comments, like book bans etc, you can't be sure if they're talking about the US or the UK, they're basically equally as shit now.
Likewise the talk of book bans is just silly. What books are banned in America?
Oh well, same thing. At this point the UK is basically the mutant kid sprouting from the body of that guy in Total Recall :)
The same shitty some of the worst authoritarianism among the Western world etc.
(yes I know Kuato was a good guy but I mean the UK seems like a hanger-on of the US now, both trying to make shit worse for their own citizens)
But all of your objections here (or rather, more specifically, the choice to present them all together as a list of grievances, given that they are connected by a theme but not otherwise related or coordinated) are 1) blatant whataboutism and 2) an attempt to wage "ideological or political battle" in violation of HN commenting guidelines.
Please point out where Jimmy Kimmel did that. I'll help, here's a transcript:
https://www.readtpa.com/p/read-the-jimmy-kimmel-monologue-th...
You're going to need a jet pack to traverse the logical leaps you're making here.
No, that is not even remotely what I said, and not even a plausible reading of what I said. It is a blatant mischaracterization of very simple logic that I laid out explicitly.
Again: Kimmel made factually incorrect statements that he reasonably should have known were incorrect, which tended to demean the character of his political opponents, by ascribing to them a false cover-up while falsely assigning a murderer to their side.
That is not "taking a side in a debate", because the ideology of Tyler Robinson was not a matter of debate.
2. "tended to demean the character of his political opponents" - this is the world in which we live, and quite frankly, much of it is well deserved. While he did not deserve to be assassinated, Charlie Kirk himself earned plenty of skewing. He was hardly a saint, and neither was his supporters. Also, Jimmy Kimmel Live is a freaking comedy show, not a news program or law enforcement press office. Unlike the Government, he doesn't owe his audience even the slightest semblance of impartiality.
3. Whether something is a matter of debate is often time- and circumstance-dependent. When news breaks out, it's usually accompanied by a great deal of speculation, and people make mistakes. Only in the fullness of time do the facts come out. I'm not saying it's necessarily right if Kimmel (like others) came to a conclusion before the facts were settled, but it's also not unusual, and people can and should issue corrections if they are wrong.
Yes. Someone already linked it upthread.
> Unlike the Government, he doesn't owe his audience even the slightest semblance of impartiality.
He does owe them honesty.
> When news breaks out, it's usually accompanied by a great deal of speculation, and people make mistakes. Only in the fullness of time do the facts come out.
It was immediately obvious that the facts did not support his narrative to anyone who was actually attempting to gather the facts. Furthermore, that narrative should have been heavily discounted a priori on the basis of Occam's razor: obviously it is far more likely that a politically controversial figure gets targeted by opponents than by people on the same side.
"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them"
Seems pretty harmless to me. The second clause of that statement is factual; that is what they were doing. They happened to be correct in the end, but the statement itself is still truthful.
Please show where he pinned the blame on anyone.
You will note that at no point did absolutely anyone whatsoever propose prison time for Kimmel. Kirk, on the other hand, lost his life in an act of what the evidence strongly suggests was vigilantism.
While the US isn't perfect it is also far from the worst conceivable entity to be in that position (and current UK and Australian governments provide easy examples). If they want to use their influence to promote free speech then good, because we need it. Just less of the mass surveillance of absolutely everyone at the same time, then we'd be good.
Quote from the article:
> Ofcom has targeted 200-ish American platforms with censorship orders; only four of those sites, all of which are my clients, refused
Seems like Ofcom broadly got the result they wanted. A 98% success rate is not going to be particularly discouraging to them.
4chan was absolutely the defining target of this wave of noise, but X is what really bothers the UK establishment.
Not being able to do business in (or, depending on how serious they are about enforcement action, visit) the UK is actually pretty constraining. It's understandable if other companies decided they would prefer to find a middle ground that lets them provide one face to the US and another to the UK, or even that they're not interested in 4chan-style maximalism and found it non-onerous to comply with the UK asks because they're pretty in-line with the site's existing standards (I'd have to see the list of sites that complied to have a real opinion on that part).
The thing is, you can afford sticking the finger to the UK if you do not have any business interests there. A platform like 4chan won't be bothered even if the UK government says "all payments to be made towards 4chan for advertising are hereby seized until the fine is paid off". But places like Twitter or Meta, that derive millions if not billions of euros a year from the UK and European advertisers? Now that's a lot of money to lose, money that even American shareholders will complain about it being missing from the revenue sheet.
In my comment I explained how countries, including the US, project their laws by imposing controls within their jurisdiction.
The weird part about this case is how they thought they could directly project their laws into another country in a way that overrides that country’s constitution, and they expected the other country to override their own constitution in agreement.
That’s not the same. This was something weirder, which is why there is speculation that it was designed to fail as a demonstration.
The US fundamentally disagrees with other countries on the limits of their own jurisdiction to include basically anything tangentially related to the US.
Again, I am far from anti-US but any outsider can see this for what it is: a one way street.
Let's see the Dutch get a US based server that is violating Dutch laws. It will never happen.
If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
// If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
That's a very good way to force the Hague Invasion Act to manifest in some form or another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Trump personally intervened when two US spooks were driving on the wrong side of the road in London, with the driver most likely on her phone, killed someone, and then fled the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn
Compare this with a hispanic american who severely injured someone in similar circumstances. Extradition granted and was convicted for a 32 month prison sentence in the UK.
You may note from the title that this is the "American Service-Members' Protection Act".
The current attempt to destroy the ICC is not due to protection of American service members, but Israeli ones.
The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
The admin (and perhaps many in the country) might like to think they can go alone, but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies.
While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
//The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
NATO's founding multilateral principles and the USA have been leading parallel lives for quite some time. Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation, described them as a 'paper tiger' repeatedly. As the Wpost reported on 3rd April '22, Bolton claimed that Trump came very close to leaving NATO in 2018, and Russian President Vladimir Putin “was waiting for that.” [1]
In addition, the executive branch will take no notice of any 'binding' mandates or statutory notice periods, as already demonstrated in the 2020 withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty.
Indeed, Congress literally had to enact 22 U.S.C. § 1928f (the Kaine-Rubio provision) in 2023 which expressly prohibits the president from exiting the North Atlantic Treaty without prior congressional authorization. But since any subsequent enforcement is dependent on legal resolution by the Supreme Court, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
//but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies
Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
// While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
A false equivalence. Trump intervened in a case where the ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent based on their inability to drive on the right side of the road or stay off their phone.
The point was that if he'll personally intervene in such a contextually miniscule matter for an intelligence asset, then he can be assumed to intervene with significant force in the case of the ICC taking custody of an 'ally'.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/04/bolton-sa...
The nickname is irrelevant.
The first line of the wiki does not support your claim: "all means necessary and appropriate" is much vaguer than "must invade", and no domestic law would change that an invasion of the Netherlands would be a violation of the sovereignty of a NATO ally.
> Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
Read further in my previous comment and find out.
> Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation
None was needed for that, not from NATO at least. Should've raised it with the UN, if that's what you meant?
> Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
I'm not saying they won't do such things, but it's bad for the US if they do. That said, Iran is looking like it'll be another Vietnam only this time with an oil crisis to match the OPEC crisis, so this is already bad with regard to energy sources.
And that's without everyone else in NATO is likely gearing up for fighting against the USA and Russia at the same time even if we'd very much rather not, and Israel itself (the country for which they are doing this to the ICC) is looking somewhat unstable and even the most allied parts are distancing themselves from the USA.
> A false equivalence.
That's my point: the behaviour with regards to Harry Dunn is a false equivalence with regards to these other things.
> ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent
No, not even close; even in the most egregious cases, and this wasn't an egregious example:
A person convicted of causing death by dangerous driving is liable to imprisonment for up to 14 years and a driving ban of at least 2 years for an offence committed before 28 June 2022
The servers were seized under a mutual legal enforcement agreement and it remains to be seen if it underwent a separate Dutch legal review. Quite of a bit of legal footwork gets skipped when the “terrorism” charge is invoked. But it looks like the servers are not being physically turned over, the disks are being imaged and that is what is being transferred.
The UK would have been perfectly justified in saying 4chan can't access any of their systems.
4chan is suing Ofcom, not the other way round.
(You could say the Taliban were even more thoroughly 'defeated' in Afghanistan while the country was occupied by the US, but it can hardly be said that it was a victory for the US either, given what happened as soon as they left).
No it wasn't. If Iran's only goal is to survive then it would have made peace with the USA and surrounding Middle Eastern territories decades ago.
This whole war is happening because Iran had great political ambitions than just thriving on its own.
Iran has been funding proxy terrorist groups for a long time now, specifically because it is trying to achieve larger goals than just surviving.
And on those fronts, well those proxy groups have taken a ton of damage and aren't long for this world.
You missed the perfectly reasonable 3rd option. Iran could stop shooting missiles at oil tankers, stop funding proxy groups, and make an arrangement for peace.
We both know though, that they are unwilling to do that. Because peace was never their goal. Instead, they wanted to achieve regional hegemony, and funded proxy groups to do that. But whatever, look how well that worked out for them.
Sure, if taking out the regime is the only pathway to stop Iran from continuing on its current path, then the USA is of course going to try that. But if there was an actual path the peace here, where Iran simply stopped its attacks, things could get back to normal fairly quickly.
What's stopping Israel from attacking "random" countries? Perhaps the fact that they're hardly "random", rather they all host proxy groups of the occupying regime in Iran, who have very openly been subverting those countries into bases from which to attack Israel.
Try again.
If you have a problem with proxies, then Iran has the right to shoot down and occupy most of Europe and Australia as they have been American proxies for long and they are supplying their bases and infrastructure for Americans to launch attacks on Iran from. Iran also as far as I am aware has never sprayed chemical poisons on foreign countries farms to kill their food supply. Israel has.
How many of the Iranian attacks in the gulf were not those fired at American bases and soldiers in those countries?
The militant groups obviously. If peace isn't possible of course Israel is going to play to win.
Israel was perfectly able to make peace with Egypt and jordan, for example, and they aren't invading them.
Oh great proving my point. They get to be at peace and get paid money to do so. Looks like a good deal all around. I guess peace is possible with the surrounding countries after all right?
Either way, the US and Iran were at peace right up until we decided to pull out of our disarmament treaty with them. And then executed a decapitation strike against them.
The only thing JCPOA did was funnel billions into their hands so they could continue oppressing their own population within their own borders, and destabilizing the entire region outside of them.
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/ex-nuclear-chief... [2] https://www.iranintl.com/en/202204245312
They never gave up. The plan was always to lie and get sanction relief from the West, in order to to sell oil and fund Islamist terrorism throughout the region and the world. It isn't only about the nukes. Fundamentally, this is about containment of a dangerous anti-Western ideology. Same thing in Cuba.
Your only defense of the astounding level of evil represented by the occupying regime in Iran is to keep frothing at the mouth about Israel? That shows quite a lot. Try again.
The surrounding states, which have been attacked by Iran and use the strait to export their oil, should grow a pair, close their borders with Iran, and use all the weapons they bought over the years from the U.S. and finish off once and for all the "Islamic Republic." It seems that, at last, the Saudis are stepping up to the plate and doing something about the Houthis. This is all because they did not finish the job last time.
As I just said before, if this was their only goal, they could have had it decades ago by choosing peace instead of funding proxy milita groups en mass.
The fact that they fund all they proxy groups shows that actually yes they have other goals beyond surviving (They they are quickly failing to achieve as their proxy groups get dismantled), and they are actually willing to risk war and risk their survival to attempt to achieve them.
As for "freeing" themselves in 1979... please talk to some actual Iranians and ask them how much of their country's resources are actually benefitting them, instead of going to regional terror proxies and into enriching corrupt Mullahs so that their sons and daughters could go live in luxury in the West they so despise. Ask them, too, how "free" they really feel.
The only durable way achieve peace in the Mideast is the collapse of Iran and of its regional proxies. Disarming Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis is a necessity before things like rebuilding Gaza is possible at all.
There, fixed it for you. No charge.
Its called mutually assured destruction bro. Every country in the world would use their nukes if they were actually under threat of destruction.
Thats the point of having nukes. For them to be used as a deterent against collapse.
> All the more reason to check
They have the nukes already dude! They aren't going away. They aren't going to be destroyed. And the nukes don't disappear just because funding stops going to them.
The point being, the destruction of Israel would just result in all of their enemies being destroyed along with them, so you better hope it doesn't happen.
They aren't going to massively change their demographics. They will never agree to that, and they would have to be invaded to achieve anything close to that. Which brings up back to them haveing 100+ nuclear weapons.
This goal of destroying israel, or massively changing their demographics has caused hundreds of thousands of arabs to die, over and over again, wasting on a doomed goal, seeing as Israel has a modern military and nuclear weapons that they would absolutely use if their military was at risk of being defeat.
The actual peaceful solutions look something like Jordan or Egypt, which are perfectly able to be at peace.
Again, the best solution would have been if Britain had refused to budge against Zionist terrorist attacks on innocent Brits, and instead prosecuted and executed them brutally, instituted a ruthless and militant martial rule there and shot all agitators on sight, and also done things like tax breaks for mixed marriages, etc. Since that golden opportunity for sanity and stability is gone, we have to see what the current options are.
If Iran stopped funding Hezbollah then real peace could have been achieved.
You are going to go back a whole 70 years to make your point? Isn't it time to get over it?
All the surrounding governments are at peace with everyone else. Iran could have had the same thing if it wanted. All it had to do what stop funding proxy militant groups.
The US government needing to get over it is their point.
Also the relevant year they're going back to is 1979.
The US government is perfectly able to make peace with countries like Egypt and Jordan. Because those countries aren't funding proxy groups to destabilize the region.
As soon as Iran stops shooting missiles at tankers and stops funding militant groups, peace would be achieved.
4chan sued Ofcom over the fines. Ofcom has been perhaps waiting for the outcome of this suit and is announcing they can't collect fines but I don't think that was the purpose. They have the power to instruct ISPs to block domains and to me it seems more likely that is what they will do and that was perhaps what they wanted from the beginning.
Demand online services change their services to conform to their law. Because its accessible from the UK.
Services refuse.
Up goes the wall.
4chan was already blocked by ISPs and you need to call them to unblock it on your connection.
Because of this, it is questionable why Ofcom picked 4chan as a target it the first place.
Correct. UK ISPs already implement a fairly wide-ranging block list (which even includes archive.org) for any subscribers who do not explicitly opt-in to 'adult' content access privileges.
Notably, the two countries involved literally fought a war about one's wish to enforce laws in the other, with the latter declaring that no, it'd prefer to operate independently of those laws.
Look, that was 250 years ago, and we've buried the hatchet. We've had our spats, but it's more like siblings arguing. Let someone else attack one of them and they get reminded that only these 2 are allowed to pick on each other. That said, our entire country was literally built on a legal system that says Americans aren't subject to British law. It's kinda part of our national character.
Countries used to enforce this at their borders (for foreign information) because it largely worked. They couldn’t stop 100% of the copies of the book, but they could stop there being enough copies for it to be part of the cultural zeitgeist (most of the time).
Not anymore. The companies don’t have a local HQ to harass, and the information doesn’t flow through infrastructure the government owns. They’ve pretty much entirely lost the ability to control the flow of information, and they’ve largely lost the ability to control its direction either with the fall of major news outlets.
I don’t think they have the support for a China-style great firewall, but I’m not British so maybe I’m wrong.
I think it’s a good thing information is set free, but I see why they tried it. It’s the only politically tenable way they had to try to keep that control.
Easy to circumvent ? Sure, but most people don't know how, so you've made the website inaccessible to the vast majority
Yes this is exactly what they thought, and no it is not surprising. Section 204 of the Online Safety Act of 2023 specifically says the Act covers internet services provided from outside the UK as well.
Of course the rest of us think its stupid. But the UK government doesnt.
It's not just that courts generally decline. It's now also against US law for them to enforce the judgment without assessing the Constitutional issues. And the burden of proof is on those trying to enforce the judgment.
By deliberately going after unwinnable cases, there is perhaps here a deliberate attempt to project a "voice of common sense" - effectively demonstrating that this is uneforceable nonsense, regardless of what the then-current government and media insisted. So they make a big show of it being defeated in the hope that the powers that be seen sense and quietly drop it.
Or they really are delusional. I dunno.
Yeah, unfortunately the UK isn't a country, it is actually a circus, so you can't apply any regular logic, you must apply circus logic.
State censors in western countries are becoming increasingly brazen and desperate. Despite the Orwellian slogans about "safety" they all constantly recite, their objectives are securing the supremacy of the regime not the interests of the people.
When something can be explained by both incompetence and conspiracy, the correct explanation is usually incompetence.
How this judgment do that?
We all know the USA punishes its own people for that all the time, of course, but only when the current administration agrees with the ruling, which this one doesn't. It's not that the constitution can't be violated - it's that violating the constitution can be used as an excuse in cases like this one.
What's that got to do with the US constition?
It's like the British government trying to enforce tea confiscations on US residents in a way that violates the fifth amendment protections against unreasonable confiscation of private property.
Byrne reasonably knew that FSIA applies; the point was to get the words on record that allow him to claim a victory in the court of public opinion. Filing the suit was irrelevant, that was the point: it highlights how Ofcom's attempts at enforcement were equally irrelevant and lacking in jurisdiction. Hence:
> All Plaintiffs seek in this action is a declaration that [Ofcom’s] Section 100 Orders, transmitted by e-mail, did not effect valid service in the United States.
No actual damages for the putative violation of rights; just an affirmation that Ofcom was FOS in trying anything in the first place.
And, per Byrne, the court gladly delivered:
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution, if indeed Plaintiffs are correct in their constitutional claims.
Byrne and 4chan clearly are correct in the original constitutional claim, and Ofcom has received and will continue to receive $0 of the fines they purport to assess.
Considerable misunderstanding here. Ofcom didn't go to a US court. 4chan went to a US court.
And lost. Judge dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that Ofcom is protected by foreign sovereign immunity.
Not European politicians.
You see, in the EU international treaties supersede individual countries' constitutions in theory. This is the other way the EU is moving power to executive governments away from parliament and judicial branches.
Of course, in practice, you have at least a good chance that courts just ignore it (of course the laws of many European countries are a good match, the big thing you get many conflicts about is if 2 governments act on the same company/crime/...). Then the EU court makes a counter judgement ... and is ignored, despite the law. Which is one of the reasons you keep reading the EU is about to fall apart.
Why is this surprising? The United States does this all the time, successfully.
Indian citizens living in India, who have never left India and only do business with Indian entities, have to declare compliance with US laws (FATCA) when opening a bank account in India with an Indian bank. This is enforced by the Indian government.
That's just one handshake away from their bank which does have business with US and their dollaridos.
The surprise is that Britain is a local backwater and the United States isn't. You can't throw your weight around if you don't have any weight.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBBYvj4YQLE (full video is an hour and a half, but you can skip to any bit because he just makes the same handful of points over and over again)
I'm somewhat dubious of a Youtube channel called "Western Liberty" that was created the day of Cummings's testimony, which contains nothing but the session and short clips of it. Using the link above avoids any potential ad revenue going to that clearly political pointed channel.
For anyone that's interested, here are the links to the other sessions of this committee:
- 22nd April 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/e79ae489-4db6-4159-88b...
- 3rd June 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/f27d8b93-b09d-433a-8e6...
- 10th June 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/097aadbd-b58d-4f76-90e...
- 15th July 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/87f1e00f-82b5-432b-af6...
- 2nd September 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/110f81a5-32c4-4577-bab...
- 16th September 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/ecf7a237-54c9-40be-922...
Anyway, after watching the session with Cummings, I have to say I'm deeply unimpressed with his contribution. While I found his bluntness somewhat refreshing, he was clearly irritated at being (repeatedly) asked to suggest actual solutions instead of just using the session as a pulpit for his grievances.
He’s like an incompetent Cassandra: people keep on agreeing with his diagnoses, giving him power in the hope that he’ll fix things at which point he makes a complete hash of everything and leaves in a huff having made things worse than they were before.
If the right ever takes power in the UK in the near-ish future I expect us to go through exactly this cycle again. Cummings seems to be very bad at the politics of driving organisational change & making it stick, which is ironic given that criticising public bodies is what he spends so much of his time doing.
For example, he claims that legal experts, regardless of their political leanings, agree that the small-boats crisis cannot be solved without primary-legislative changes to the Human Rights Act. Does he mention how the HRA is obstructive? No. Does he mention even one change to the HRA that would help? No. Does he mention the scale of changes required? No.
What's funny is that I'd actually use his HRA example as an example of our constitutional safeguards working exactly as intended: it's for Parliament to decide what our human rights are and their extent, not the whims of ministers. That the Prime Minister and Parliament are refusing to make those changes because they find them to be politically untenable is actually how a democratic system ought to work.
In fact, I'd summarise his testimony as him being irritated at constitutional safeguards working as intended. For example, he claimed that the biggest enemy to British Special Forces is not Russia, China, or Iran but the Cabinet Office and Ministry of Defence lawyers. Oh no, our ministries are operating within the law! How terrible! He seems to advocate for ministers and ministries to instead adopt an 'ask for forgiveness, not permission' mindset with regards to the law, particularly given his testimony on how things were done during the chaos of the pandemic:
> That led to some very big decisions inside No. 10 where, essentially, I said on behalf of the PM, for example, "Call the airlines. Commandeer the planes. Fly the planes to China. Pick up all our PPE. Fly back here. We don't care if the officials all say it's unlawful. If we don't get all this PPE back, God knows how many doctors and nurses are going to die as a consequence. Do it, and, if there's a judicial review that says it's all illegal, whatever, the PM will deal with that down the line".
Trouble is, he thinks they're thixotropic - give 'em a big whack to get them moving faster - when they're actually by design closer to being rheopectic, absorbing sudden stresses to protect the nation.
So when faced with the multiple sudden gyrations in policy that we saw under the final five years of the last government, they of course acted as a dampener. That's what they're there for, that's why they're so valuable. But if you don't shock them and instead apply constant pressure in a consistent direction, they'll move smoothly, efficiently, and effectively.
For a good example of that, see Francis Maude's term in the Cabinet Office in the first half of the 2010s which changed the civil service very much for the better and was responsible for, amongst others, GDS, the Government Security Group, and a lot of open government initiatives.
His problem is he doesn't understand politics, and like Musk he's wasted his time getting involved with the worst people instead of focusing on what he's good at.
I'm pretty sure that if we ask the operative layer what should the policies be, they wouldn't even pursue this goal
1) Notice that the odds that a foreign power is going to be able to harm them in any meaningful way for violating their "child 'safety'" laws that curtail freedom of speech and association are very low
2) Notice that 4chan is fighting harder to resist these attacks on free speech and association than many of big names in the sector and reflect on what it might mean when _4chan_ is the hero of the story
Alas.
Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based? Big American tech companies have employees, assets, or at least a business presence of some sort in countries outside the US, which means that they are exposed to legal systems in those other countries.
That is an issue, but it's explicitly not what I was talking about. To pick one example, Discord is -AFAIK- US-based. They decided to knuckle under rather than tell the UK, Australia, and others to fuck right off with their free-speech-and-association-limiting horseshit.
Multinationals have their own problems, but they're -when we measure by number of businesses- a tiny minority of businesses. My commentary was exclusively about US-based companies.
And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be far less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.
They have a registered office in Schiphol:
https://discord.com/company-information
Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other companies it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
Ah, I stand corrected. Discord has a branch office in the Netherlands. Thanks for the correction.
> Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other big names it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
As I said:
And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be *far* less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.
This reminds me of the time you could use Twitter as a sort of an oracle to tell whether Twitter thought an account was probably pro-fascist. This wasn't something they'd necessarily surface in the US, but for compliance reasons in Germany they had to suppress fascist propaganda so the backend was aware of flags on individual posts and entire accounts.
At some point, at least, the API did expose that state; after the API got yanked, you could still hypothetically find it by accessing Twitter from Germany via VPN and comparing visibility of posts and accounts in and out of that environment.
Which was very funny to me, because it meant that institutionally, Twitter had an opinion on these accounts but they made it increasingly difficult for US users to know that opinion.
"Freedom of speech" indeed. ;)
You're agreeing with parent poster that they don't care to fight on principle (in the unlikely chance they hold any principle in the first place). You're just using avoidant terminology that skips the criticism inherent in parent's framing.
I am a US citizen and I approve of US-style free speech protection. If anything, I think that the US still has too much restriction on speech (e.g. DMCA limits on "anti-circumvention" software.)
However, I also approve of democratic government. If people in other countries vote to treat speech differently than the US, I wouldn't want to live under those laws, but I also wouldn't say that they are incorrect. I think that democratic principles mean implementing the will of the majority, even if I think that the majority is foolish. There are some things that I would fight against (not just lament) even if approved by the will of the majority; I can't fully reconcile my conflicting impulses, but I acknowledge them. All of this would have been a long and distracting aside to my original point, which was that most American businesses of note operate under multiple countries' jurisdictions.
4chan is only reasonably immune from this because it's not really operating as a business...
4chan is absolutely operating as a business ("4chan community support LLC") that accepts payments [0], as is Kiwi Farms ("Lolcow LLC") [1]. There is zero doubt in my mind that both companies have users in the EU, UK, and other jurisdictions that have the sorts of awful regulations that we're discussing. I expect that they also receive payments from users in those jurisdictions.
Given that you report that it's trivial to do, I wonder why Ofcom declined to levy its fines by way of commanding UK-based payment processors...
[0] <https://4chan.org/pass>
[1] The link that leads to [2] is labelled "Donate", but a sixty-second search turns up no indication that Lolcow LLC is a registered US charity
You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures. It doesn't say "First they came for the KKK." And, of course, it doesn't say "First they came for the Nazis."
Just as saints and captains of industry deserve no less scrutiny and liability under the law than the rest of us, scoundrels and horrible people deserve no less protection under the law than the rest of us.
If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good, then you still have quite a bit of emotional maturity to develop.
To put the previous paragraph another way: It's entirely consistent to decry an someone as a loathsome scumbag that all upstanding people should shun and refuse to associate with while also remarking that that one time they dove into a freezing river to save a child being swept away was a good and noble thing to do, and behavior that we should all aspire to mirror.
And they got it. "I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake." But that doesn't mean anyone needs feel sympathy for the devil. We're not obligated to cheer when the wretched hive of scum and villainy keeps its liquor license another year. The law was followed and we can move on.
> If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good
... It is usually the case when we're talking about 4chan (and always when talking about Kiwi Farms) that "unalloyed" is doing a lot of the kind of load-bearing one probably wants an alloy for. 4chan's most positive benefit to society is as a litmus test for precisely how far the [xkcd-1357](https://xkcd.com/1357/) principle goes. They are 100% welcome, per their freedom of the press (and the freedom of speech of their users), to host their website. On their infrastructure. With their own DOS protection. In a country that recognizes those rights and protects them. That's the system working as intended.
No? Saving a child from being swept away in a freezing river is an unalloyed good, no matter how terrible the scoundrel that did it.
Like I mentioned, it looks like you still have quite a lot of emotional maturity to develop.
(You might also benefit from checking out 4chan boards that aren't /b/, /pol/, and /gif/.)
What if it's only as part of kidnapping the child and forcing them into grueling slave labor until the day they die? Is that still perfectly unalloyed?
(Not that I'm saying 4chan is metaphorically doing that here; just for the sake of argument.)
Emotional maturity is important. So is platform maturity. We are long past the point where "reader beware" and "it's just a hobby site" are good enough in an era where under-policed fora result in actual harm. I appreciate 4chan's strong stance on the topic of it not being their job to police their house... But I do often find myself cheering when someone compels them, as a site that receives 22 million unique monthly visitors, to act like they have any host responsibility.
It's hard for me to be deeply supportive, beyond my legal requirements to be so, of a site that hosts /b/, /pol/, /hc/, and /gif/ because it chooses to host them too.
So, yes, the poem does extend to all subcultures because it reaches out to include every voice of opposition to totalitarianism, until no one is left but the speaker.
It's also meant to be understood in the first four lines: The people mentioned — communists, trade unionists, social democrats, and Jews — were meant to be emblematic of people who are seen as enemies or outsiders to the author's cause. These are people whose values are seen to be radically different than our own.
Remember the context: the author of the speech, which was re-rendered as a poem, was a real person, Martin Niemöller, who was a pastor in the Confessing Church, which was an underground church movement organized in resistance to the Nazis.
However his speech, given in January of 1946, was an indictment of the Confessing Church. The movement was initially organized primarily as a form of resistance to governmental interference in religion, rather than to speak out for all people. Niemöller was, in fact, explicit that this was about people who were his "opponents" and his "enemies":
> "... The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?"
Instead, Niemöller points out, in a theologically poignant allusion to the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, that we have a responsibility to our fellow humans to look out for their wellbeing and their interests as our own.
So yes, that poem calls for you to look out for the wellbeing and interests — including freedom from oppression and censorship — for those folks who you might now perceive to be your enemies.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
It should be noted that Niemöller was not the only one to draw on this story as an indictment of the church's inaction. Margarete “Marga” Meusel, a contemporary and correspondent of Niemöller wrote this in 1935 which was antecedent in the body of thought informing the 1946 speech:
> Why does the church do nothing? Why does it allow unspeakable injustice to occur? ... What shall we one day answer to the question, where is thy brother Abel? The only answer that will be left to us, as well as to the Confessing Church, is the answer of Cain. ("Am I my brother's keeper?" Genesis 4:9)
> every voice of opposition to totalitarianism
Unless your definition of "opposition to totalitarianism" is very different from mine, I would hope it is transparent that the examples given in the comment you replied to are not such voices.
This may be one of those "not everyone gets to win everywhere" situations. And if I have to choose protecting 4chan vs. protecting children...
... I can see two positions on the topic which have merit. So it's a good thing there are separate nations to decide on different bars of safety.
I would have no problem with a world where 4chan is free to operate in the US and blocked in the UK. Different countries with different cultures.
Which to be clear, is nothing but a fiction you built yourself in order to insist on your failed arguments, 4chan is a 18+ site and it enforces the rule. It's literally the second rule of the site just below not posting illegal content.
Here, 4chan's design works against answering the question satisfactorily; their commitment to anonymity makes it difficult to say whether they really keep minors off the site (purely anecdotally, the answer seems to be "Not really; everyone knows click-through confirmation is a joke," but that's anecdote). OFCOM allegation, indeed, is more-or-less that 4chan pays lip-service to keeping minors out but fails in practice, and they demand better of service providers then "Well, we told them they're not allowed and if they make it too obvious to ignore we give 'em the boot; what more could we possibly do?" Because OFCOM has a list of what more they could possibly do.
There is a nonzero possibility that the Internet as a whole - including fora like 4chan - has become deeply enough integrated into daily human experience that 4chan having an "Are you over 18" clickthrough is no more acceptable than a 21-and-up club leaving the back door unlocked and never carding once you're inside.
This message was sponsored by SafetyTM.
Every single day And every word you say Every game you play Every night you stay
I'll be watching you
No, in a free society the government doesn't decide, via its monopoly on violence, what it's okay for consenting adults to say or hear. And in a sane society, parents are responsible for policing what their children see and hear, and not the government.
That's the experiment we're running right now. The Internet is different from TV. It's interactive and bidirectional. Most importantly, it's decentralized. Network television could control what showed up in your living room without you expecting it. Verizon and Comcast can't (nor should they, but the "can't" matters quite a bit here).
(To be clear, there are definitely tradeoffs, and I see them. But I think it's important to steel-man the counter-position because the counter-position doesn't just go away. Especially since there's a non-ignorably-trivial number of citizens, in both the US and the UK, who feel the trade-offs are acceptable because they really do not like what they perceive open and unfettered Internet access to have done to one or two generations of humanity exposed to it in childhood at this point.
To argue against it, we have to face it, not dismiss it).
I reject the assertion that it is a "practical impossibility" for a parent to properly raise their child. The fact that it is common practice for a parent to outsource the raising of their child to strangers ("day care") and the government ("public schools") doesn't mean that is is smart, desirable, beneficial or conducive to raising a smart, moral and intelligent child. If your answer is, "I have to outsource the rearing of my child to others/the government because of XYZ", then my answer to you is don't have a child! The "trade-offs" that the non-trivial number of citizens in the US and the UK are choosing to make is to trade the freedom of other people so that they don't have to worry about properly supervising or raising their children. Sorry, you don't get to trade my freedoms for your convenience, especially when trading away my freedoms ultimately does nothing to solve the problem your tradeoff purportedly solves, as children will always find a way to access the internet anyway.
>Network television could control what showed up in your living room without you expecting it. Verizon and Comcast can't (nor should they, but the "can't" matters quite a bit here).
No parent was forced to buy a TV and no parent is forced to by their child a device with unfettered access to the internet. Suggesting that we should strip away the rights and freedoms of every adult and entirely abandon the right to privacy and anonymity in a fruitless attempt to bulletproof society for children is a non-starter for me and many others.
> You don't get to trade my freedoms for your convenience
Precisely that trade is most of politics and regulation, be it "You have to drive on the right side of the road" or "You can't swear on FCC-licensed airwave broadcast." We took a very liberal stance to the Internet, and much of Western society seems to be reevaluating that stance in this era.
The challenge with the Internet is that accessing it is so ubiquitous that even if a parent wants to keep a child off it, it's pretty impossible. You can get on it at any public library. Certainly we're not banning children from libraries to keep them safe? That's unworkable.
You yourself assert that children will always find a way to access the Internet. The unfortunate conclusion drawn from the strongest form of that assertion is that we must therefore make the Internet they can access child-safe.
(I recognize how this is a non-starter for many. My concern is that failure to engage the argument may leave those for whom it's a non-starter at a severe disadvantage as the opposing view consolidates political power to effect change. I think the result of saying l assuming the status-quo holds is we're going to wake up one day to find half the Internet ID-walled and the other half behind Tor).
The state isn’t totally incompetent but doing it properly would be a serious undertaking, the kind of thing where the recent track record of big government tech projects isn’t great
One example is after the Southport riots, miraculously the justice system became hyperefficient and the perpetrators were found, arrested, charged and jailed within a week.
That suggests a lot of what looks like incompetence (potholes, petty crime, maybe also this) is actually just the state not really caring about a lot of issues.
If they decide they really care about internet censorship, I wouldn't rule out them suddenly becoming a lot more competent in that specific area
If you want to really make sure nobody in the uk can easily access 4chan (PRC style) it needs some effort, and you're in an arms race with attempts to mask/tunnel traffic so it gets through
Just a recap how it happened in Russia:
1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8
2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.
3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).
4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).
5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).
6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.
7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc ).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...
I don't see the need for extra tooling like DPI when the willingness and methodology to outright block sites at a higher level is already in place. Also bear in mind that the groups who have compiled the most widely implemented block lists are also major sponsors of the bill which this 4chan story refers to, so they have largely gotten what they wanted.
This is how it works, if you want I can explain to you why it works like this, or you can work it out from first principles. But this is not a proposal.
VPNs are an asterisk and they work not by avoiding this natural unavoidable principle, but by tunneling, the VPN or proxy vendor is putting themselves on the headers, and on the backend they still route the packets to the destination by putting the intended destination on the headers.
If these VPNs don't comply with local regulations and are used to evade national restrictions they can and are often themselves subject to bans. But even if not, it acts as a sort of waiver and compromising element for all illicit activity.
Sometimes it's not necessary to completely outlaw something, it is sufficient to make it so that engaging in the outlawed activity is sufficiently uncomfortable and clear that it is illegal, forcing users to undeniably acknowledge they are avoiding the law. An example of this is trying to watch pirated movies without paying for them, yeah you can do it, but you gotta do some shady shit and dodge a lot of malware, and eat shady gambling ads and etcetera.
In addition to making you feel like an asshole, it removes any recourse you may have, it's very hard to make any claim later, you cannot really complain later if you were accessing it illegally to begin with. Nobody is going to pursue you to the end of the world not to access a pirated movie or an illegal website, but they pursue the distributor and make things very uncomfortable enough so that you are effectively hiding like a fiending outlaw.
The bad thing would be tying that process in with growing internet restrictions.
I don’t think it’s weird to point out the little guys (especially former or current EU) getting strapped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
Now we’re both wrong!
The French are now using submarines (striking distance and speed, blah blah)
and are apparently being looked at as the leader of “forward deterrence” in the region.
https://tvpworld.com/93637117/frances-nuclear-umbrella-which...
Deep inland strikes from miles out while underwater/at sea.
Let's not pretend this is the only way (some) laws are enforced abroad. A US company wants your country to put you in jail for hacking hardware you legally own? No problem, they lobby this in trade deal negotiations and they get their way.
This is economic coercion instead of the fleet, so people don't get as angry about this as they should.
But don’t worry! We will check your passport when you open your phone (already live in the UK, efforts supported by the GBP 2M secret donation of Meta to NGOs).
And what’s the worst thing that could happen? No one would for sure arrest you for being critical of a foreign government.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/palestine-action...
Does _not_ need to be foreign.
People in Western Democracies assume we are immune to dictatorships.
Plenty of dictatorships in our modern history were regressions from at least some form of functional democracy, many even regressed from long lasting robust democracies.
So much of the UK, EU comission, Palantir moves is straight up Stasi playbook.
It is almost disrespectful of German History and collective suffering for VDL to stand on the wrong side of history with this corporate puppetering.
The problem is America cannot stand alone - everyone needs friends
The problem is platforms that millions do use and have no ability to counter Russian, Mossad and other foreign influence. The problem is that we are all complete cucks to Israel and they've done everything in their power to ensure the likes of Tik Tok will never be able to teach children about their genocide or dragging us into their forever wars. The problem is private equity and corporate dystopia and our cretinous politicians.
We got our own problems with Authoritarianism. There is no need to protect our borders from something our own government and corporations are practicing day in and day out on our own people, in our own country. You might want to acknowledge that first, before assuming we got problems across the pond.
And BTW the real answer is to enforce antitrust and put an end to Citizens United to prevent money from flowing into our political institutions and reign in these corrupt business. You might want to add that as well to your point about the GRANITE Act
From a UK point of view, what stands out currently is the cowed state of the US media. There is very little sense of a free press effectively holding the administration of the day to account. Extraordinary levels of corruption and incompetence are remarked on merely in passing.
Number of US media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with Donald Trump in recent years: 4 (totalling about $67 million).
Number of UK media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with a UK Prime Minister in recent years: 0†
† The last instances appear to have been Tony Blair in 2007 (who settled with the Daily Mail over photos of his family taken during a private holiday), and John Major in 1993 (who successfully sued the New Statesman over allegations that he'd had an affair).
You don't say!
> American courts are not necessarily required to enforce foreign penal judgments
Shocking.
What's the rational point of existence of Ofcom? Plain censorship?
They are supposed to regulate domestic broadcasters and communications companies, and frankly have done a terrible job of it to date, like all the other 'independent' regulators set up after the waves of privatisation which sold off our public utilities (huge conflicts of interest involved when ex-regulators frequently move into board positions in the companies they were previously responsible for keeping in line). This new mandate to police the internet is a recent one for Ofcom which has greatly widened the scope of their remit, and as we all know, authoritarians never complain about being given more power.
Though I guess we've already seen something similar in 2024 with France and Telegram...
Though I guess we've already seen something similar in France with Telegram...
This government really can go and fuck themselves, as can all our other useless and cretinous political parties. They've achieved nothing, at great cost, and at the expense of a million other issues.
All of our social media has been manipulated by the likes of Russia and Mossad for over a decade now. Our democracies are compromised, everyone is poorer and angrier, and they have sat here and done nothing but go after some fringe website and make people take selfies to wank.
The world wide web remains undefeated.
Any examples?
What Ofcom wants next is to make VPNs illegal.
I think OFCOM themselves recognize the problem with trying to ban VPNs, but extremely dim MPs and extremely angry newspapers (who are the underlying enemies of free speech here) don't.
https://www.blocked.org.uk/site/http://www.4chan.org suggests the latter to me, but the checks aren't very recent
Beyond that, it is just madness to try to control the US company or fine it. Going beyond this duty shows that not all biscuits are present at the afternoon tea.
It's not like Facebook, or anyone's personal life or business, depends on 4chan.
I think the Spain-Cloudflare case does IP level blocks and it has a lot of side effect damage, but if I recall they do IP-block level blocking because the vendor, cloudflare, provides header/envelope encryption and pooling, so the Spanish courts considers it legal to block the whole service even, alleging that they are not collaborating with court orders, they just choose not to block the whole provider to reduce the collateral damage, even if they consider they have jurisdiction to block all of CF
Reddit is complete trash, nobody can say anything that goes against the authoritarian mods on any subreddit, regardless of if those are good or bad rules, it's just an echo chamber. Twitter is hyperreal at this point, it's impossible to spend more than 3 minutes without being angry at the world.
4chan is so full of fake news, CIA/FSB/Mossad shills and doctored screenshots that it forces you to be skeptical, its not for the masses but I've seen genuine nuggets of gold on there. It's one of the few actual communities, where people actually "get" each other, which is ironic I suppose.
Good grief. This is sad stuff.
Ofcom knows its rulings don't apply internationally.
So yes, the status quo is enforced by the US courts, as if it was ever in doubt and nothing at all has changed.
Of course ofcom knows its power is limited, that shouldn't stop it attempting to do it's job, however much that job might irk foreign operators publishing to ofcoms jurisdiction.
The fact is the US has different standards to the UK. It doesn't mean one is right and one is wrong but it does mean that those differences will cause cultural and legal friction that responsible operators will attempt to diminish within reason, while others will attempt to capitalize for publicity.