Comment by fidotron
15 hours ago
While Ofcom were barmy to even try this there is a level of understandable annoyance outside the US that the US does get to project what it wants and other countries don't, and somewhere that will have contributed to supporting the effort to do this.
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.
> While Ofcom were barmy to even try this
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.
Standard regulator strategy: try to make the one thing you actually want to comply be the odd one out and then point at them going "but why not you too?" (The FTC do this as well).
4chan was absolutely the defining target of this wave of noise, but X is what really bothers the UK establishment.
X is different because it does have a business presence in the UK: UK advertisers
The rest of them presumably wanted to continue doing business in the UK & did not want to IP-block the entire country.
Right, thus Ofcom were not in fact "barmy to even try this".
How many of those organizations had business within Ofcoms jurisdiction? No one operating outside of their legal jurisdiction should have complied.
> A 98% success rate is not going to be particularly discouraging to them.
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.
> from the UK and European advertisers Why would "European" advertisers come into this, I don't think ofcom has jurisdiction outside of the UK?
Presumably a decent chunk of those might now reconsider?
And also this only worked once, but in the future other entities getting sued now know they can just ignore it.
it depends on what those other orgs want.
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).
Did any of them move to a .onion? I would expect commercial sites to cave and some small sites to just move to Tor which probably accomplishes the same thing as far fewer people use the Tor Browser or Brave. I could also be delusional.
> there is a level of understandable annoyance outside the US that the US does get to project what it wants and other countries don't
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.
That's exactly what the US do though. We recently saw server seizures in Amsterdam, there is the US Cloud act and so on.
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.
Was this in violation of the Netherlands constitution or just not explicitly illegal in Amsterdam? I don’t know the details or the incident you’re referencing, but there is generally a distinction.
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Why be far from anti-US if this is what the US does?
The US also has laws imposing restrictions on institutions outside their borders/jurisdiction. FATCA for example.
But they do that via things in their control. For example, banks that don't follow FATCA cannot access the US banking system. It's rare for the US to send law enforcement to banks that don't comply
The UK would have been perfectly justified in saying 4chan can't access any of their systems.
Ofcom knows it's barmy. They are pursuing foreign sites because a) they are required to by law, and b) they are under political pressure to do so. But I suspect they are quite happy that it has backfired, to help relieve some of that pressure and bring into the open the barminess of the OSA enterprise.
This. The regulation organisations can sometimes try to make a point when they're tasked with enforcing an unenforceable or otherwise unworkable rule.
As a US citizen, I'm inclined to agree.
The US in particular had to proactively not enforce British Libel judgements against US citizens. Because the vast majority violate free speech rights.
Ofcom didn't "try this"
4chan is suing Ofcom, not the other way round.
Ofcom started it. They sent nasty legal letters to 4chan first.
Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who, this is supposed to be a happy occasion!