cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35889767
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BYRNE & STORM, P.C.
ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW
Re: Statement Regarding Ofcom’s Reported Provisional Notice - 4chan Community Support LLC
Byrne & Storm, P.C. ( @ByrneStorm ) and Coleman Law, P.C. ( @RonColeman ) represent 4chan Community Support LLC (“4chan”).
According to press reports, the U.K. Office of Communications (“Ofcom”) has issued a provisional notice under the Online Safety Act alleging a contravention by 4chan and indicating an intention to impose a penalty of £20,000, plus daily penalties thereafter.
4chan is a United States company, incorporated in Delaware, with no establishment, assets, or operations in the United Kingdom. Any attempt to impose or enforce a penalty against 4chan will be resisted in U.S. federal court.
American businesses do not surrender their First Amendment rights because a foreign bureaucrat sends them an e-mail. Under settled principles of U.S. law, American courts will not enforce foreign penal fines or censorship codes.
If necessary, we will seek appropriate relief in U.S. federal court to confirm these principles.
United States federal authorities have been briefed on this matter.
The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, was reportedly warned by the White House to cease targeting Americans with U.K. censorship codes (according to reporting in the Telegraph on July 30th).
Despite these warnings, Ofcom continues its illegal campaign of harassment against American technology firms. A political solution to this matter is urgently required and that solution must come from the highest levels of American government.
We call on the Trump Administration to invoke all diplomatic and legal levers available to the United States to protect American companies from extraterritorial censorship mandates.
Our client reserves all rights.
I can’t believe I’m agreeing with 4chan INC (or whatever the company is called). This whole situation is a mess. So many jurisdictions want to force age verification. I am a from believer that pushing laws to force “adult” content sites to have a standardized set of tags that parental controls can block will be way better. More beneficial to actually concerned parents (not fear mongering adults), safer for visitors to these sites by not forcing them to send their ID to a place that may mishandle it, safer for everyone by not making it normal to submit your ID to websites (think of the phishing opportunities), and more convenient for everyone.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, a woman got arrested in Georgia for leaving the house while her child was playing outside. We expect parents to know where their children are every moment of every day but just throw our hands up and say “there’s nothing I can do” when it comes to the net? It should be parents’ responsibility to block such content, and requiring standardized tags across jurisdictions would make this easier.
Maybe don’t let minors get full, unblocked access to the Internet.
kids are just handy excuse that appeals to the masses. Getting more control over people is the goal.
On one hand, 4chan (miraculously) has a point. They do not have a presence in the UK. They just serve traffic to it. Fining them for not following UK law makes no sense, and 4chan should tell them to pound sand.
On the other hand, if this were merely “we’ll block you in our country unless you do X”, then I do think notifying them ahead of time would be common courtesy. If the “violating” website sends them back a picture of tubgirl or something, then that’s your answer.
This really comes down to national sovereignty. The UK can’t force US businesses with no presence in the UK to play by the UK’s rules, and the US can’t stop the UK from blocking external businesses from serving the UK for not complying with their rules (as dumb as the rules are).
They serve users in the UK, therefore they can be fined. There is an established way to not get fined by governments of states whose markets you operate in: get out of that market. Block traffic from the UK. It is not the country’s obligation to block, it is the company’s. This has been already played out over the years in courts.
Websites have no way to know where a user is located. They can only use heuristics to predict a user’s location. Such a law would be unenforceable anyway because 4chan can just tell the UK to blow themselves and there’s nothing the UK can do in US territory except politely ask Trump to ship them to Europe.
they can be fined.
Sounds like no? How are they going to make a company with no assets or staff in the UK pay the fine? American courts likely won’t enforce it.
This is also hilariously relevant with export-controlled GPUs in China. GamersNexus put out a great video on it recently, but basically in China there’s no laws preventing someone from buying or selling the GPUs (despite the US’s attempts to block it), so entire above-ground businesses operate on selling these GPUs, even providing their own warranties and support.
I mean, the state can fine them, they just can’t execute that if the owner company of 4chan truly has no assets in the UK.
~2006: haha can you believe it? China and Thailand and other such countries are blocking sites like Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. because there’s stuff on there that their governments don’t like, how awfully authoritarian of them to think that their laws apply to everyone in the world, we liberal democracies in the west are a lot better than that fortunately
2025:
I get that the joke is that “look at what’s happening now” but it can also be interpreted as the government censoring the rest of your post. Very lenticular!
The difference is that the UK is not blocking sites. Sites are blocking the UK.
In the particular story that this thread is about, neither is happening: the UK is fining a site. I admit that it’s not exactly the same thing; the point is that it’s the same concept of national governments believing they have any business at all enforcing their laws on foreign websites.
I don’t know who to wish to fail more; OFCOM or 4Chan
I know I want Ofcom to lose. I am indifferent to losses suffered by 4chan.
deleted by creator
That’s full circle, since the current administration was basically grown in the lab called 4Chan.
God help me when I’m barracking for 4chan
they’re clearly not good if they’re listing their twitter handles in official legal documents
I don’t think ofcom expect to get any money. It’s either to just be a precursor to requiring a DNS/ip block by isps. Or just as they have told that they have to do this anyway.
I guess we’ll see how that goes, but with similar age verification laws currently being introduced across the US, it seems like it soon won’t make much of a difference.
And apparently enforcement of foreign judgements in the US is state-by-state, and the US state doesn’t need personal jurisdiction over the person. So any US state court can decide to recognise a foreign jurisdiction, under local state laws, and all other states will recognise it. So if OFCOM can find one state that will recognise the judgement, then they are in trouble.
UK stretching its ol’ colonial muscles again.
TIL 4chan still exists
It’s distilled essence runs the modern Republican Party, fam.
Never read a greentext before?
I thought 4chan was down for good
nice to know 4chans lawyers are as dumb as the posters
enjoy your dns level block in the uk 4chan
Cheering on disturbing censorship legislation is pretty cringe, their lawyers are also correct the UK has zero legal standing to make these sorts of demands of companies with zero infra in their borders when.it comes to international & US law.
censoring white supremacists and paedophiles is good actually.
That’s not how human rights work. Either they’re for everyone or they’re for no one.
you don’t have a human right to be sexually attracted to kids or want to kill minorities…
Good thing no one was talking about that. We were talking about freedom of speech.
ok but “freedom of speech” is an american thing.
It is not, it’s an officially recognised human right.
LOL no it’s not, it’s very much a humanity thing.
But they’re not censoring 4chan because they’re white supremacist, they’re censoring them because of consensual adult material.
consensual and 4chan should not be in the same sentence given their history.
Same can be said for: reddit, facebook, xitter, myspace, tumblr etc etc etc.
sure, agreed; social is largely trash
True, but the UK doesn’t care if it’s consensual or not.
I actually sometimes use 4chan, if that’s what you think it is then you’re frankly pretty deluded & again these laws are dangerous and will eventually be turned on something you support. You are falling hook line and sinker for ye olde “think of the kids” line that the political class roll out for authoritarian surveillance legislation.
Actually they do if they serves traffic to the UK.
By that token, I could start my own private Island nation, make some batty rules, log into a site, and demand a bajillion dollars because my laws say so.
Internet doesn’t work that way, access is not presence of operations.
4chan can also tell the UK to get fucked
Some countries already do (See fines from Russia to Google), but the compagnies don’t have to operate in those countries and can choose to not serve traffic to IPs from that country.
GeoIP fencing is an eternal whack-a-mole, I’ve had to track down issues where a site owned by MS was blocked because they bought some public IP space previously owned by countries the client blocks.
In the end you have countries trying to get a piece of the pie from a company that they have no ties to but being unwilling to upset the people living there by taking an effort to block it. If they think the company is behaving incorrectly then it’s on them to deny access to their citizens that they have to answer to.
A company can’t reasonably decide which jurisdictions and IPs it should serve at any given time. If I don’t want a site in my house I don’t petition them to block my IP.
Yes they can, intelligence/network compagnies like spur even sell this service, but I give it to you that as an individual it may not be a trivial task.
Ok, so badly phrased, yes companies will do geo fencing principally for security threat containment. If a company has no means to serve customers in a region they may also block access to avoid people making orders that can’t be fulfilled.
Denying service that they functionally can perform because of the whims of politicians and politically minded actors is a foolish behavior though. Every place on earth has some wing of society that would prefer isolationist and ultra conservative practices, to self censor to the lowest common denominator is going to only push away those users who aren’t zealots.
Not under US law & I say this as a Brit, the UK is massively overstepping their authority at this point. If you’re going to ban it then ban it, imposing fines on very vague legislation is a load of BS.
US law does not cover privacy like GDPR, however compagnies still have to comply with GDPR if they process EU data. Same logic apply here. Also 4chan running to cry to the feds is quite hilarious
In strict legal definitions that’s slightly different due to it handling defined personal data, how its processed and where its located rather than merely “Significant number of UK users accessing the site”. GDPR is also very well written and quite clear unlike the OSA which is vague, with a enforcer that’s already pretty infamous in the UK for being somewhat loopy in how they operate. Under US law and frankly international business law ofcom has pretty much zero mandate to demand what they are demanding of a entirely US domiciled company. Most matters of GDPR in regards to a foreign company will apply to companies with infra and a presence in the EU anyways.
What the UK says here pretty much doesn’t matter in any way shape or form, and if they’re going to ban it then ban it already rather than chasing around with fines and paperwork. I’d still rather this wasn’t happening as the OSA is a massive steaming turd of a law that’ll merely be used to suppress speech.
But yes technically if Hiroyuki Nishimura stepped foot in the UK he might wind up with some flak from it but beyond that this is just posturing.
They say comply or get blocked, we know what is the next step
Aye probs a DNS level block. Either way potato potatø the OSA is a disturbing authoritarian mess of a law, some absolute idiots in government are now advocating to begin gunning for VPNs as well : (.
It doesn’t matter where they “serve traffic”. They do not operate in the EU and thus are not subject to EU law.
The UK is not EU.
They were very clear about that.
Great, they don’t operate in the UK either.
In case of GDPR, this is not true and compagnies are subject to this EU law if they process EU citizens’ personal data. Wether they comply or can be prosecuted is another thing https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/
The EU can publish all the laws and articles they want. They have no authority to enforce them.
It’s another debate, but countries do have the authority to enforce their laws on their sovereign scope, which include network infrastructure located in the country, used to transport traffic from foreign compagnies.
How do you suppose they’re going to use network infrastructure to impose fines?
I’m going to argue that it’s a little of both. While I doubt Ofcom have much chance being able to actually recover money through legal channels because of US constitutional amendments, they must have thought about this and the next step is likely to be an even more draconian “great firewall of britain” moment. Which of course will likely be equally as trivial to bypass as the age verification so…
Oh no, a DNS block. Does that even work on DNS over HTTPS?
