A lawyer representing the online message board 4chan says it won’t pay a proposed fine by the UK’s media regulator as it enforces the Online Safety Act.
According to Preston Byrne, managing partner of law firm Byrne & Storm, Ofcom has provisionally decided to impose a £20,000 fine “with daily penalties thereafter” for as long as the site fails to comply with its request.
“Ofcom’s notices create no legal obligations in the United States,” he told the BBC, adding he believed the regulator’s investigation was part of an “illegal campaign of harassment” against US tech firms.
Ofcom has declined to comment while its investigation continues.
“4chan has broken no laws in the United States - my client will not pay any penalty,” Mr Byrne said.
Ofcom began investigating 4chan over whether it was complying with its obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Act.
Then in August, it said it had issued 4chan with “a provisional notice of contravention” for failing to comply with two requests for information.
Ofcom said its investigation would examine whether the message board was complying with the act, including requirements to protect its users from illegal content.
4chan has often been at the heart of online controversies in its 22 years, including misogynistic campaigns and conspiracy theories.
Users are anonymous, which can often lead to extreme content being posted.
When 4chan has the moral high ground, it’s time to seriously reconsider a law.
If you’re making 4chan look like the good guys, you are seriously depraved and fucked.
There’s enough room in my heart and head to wish 4chan a nasty departure and also not want the UK to dictate what happens in other countries. If they don’t want people going there they can stop them on their own fucking soil.
Didn’t think I’d say this, but 4chan ia right: If the UK doesn’t like it, they can have their ISPs block it.
I feel like that’s the ultimate goal: simply not having “unmoral” content on the internet.
I used to think that when sites like Pornhub started geoblocking regions with those stupid laws, it was a sort of win for the open internet, some sort of fight back. Now I think that was the original goal of the fascist to begin with.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” (Mandate for Leadership 2025, Page 5)
One of the authors of P2025 celebrates when Pornhub geoblocks, I think I saw him speaking in a video, I’ve never been able to find the quote in written form.
Geoblocking fascist regions is a win for everyone outside that region, and better than capitulating, but fascism is like a cancer that will continue expanding by force, and geoblocks will become less effective at protecting the internet for the rest of us. They are only a temporary measure. As long as the cancer remains the disease is terminal.
Good.
This concerted effort of censorship needs to end.
If UK [REDACTED] want their internet cut up like China, that’s up to their rulers.
Online Safety Act vs 4chan
Can they somehow both lose?
Feel like 4chan stands for human rights more than any of these authoritarian governments
depressing and accurate.
UK government is sick and rotten. They are trying to create a nanny dictatorship.
I would just ignore this as well. If some foreign government that I have zero ties or interests with sent me fines, they’d go in the trash/spam filter. They have zero ability to enforce them. Wasn’t it Russia and Google where Russia claimed Google had to pay some absurd multi-trillion dollar fine that exceeds all of the world currency? Kick rocks.
Google had some representative company in Russia though. The British just went totally crazy in this case.
That’s fair, I was so struck by the absurdity of the amount 😅.
Back when I worked in web hosting I would occasionally get calls mostly from certain European countries and websites mainly doing online gambling which was illegal in those countries. They would always try and demand I hand over the owner of the website and to take it offline.
My response was always the same unless you have a court order from our government than fuck off.
The ones that did have court orders were always interesting cases though and the crazy ones were the ones with court not to take down the website but to plugin a device to monitor all the traffic and every year they would send a new order to let them monitor it for another year
That’s wild and seems like a lot of wasted time, effort, and money. If it is really that serious put the onus on the ISPs in their jurisdiction to block it.
That’s wild and seems like a lot of wasted time, effort, and money.
In the parent poster’s case — not 4chan, but online gambling — gambling can be used as a way to launder money, since Party A can transfer money into a black box, and Party B pull money back out.
My guess is that this may be a factor driving interest.
4chan is a real company? I thought they were just some enthusiasts who set up a few servers for trolls to have fun.
They became a real company when moot sold the site
it is a honey pot
I tried to make a comment on that site and it was simply not possible for me to do it while implementing basic privacy-preserving techniques like using a VPN or even through a pre-paid sim card. I think that their ‘anti-bot/anti-spam’ mechanisms push users to de-anonimize quite strongly. Honey pot makes sense to me.
Anti-bot and anti-spam sure but also anti-child porn measure
Your pot theory is interesting. What substance is in the Reddit pot, what do you think? :)
The number of .gov email address found in janitor section of the DB dump when the site was hacked not too long ago perhaps.
How many were there?
stinky honey for chinese poo bears
That’s lemmy.ml
Chinese communist bots are everywhere nowadays. But easy to recognize due to their low quality posts and comments.
I think more of them are shills than bots.
I unfortunately know someone who isn’t very smart that thinks China is the greatest country on earth thanks to propaganda.
She’s the kind of person that subscribes to youtube videos whenever the notification comes up.
They did a pretty good job during the 2024 US Presidential election 😬
The People v Larry Flynt sets a precedent for smut peddlers taking a necessary moral stance, I guess
This is the modern day version of “The people versus Larry Flint”
I’m surprised 4chan didn’t respond to UK regulators by trolling with offensive memes & summoning them before Honorary Ed Lolington for an internet lolsuit.
I’ve been thinking about the idea that it should be on the government to implement any restrictions it might want to place, so than it’s not an undue burden to the site owner. That way if the UK wants age verification, it should implement it and then it can add whatever site it deems without impacting someone in another jurisdiction.
The downside is it means inserting the government into the network with each country (and state in the US) having its own firewall, so I don’t know if that’s any better. But somewhere along the way the government said that they want to control it, so it should be their problem to solve.
https?
What about it? There are tons of ways to deal with that. If it’s an SNI based site, the host header lives outside of the encrypted payload and can be actioned on. They could couple it with IP based whitelists. Or they could push it down to an account level and require it to connect to the internet period. They can approach it almost any way a corporation could. Sadly digital access hasn’t been enshrined as a right anywhere, and it’d be a fine line between enforcement and great firewall of China approach.
if the government is intercepting https requests and redirecting them to their own age verification thing wouldn’t it have to be downgraded to http?
Again, it depends. If a site is using SNI, the host header is outside the encrypted payload. That can be scanned without breaking https. You can redirect like a proxy, verify the age and then let the original traffic through.
For old style SSL sites you could evaluate by IP and do the same though it would be a broader stroke.
The worst one would be if they forced a national proxy with their own trusted root certificate, but I don’t even want to get into that one.
Sadly my dyslexia got better of me so I kept reading it as Brine & Shrimp, this didn’t make any sense so I asked family who laughed and told me I got it wrong 🤣
Who tf is funding 4chan with a lawyer?
They run ads. They actually have pretty reasonable ads policies, too.
Note that while the US does not recognize a US based server as being under foreign jurisdiction just due to being accessible in that country, there are also some subtle rules that can cause it to be considered to be doing business there by the US legal system, even if they don’t have a physical presence there and are not directly selling product there. One of those is targeted advertising to people in that foreign country.
I don’t know whether selling ads aimed at people in a country qualifies. It may not, or that bit might not have been hammered out by courts yet, but if I were 4chan, I’d be really careful on that, as they’re explicitly mentioning that they have a British userbase on that ad sales page:
Location: United States (47%), United Kingdom (7%), Canada (6%), Australia (4%), Germany (4%)
Regardless, 4chan is in the US. UK has no power here. They would have to compel the US to do something, and it (probably) won’t.
Regardless, 4chan is in the US. UK has no power here.
If the US legal system recognizes that a company in the US is doing business in the UK, then the US legal system will view the UK legal system as having jurisdiction and enforce rulings against them from the UK’s legal system.
4chan’s argument here is going to be that they don’t meet that bar. I expect that 4chan is most-likely going to be able to successfully make that argument, but the “doing business” bit does matter.
Law firm Byrne & Storm? Awesome name.
