4chan and Kiwi Farms sued the United Kingdom’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) over its age verification law in U.S. federal court Wednesday, fulfilling a promise it announced on August 23. In the lawsuit, 4chan and Kiwi Farms claim that threats and fines they have received from Ofcom “constitute foreign judgments that would restrict speech under U.S. law.”
Both entities say in the lawsuit that they are wholly based in the U.S. and that they do not have any operations in the United Kingdom and are therefore not subject to local laws. Ofcom’s attempts to fine and block 4chan and Kiwi Farms, and the lawsuit against Ofcom, highlight the messiness involved with trying to restrict access to specific websites or to force companies to comply with age verification laws.
Whether you’re the courier yourself or it is an Uber Eats rider doesn’t matter. The point is there is a pathway to another jurisdiction where a transaction happens. At the point of transaction, in that jurisdiction, are any laws being broken? If the answer is no, as much as we might not like it, then that is massive jurisdictional over reach.
Another analogy: You’re a UK satire site that operates in English and talks about everything from games to politics and one of your users posts a picture of President Xi dressed as Winnie The Pooh eating a cum filled doughnut he bought from this little French village on his last state visit to France. Suddenly China takes umbrage to this and sends you a letter demanding money and threatening arrest (because they’re like that). What do you say then? Get fucked! Right? You’ve broken no UK laws. It’s legitimate satire. But China doesn’t see it that way. Who wins?
Fair point. It’s very tricky to get the balance right. I don’t have an easy answer as it is not an easy subject. You could take the Chinese strategy and remove the access to these sites for Chinese users (a great firewall but Bri’ish. Oi M8 u can’t internet there). Or you reach outside your sovereign jurisdiction and attempt to impose laws from one country on another.
I suppose traditionally if you look at this in the same way as breaking regulations by larger multinationals the point there is that they do have a non trivial presence on the UK (or the EU) and so we can play the game of fining them on our own soil under our own jurisdictions or making it harder to grant new business to them. Until you reach the size of Apple who simply say “get fucked UK I won’t bow to you”. But you can’t do that to companies that don’t have a presence in the UK as the threats are meaningless.
Which brings you back to the Great British Bake Off Wall. Only we need to figure out how that can be used using existing laws and not abused. But then one needs to accept that we are more like China than we want to admit?