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.
In theory the country themselves should be the ones to block access for their own residents, like how China attempts to do so.
It shouldn’t be a requirement for the companies to bear the burden of verifying their users imo.
I just assumed that would be the case and that websites that don’t comply would get blocked? Is that not the case? So they make a law they have no way of actually applying?
That would be the case if they had any interest in actually blocking the website. They don’t want the website blocked because they want the data collection going on about who’s actually accessing the website. The data collection is the point, they just use “think of the children” as the excuse.
Usually they sue the company into complying