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.
Slight disagree with the revised analogy.
Imagine you’re running this French cum doughnut factory but you only serve local customers. One day a British tourist arrives - “oh I say how delightful!” - and buys, perfectly legally, a cum filled French doughnut. They then take it back to the UK for consumption. Again, the French bakery has broken no laws in France (inserting cum into doughnuts is perfectly legitimate in France). The British tourist broke no laws purchasing the doughnut. But only consumed it back home in Blighty where the government had said that children should be protected from doughnuts filled with cum but for adults it’s OK.
It’s more obvious in a physical goods scenario where you’d simply say the traveller needs to attest they have the right to the product at the border. Much like a limit on the amount of alcohol that you can bring back from abroad. But it’s harder when we’re not talking about physical goods, we’re talking about information. There isn’t an “export license” for information on the internet. Imagine if we had an internet where you couldn’t read a newspaper online from Peru because the proprietor didn’t purchase any export license. Madness.
The principle should be that countries enforce laws in their own jurisdictions. But the UK wants to additionally enforce it’s laws on other jurisdictions. It doesn’t want to admit this law is shit. And it doesn’t want to block the information as it crosses the border - as in a Great British Firewall like China’s. So it has made a pickle all for itself.
We’re stretching this analogy to breaking point here, but…
The equivalent action to this would be to hop on a ferry to Calais, use a French internet connection to load up a page of 4chan on your browser, then hop back across the channel to read the page you’ve loaded back in Dover.
Which from an OSA point of view is actually fine. If a bit unlikely.
We don’t have “export licences” for websites, but that’s not because it’s philosophically absurd; we have lots of other restrictions on ways things can be broadcast or disseminated into the country. Websites which break UK laws (such as hosting child pornography or selling illegal goods) are frequently blocked to all UK users. You can view the OSA as an unacceptable overreach, if that’s your view- but it’s not a fundamental departure from what we already do and have done for a long time.
No more cum filled doughnuts. Understood.
Then I don’t understand why we don’t continue to do this then? The UK doesn’t like 4chan, ask them to kindly change their ways, upon refusal, block them. Same with Facebook.
Instead they’re attempting to fine them where they have no jurisdiction to fine them. They don’t want to start mass blocking sites because it makes them look like China. The law is dumb and ill thought out and unnecessary.