The notorious troll sites filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court as part of a fight over the UK's Online Safety Act.

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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.

  • Patch@feddit.uk
    1·
    17 days ago

    We’re stretching this analogy to breaking point here, but…

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    • mannycalavera@feddit.uk
      1·
      16 days ago

      No more cum filled doughnuts. Understood.

      but it’s not a fundamental departure from what we already do and have done for a long time.

      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.