Gab refused to pay the fine, and it was over.
> The enforcement notice itself highlights the structural tension. Despite acknowledging Gab’s US address, the German government asserts authority to pursue collection, including formal enforcement proceedings, without identifying any German subsidiary or office.
> The payment instructions route funds directly to the German federal treasury, showing that the action is punitive rather than remedial.
> Germany’s approach also reveals the paper trail behind modern censorship enforcement. The fine stems not from a specific post or statement, but from alleged failure to comply with aspects of NetzDG. That procedural hook enables broader regulatory reach, transforming administrative requirements into a mechanism for speech governance.
https://reclaimthenet.org/gab-refuses-to-pay-germanys-fine-c...
https://www.scribd.com/document/117922444/the-pirate-bay-res...
I'm pretty sure in one they responded saying their lawyer was alseep in a ditch and would reply when he woke up lol
I realize there’s a carve out in the legislation for search engines but if the goal is to stop little Timmy finding pictures of an X being Yd up the Z then it is a resolute failure.
The only thing that works with children is transparency and accountability, be that the school firewall or a ban on screen use in secret.
”screens where I can see ‘em!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...
It is the role of customs to inspect the physical goods (i.e. physical light) that crosses the border. These are fiber connections the UK themselves chose to install. No one forced these data imports on them.
North korea and China for example have extensive infrastructure to inspect and reject imported data.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71209929/4chan-communit...
For ofcom, 4chan is just a sticking their toes in the pool. If they fall, ofcom will have complete freedom to censor the entire Internet as they wish. It's madness.
Do they understand the futility? I suspect most do. But trying to be high-functioning, in a low-functioning system, is also a good way to lose your job.
they have literally no power over things outside their own land borders and people are right to tell them to piss off.
> I've also gone back to Ofcom explicitly telling them the UK was now geoblocked (twice now) and I received a response that this was insufficient.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1rk690v/i_ru...
Ofcom really thinks that their laws apply globally.
One I remember was a site hosting streams of the 2022 football world cup. Or a number of Iranian-affiliated news sites just last year. Or offshore gambling websites in 2021.
People going "Those Crazy Brits! Thank God That'll Never Happen Here!" seem pretty ill-informed.
If you are to sell a toy in the UK you must be a British company. (and must pay VAT and comply with British safety standards).
If a consumer buys from overseas and imports a product then they do not have British consumer protections. Which is why so much aliexpress electrical stuff is dangerous (expecially USB chargers) yet it continues to be legally imported.
Just, no british retailer would be allowed to carry it without getting a fine.
>The latest image is not the first picture of a hamster lawyers for 4chan have sent in reply to Ofcom
amazing. same energy as the pirate bay telling dreamworks to sodomize themselves. i cant help but laugh at the absurdness of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,...
I used to go on a curated version of 4Chan via Telegram. Yes there is a lot of racism (although it flies in every direction, between every ethnicity you could imagine) but there is also (due to the anonymous nature) some genuinely interesting discussions. I remember one thread about aircraft carriers being of no use being debated by US and UK submarine officers.
There are also some genuinely funny bits. There was a guy in Greece who had found out that as long as he never graduated, he could live a basic life for free at university. His nickname was Dormogenes.
"In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment."[0]
So the UK plans to fine Parisian bars that serve alcohol to British under-18s in France on holiday?
"4chan is a US company operating in the US, sure it serves content to global users but the jurisdiction is the US, we have free speech, ..."
"Sure, Company X is operating in Europe, but it also serves US users so it has to respect our laws and it's warranted for the US to apply pressure and fines."
at least decide for one side of the argument instead of just going the blind patriot way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
assumedly the rate of consumption hasn't dramatically changed, so the OSA's immediate result has been either the decentralisation of porn providers (towards those small enough to dodge the law for now and be less exacting) or the mass adoption of proxies; I assume the former is the path of least resistance
this is notably the opposite of the feared outcome (which I suspect may be closer to the long-term effect) that the bar to meet the requirements would be so high (possibly involving hiring a lawyer) that smaller social/porn sites get regulated out of existence (see ie. https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lobsters_needs_your_help...)
There is a famous quote regarding this nature of British parliamentary sovereignty that is taught to every law student in the UK: "If Parliament enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence" - Ivor Jennings.
The UK isn't going to get a cent from that but the leadership is banned from entering the UK for the foreseeable future.
Doing this a lot as a country is how you achieve pariah status and losing a bunch of trade, though.
Sure they can. It’s unlikely they can do anything about it though.
4chan creates another TLD on another IP, just like TPB and the whole show starts again.
Instead of, why don't we. The UK government.
[1] I'm not going to quote studies, but plenty exist. I think it's pretty self evident to everyone here how bad internet can be for the mental health even of adults, let alone children with developing minds.
Just 2 months ago Italy tried to ban domains globally too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46555760
If I buy something illegal off of AliExpress, the US government won't and can't do squat to the seller. If they decide to enforce the law, they'll go after me.
Someone at school has parents who aren't watching their children and allowing them unrestricted Internet access? This is where the bounty-hunter private-right-of-action morality-police laws that seem to be gaining traction can be put to some actual good use instead of, for example, hunting down trans people in Kansas. If someone's child is showing other children inappropriate material because their parents are negligent, the other parents should be able to take those parents to court and recover damages if they can collect evidence. Once parents are fined for letting their children roam with an unrestricted Internet connection it'll stop pretty quick.
> they need help from the wider society they live in.
Help that is not material support (e.g. paying hospital bills, babysitting, etc.) is usually interference.
> I think it's pretty self evident to everyone here how bad internet can be for the mental health even of adults
Agreed, but I can handle myself on the internet (my parents did their job and I am also not a dog and know the difference between a screen and a real object), and shouldn't be tracked with verification nonsense because someone else can't.
We don't sell bottles containing alcohol and then expect to filter the alcohol out if the child wants to drink from it. We have two different bottles: alcoholic bottles and non-alcoholic bottles. If you are a child, you cannot purchase the former.
Stop selling unrestricted computing devices to children. Require a person to be 18+ to purchase an unrestricted internet device. Make it clear that unrestricted internet access, like alcohol and nicotine (and the list goes on) is harmful to children. That resolves 90% of the problem.
And lets be fair, the problem isn't the children. Children want what all their peers have. The problem isn't their peers. The problem is the parents. Give the spineless parents a simpler way to say no to their children, and the overall problem goes away.
It's a wonder why AliExpress flies under the radar. I assume it's impossible to keep up with it all.
The UK's comically over-engineered electrics are no match for some of these plug-in-and-die sketchy USB chargers from the Far East.
DiodesGoneWild on YouTube does teardowns of many of these incredibly poorly constructed deathtraps.
To mock and ridicule, yes. to speak your mind, sure, But first and foremost to discuss between true equals, because you can only be judged by what you write, because the value you are bringing to the discussion comes from your words and not from your reputation as the real-world human you are.
Being free to discuss controversial topics without having repercussion to your job or family (which is why doxxing was so frowned upon back then)
Being free to do some stupid childish fun, just for laughs.
Something we still had when it was just forums, even though we did have accounts they did not represent our whole persona, and we could be different people on different platform.
Something that was almost lost for good when normies invaded the internet due to social networks. It's not completely lost yet, and we must fight to keep it.
"Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point"
4chan has produced some hilarious/interesting stuff, and they have also driven people to suicide. i suppose it is up to everyone individually to make the value judgement there.
>>>
"Companies – wherever they're based – are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different," she said.
"The UK is setting new standards for online safety. Age checks and risk assessments are cornerstones of our laws, and we'll take robust enforcement action against firms that fall short."
<<<
Quite frankly she seems completely out of touch with her own argument. The UK can certainly legislate away tobacco sales, for instance; they can't go after tobacco producers in a foreign state. 4Chan operates in the US and is a US company. They have no jurisdiction over it, even if their citizenry can access it; it's on them to block that access if they don't like it. Unless they're also implying that the US government should be allowed to go after UK companies that don't follow it's free speech regulations because American citizens can access them.
It already sounds like Ofcom is likely to lose lawsuits about this, as they do not have jurisdiction in the U.S., where 4chan is hosted.
We don't put protections on kids walking out the front door, and there's plenty of theoretical dangers there too. Let the parents educate their children.
It really paints this authority in a special light if they believe they can force their rules on everyone on the planet. To be honest, I think this needs immediate psychological evaluation because you have to have a very distorted view on reality. Even if you give a lot of leverage to authorities being detached. But certainly the authority is very overwhelmed with itself and the world.
But while we are at it I demand that Ofcom removes it presence from my internet too. Perhaps flood some DNS server, so ofcom.uk to point to 4chan...
Precedent in the US is that courts do in fact have jurisdiction over a foreign website's owner if the owner "purposefully availed itself of the U.S. forum or purposefully directed its activities toward it", a test which is less demanding than it sounds. [1]
And US has taken advantage of this to go after foreign websites such as Megaupload, BTC-e, Liberty Reserve, etc.
Therefore, if there were a US law requiring companies to follow free speech rules, it could potentially be enforced against foreign website owners. But no such law currently exists. The First Amendment itself only applies to the US government (and to companies working on behalf of the US government). There is also the SPEECH Act, which, among other provisions, creates a cause of action where if someone sues a US person in a foreign court over their speech, they can sue back in US court. But only for declaratory judgement, not damages or an injunction. The goal is mainly just to prevent US courts from enforcing judgements from the foreign court in such cases.
[1] https://tlblog.org/how-to-find-personal-jurisdiction-over-fo...
2 days ago
Zoe KleinmanTechnology editor

Getty Images
The UK online safety regulator Ofcom has fined the US messaging platform 4Chan a total of £520,000 for failing to comply with various aspects of the Online Safety Act.
It includes £450,000 for failing to put in age checks to prevent children from seeing pornography on the platform.
However, a lawyer representing the company - which has previously said it won't pay such fines - has responded to the demand with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster.
In a follow-up post on X, 4Chan's lawyer Preston Byrne wrote: "In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment."
The fines also include £50,000 for failing to assess the risk of illegal material being published and a further £20,000 for failing to set out how it protects users from criminal content.
4Chan has refused to pay all previous fines from Ofcom.
Ofcom responded to the BBC's request for a reply to Byrne's posts with a statement from Suzanne Cater, its director of enforcement.
"Companies – wherever they're based – are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different," she said.
"The UK is setting new standards for online safety. Age checks and risk assessments are cornerstones of our laws, and we'll take robust enforcement action against firms that fall short."
She did not comment on the image 4Chan had published in response to the fine.

Preston & Byrne
The latest image is not the first picture of a hamster lawyers for 4chan have sent in reply to Ofcom
In February 2025 Vice President JD Vance told an audience of world leaders at the AI Summit in Paris that the administration was "growing tired" of foreign countries attempting to regulate its tech businesses.
4chan is known to be an anarchic messaging space, and has often been at the heart of online controversies since it launched 22 years ago.
Ofcom has issued nearly £3m in fines to tech companies around the world for breaches of the UK's online safety laws.
However most of this money has not yet been received.
It added that other fines were still within their timeframe to be paid, and it was "considering next steps" for those who had missed payment deadlines.
In December the regulator told the BBC it had never heard from a company running 18 porn sites, which it had fined £1m, although the company did later add age verification to its platforms.
Last month Pornhub restricted access to its website in the UK, blaming the introduction of stricter age checks, and said its traffic had fallen by 77%.


We have other crimes like this, like child sexual abuse committed in a foreign country.
Tor .onion chans have much more taboo content to put it mildly.
What Ofcom wants is for their consequences to happen extraterritorially.
How silly of them. Obviously, only the US jurisdiction can do that.
People really should turn to medical professionals and not internet strangers for help.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
- to conduct a suitable and sufficient illegal content risk assessment;
- to use proportionate measures to prevent individuals encountering priority illegal content;
- to use proportionate systems and processes to minimise the length of time priority illegal content is present;
- to swiftly take down illegal content when it becomes aware of it;
- to specify in its terms of service how individuals are to be protected from illegal content; and relating to content reporting and complaints procedures in relation to illegal content.
Reads to me like they're legally prescribing that all web content is to be automatically fed into AI models in order to assess the content's appropriateness and "risk", and then "swiftly" censor the content if it's deemed too risky or illegal.That's the only method that will scale, can be done "swiftly" and won't have the government kicking down your door if someone posts something illegal on your platform while you're sleeping or on vacation.
They also force ISPs to block IPs [0].
I feel trying to say that's not "blocking websites" is playing games with words, and the results are functionally the same to the "average" user.
The fact that the US effectively claim juristiction over the root DNS system is a more a geopolitical power thing rather than a legal restriction.
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/us-court-orders-every-isp-in-the-un...
Sometimes it self resolves - as you contributed here, yes, countries limit and interfere and fine other countries businesses, all the time!
I don’t know what yours means though. What electrics are made in the UK? How are they over engineered?
Not even China and North Korea whine about or send fake “fines” to offshore entities. They just block their sites and move on with life.
The fact that's technically hard to do (at least without going full-on CCP) doesn't change the situation. Attempting to fine a foreign entity for doing something that breaks no laws in the foreign entity's jurisdiction is just risible.
The us does that regularly. There's thousands of companies that cannot do business with entities from countries like China or they can face criminal charges in US.
A former company I had as a client, EU based SaaS faced this.
Keyword: "The UK".
> cornerstones of our laws
Keyword: "our laws".
> and we'll take robust enforcement action
Enforcement action can only take place within the jurisdiction (with a notable exception of the US which doesn't give a single fuck about someone else's law).
US is extremist and out of step with the civilised world.
So it really wouldn't be hard for the same legal framework that restricts age to happen in the US. It just takes compliance on our part. The UK is just one tentacle of the legal bureaucracy. It wouldn't surprise me if a bill appears called the Online Child Safey Act or something like that soon and it happens to coincide with a bunch of issues Ofcom raises in this lawsuit.
I don’t recall the outcome exact outcome or what has happened since, but I think Gab basically told them off in a similar way, i.e., “ummmm, this is America, silly Europeans” and may have even submitted the foreign demand letters to Congress and for whatever reason may have still geo-blocked the UK and at the same time has blocked VPN IPs because they found it effective at blocking pornography and the bad actors who emanated from a certain country. The effect though is that they’ve effectively barred the UK from participating in free speech in America if that’s still the current state of things. I suspect that is exactly what the tyrannical forces have worked out too, and which is why they’re demanding something other than just geo-blocking.
If you agree to VPN blocking, you effectively enforce the geo-block as well as unmasking users for five-eye de facto domestic surveillance. But they only came after those horrible horrible “Nazis” that insist on their rights to free speech, “…and I did not speak out.”
The point is, regardless of what one thinks of Gab, the powerful and tyrannical elements clearly go after those the mainstream population hates due to the two minutes of hate, so to say, which people have been conditioned to loathe; where the tyrants refine their tactics and the strategy, and practice and normalize the process for when they are ready to go after the mainstream populace… which seems to be approaching. And then the mainstream people are shocked and surprised because they believe it all came out of nowhere, when they just ignored it all along.
This of course is not just limited to the digital realm, the tyrannical forces will always come after scapegoats, and the exposed and low hanging fruit, or and even deliberately cause the “troublemakers” to identify themselves so they can be tracked, monitored, and picked off if need be.
This is not new, and people seem to fall for the same tricks over and over and over.
The US by and large doesn't censor websites even if the content is illegal in the US. They'll get a warrant and seize servers or domains if it's in the country, or maybe poke international law enforcement for cooperation, but it doesn't really extend beyond that.
Therefore they're actually transacting that business on UK/EU soil.
Didn't the US use this argument to prosecute and extradite the Mega founder?
I wonder if the UK/EU will reverse uno the US's stance and start extraditions on US CEOs.
It’s like fining Parisian bars to hand over alcohol to couriers without checking to whom couriers will deliver it.
Couriers = all involved network providers.
Laws apply to actions in the country, they’re not based on citizenship.
If you go to Amsterdam and sleep with a hooker, you didn’t break a law by doing that: despite prostitution (specifically purchasing sex) being illegal in many western countries.
How would Ofcom even have a lawsuit to lose? Are they going to file it in the US? Of course not, USA courts will tell them to pound sand.
They'll just advise the UK government to block 4chan nationwide. Which is really what they want to do anyway.
It's a stupid law and Ofcom are stupid. I wish that Labour hadn't continued with implementing the Tories authoritarian law, but then Labour seem to be a Tory-Lite party but with just less blatant corruption.
I remember him. Sadly he got evicted in the end. F.
> Messages sent to 4chan's press email went unreturned. One of the two dozen or so alleged moderators purportedly exposed in the hack wrote back using their 4chan email address to say that the site had released a "video statement." The user then pointed Reuters to an unrelated, explicit four-minute video montage. A request for further information was followed by a link to a different video with similar content.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/notorious-i...
Its like telling people don't talk to friends and family only go to a professional. This is how we end up in a worse mental crisis.
There are so many global laws that are actually enforced. Of course they all origin in the US. See KYC/AML laws.
No? All countries catch drug dealers from other countries all the time even for the crime that happened outside of their borders. Or do you really think El Chapo could vacation freely in Europe.
It's 90% corporate lobbying with a "do gooder" varnish
Even if you agree that this should be done for the currently stated reasons, the precedent is horrifying.
To quote Snowden, we're building the infrastructure of mass surveillance. (And then hoping nobody's going to come along and use it.)
If you posted cocaine from your cocaine-legal country to an address where it was illegal, and you followed all the regular customs labelling rules, I'm not sure you should be liable. And you shouldn't be extradited either. Even the UK demands that extradition offences would have been criminal had they been committed in the UK. Now I'm sure in practice, you'd find yourself in trouble immediately but I don't think it's fair.
The ramifications of laws like this is everyone needs to be Geo-IP check every request, adhere to every local law. It's not the Internet we signed up for.
If the UK wants to block packets from across the pond, they should (but I hope they don't) do it via a Great Firewall, rather than expecting random foreign websites to do it for them.
Not a big loss, but something to keep in mind. There is a risk the UK has long memory.
The kind of vague phrasing that makes one immediately suspicious. What were these 'several countries'? Iran? Cuba? North Korea?
> also US customers were 30% of the total which made it a non choice
You're literally operating in the US then. It's obvious US laws would apply if you're serving US customers.
For your own safety, you are to only discuss your health with NHS certified healthcare providers and no one else. Doing so with others can lead to unprovoked, unsanctioned and dangerous anecdotes, advice and memes. Worse, you might find community and make friends with people who have similar life experiences, which can distract from your state sanctioned treatment plan. This extends to your friends and spouse, they might mean well, but they are not medical professionals.
Your health is your private matter, let's keep it that way!
When OSA was announced I really expected the US to state clearly that they wouldn't let UK to threaten US citizens with millions of fines if they practice their rights to Free Speech.
Because this is what's happening, the UK is making open threats against US citizens when they practice their rights to Free Speech. See e.g. Lobsters' take on it: they just wanted to have a webforum in the US but they couldn't because a foreign country threatened them with huge fines. No protection from the US.
"Just geoblock UK" seemed like a good enough in practice solution, although it is more action needed than I'd prefer.
You need to buy it from compliance companies which lobbied for the law in the UK, run by ex regulators.
If a country has media or broadcast standards laws, and you distribute or broadcast content in that country that violates those laws, that’s on you. The country can just fine you if you chose not to comply. Just the same as they would if you were doing it while living in that country. You’re not obliged to care about the fine if you don’t live there and never intend to travel there. But if you do then you’re going to be subject to their laws at that point, for violating those laws when you distributed that content in that country.
>We don't put protections on kids walking out the front door
My view is that we most certainly ban and/or heavily discourage children from entering certain places and talking to random strangers. There are many safeguards in the real world, there is simply not enough in the internet.
I don't say this lightly. I am very firmly against the nanny state, and i feel equally strongly in parental rights. I've made comments in the past against these laws but i feel it's the only way forward. The only question that remains is how to best implement such policies to minimize the inevitable erosion of our privacy.
I don't like it, but that's how it is.
The people who support incest porn are a lot less talkative.
As such our windsock government with no strong beliefs does what the survey says is most popular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_interventio...
If anything, the person you were replying to was intentionally describing how 4chan is less dissimilar to humanity in general than its typical portrayal, so responding with a dismissal that that makes them just the same as everyone else is really just affirming their point.
But unlike physical imports, there's a sense that blocking these imports is an affront to base philosophical freedom in a way that prohibiting physical imports isn't.
The reality is this will seriously chill speech broadly across the country regardless of either of those outcomes, and the technical costs of enforcement will be steep.
we’re seeing some good evidence the most recent pushes were secretly funded and directly written by meta, the corporation. [0][1]
according to the link in there,
> Rep. Kim Carver (R-Bossier City), the sponsor of Louisiana's HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her.
and they’ve put as much as 2 billion dollars into it. and yes, that’s billion, with a B.
corporations openai, meta, and google were absolutely backing the push for the age verification bill in california and ohio. [2][3][4]
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45244049
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/13/california-advances...
[4] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/meta-google-back-differe...
I work in safety, and you are right in that this comes up every year. The pressures have been building up and it’s coming to a head. However:
0) Techlash is a thing, and HN regularly underestimates the vehemence and anger behind it.
1) There IS an organic component, driven by voters globally.
2) It is also meta and governments, taking advantage of a crisis to further their ends.
Governments globally are tending towards authoritarianism. Tech firms impact most of the world, but are barely responsive to even the American government.
Voters around the world are increasingly terrified of what tech is doing, while tech is entirely unresponsive to their concerns. Tech is very firmly the bad guy today, when it used to be the “good guy” in the 90s.
So governments are more than happy to be seen as putting tech in its place, while gaining more power for themselves.
A few anecdotes about how bad the safety side is: NDAs are so prevalent and tech is so averse to customer support, that safety teams have no formal signal sharing methods.
The number of requests to recover accounts, point out fraud, or even to address CSAM, that go through WhatsApp, slack, discord, etc. is heart breaking.
To be blunt, it’s a Kafkaesque fuck up that the whole world is stuck in, and people are pissed.
The UK has the 6th highest GDP in the world. Pretty high bar if that make you economically irrelevant.
We grant fully that it’s a slippery slope, ofc. But is the end of the slope in mind at the outset? Maybe, but not certainly.
Britain does not have colonies. You might be thinking of the British overseas territory but the total population of those islands is less than 400,000
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/judge-rules-ever...
On the contrary, both of those are very active in going after people who operate websites they don't like from overseas, and/or their family members (who are often easier to get at). They just don't publish legal notices around it.
..neither do i?
This stuff is not magic, you can just do it yourself.
"~You are a bad parent. Insert $500. Brought to you by Carls Jr."
What evidence is that? Who gets to say what's sufficient?
Unless there is a high probability that an alleged lack of control will negatively other people than the family in question, I don't think it should be the government's business to police.
The people who support incest porn are a lot less talkative.
I think there is an argument to made the pornography in general is harmful.
But to single out one single type of porn strikes me as... very odd. Maybe politicians can list, explicitly, all the other porn genres they find acceptable or agreeable to them, as a kind of compare and contrast exercise.
> Current law allows for restrictions on threatening or abusive words or behaviour intending or likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress or cause a breach of the peace, sending another any article which is indecent or grossly offensive with an intent to cause distress or anxiety,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd...
It's depressingly true; it seems the UK really heading quickly towards a Great Firewall, they've been looking to control VPN use [1] and the top most read article on BBC News right now is yet another public sector cover up of children being sexually abused. [2]
[1] https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/uk-govern...
Tribalism is awful for societies. There’s a reason Russia put so much effort into amplifying it in the west.
It would serve UK legislators well to explore that tingling sense some more before they consider any further efforts in this direction, but that's just my two pence.
They have had decades to do this. They have not.
Risk aversion and Regulation are the heart of the issue.
Same things that have flattened the American housing market for the last 30 years.
And honestly this is more than they really should even have to do. I think it does go above their obligation. They're doing Offcom a favor here, they don't even have to figure out how to block it themselves.
VPN take up in the UK is around 20-25%
From my experience, the best one can do is to get a good and affordable therapist by a word of mouth.. and sometimes one can get lucky as such person is doing also service for a state, for free. Main point is to actively start searching
As far as regulation goes this is pretty light and allowing. It’s more annoying than not having any laws at all sure, but zero regulation regime failed (from the point of view of powers that be).
Next on the escalation ladder is govt writing the rules for you that you either take or leave
So any customer from Libya makes it customary for my female co-workers to wear hijab at the workplace, right? Same logic.
No.
A customer who voluntarily purchases services from a company in a different jurisdiction does NOT automatically makes this company subject to his specific jurisdiction.
The hardware that propagates the data transmission is owned partly by the UK and partly by Canada. The Canadian website operator has turned off the transmission to the UK on their side and has fulfilled their obligations. The UK is complaining that they didn't turn off transmission on their side.
What you're saying is that the website operator should travel to the UK to enforce UK law from Canada. It's nonsensical.
Edit: If this wasn't clear enough here is a cartoonish version:
Ofcom: Your site violates UK law. By allowing UK citizens access, you must abide by UK law.
Website operator: I do not care about serving UK citizens and am now blocking UK IP addresses. Thank you for notifying us.
Ofcom: We have decided that we will not block access to your website from the UK. Therefore it is theoretically possible to access your website anyway, which is a violation of UK law. No matter how much effort you spend on ensuring that UK citizens do not gain access to your website, we will make sure that there will always be a non zero possibility of violating UK law. Since we are not blocking anything, the blame cannot lie in UK users circumventing a UK side block, which would force us to prosecute UK citizens rather than you as the website operator.
Please shut your website down to ensure compliance.
Website Operator: Okay so you're telling me I have to build the great firewall in the UK, make all ISPs adopt it and lobby a change in UK law to make the firewall mandatory, just so I can host my website?
Ofcom: yes
Nobody likes USA. Nor is that required. It is irrelevant. International politics do not run on emotions. As long as USA is capable of enforcing its will, USA's view will be the one that matters. You may dislike it, but that is what it is.
Is it “different” then?
Being serious here.
This is the same as letting a delivery cross your borders, except the delivery vehicle here is permanent infrastructure, similar to a pipeline and it is purposefully set to be permissive and allow anything through.
Why are you suddenly pretending that there is no equivalent to the customs office in this scenario?
It's not like the website operator is sneakily smuggling cargo on a container ship. VPN usage is done UK citizens. The operator has already denied shipments to UK addresses in this scenario.
It's kinda voluntary, though, there's no international agreement about this.
The extradition has succeeded so far because it's based on acts that would have met a criminal bar in New Zealand, and deemed to have a high likelihood of being successfully prosecuted. Fraud, copyright infringement, etc.
The US has standing because many MegaUpload servers were in the US.
And yet, me sitting in Germany suddenly saw a nice banned notice when trying to access the site claiming this is because of "a high court verdict yadayadaya".
Why on earth do I now find ways around a UK court order to unblock a website when I am nowhere near their country? They should at least try and keep things within their jurisdiction.
The UK government has been openly doing this for a couple of years by now.
The original research is riddled with baked in conclusions, and has not been verified independently. Its also mostly LLM generated.
For example, Finland claims jurisdiction over crimes where the action itself or its relevant consequences happen in Finland or the victim is a Finnish citizen, permanent resident, or legal entity. Then there are plenty of rules and exceptions detailing what those principles mean in practice.
But given the increasingly dystopian state of many countries worldwide, you may also encounter difficulties related to administrative burden and systems with not enough human oversight and override for exceptional situations.
LOL, classic. Everyone thinks they are the one being picked on. Plenty of people would argue that what you say here is actually the polar opposite of what happens on HN.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
Despite the enormously heinous stuff I've seen on that site, it has made me a better writer, developed my critical thinking skills, and given me a perspective on the world and its people that wouldn't have existed without.
It also introduced me to many different things and developed my taste beyond measure.
The massive downside, that I suspect the grandparent still wrestles with, is integrating all of depravity of humankind into a coherent world view without falling into cognitive dissonance between the idealized and constructed world with an onslaught of information on the actual reality of it.
It's sort of like looking into the Epstein files and having to decide one's reaction to them:
- crushed by despair at the state of things leading to nihilism and depression
- deciding to ignore it all, and continuing to go on about one's life without integrating it
- acceptance, normalization, and corruption
- a secret fourth option that reaffirms you, using that news as fuel for whatever ends in the hope you can improve the world even if just a little bit, despite how ugly it is
And so on.
The place you sent the box then repacks it and mails it to the UK. Somehow the UK thinks that you and only you have broken the law.
EU doesn't believe in human rights or freedoms.
In 1983, the status of CUKC was renamed to British citizen (for those CUKCs resident in or closely connected with the UK: the situation in the remaining colonies was more complicated). At the same time, the status of British subject was officially restricted to those few British subjects who didn't qualify for citizenship of the UK or of any other Commonwealth country in 1949, and who were formerly known as "British subjects without citizenship".
So we are officially and legally citizens, not subjects.
The original report that cited the $2 billion number was AI generated slop. The $2 billion number wasn't from Meta, it was from Arabella Advisors.
The AI-generated report showed only about $20-30 million in lobbying efforts per year across all lobbying.
Even the Show HN post was full of AI slop, claiming things like "months of research" when the Claude-generated report showed it began a couple days prior.
So please stop repeating this AI generated junk. It dilutes any real story and the obvious falsehoods make it easy for critics to dismiss.
Is there a nuke authority that I did not know about who decides who should and should not have nukes?
A quick comparison with [1] (using 1 GBP ~ 1.30 USD) shows that London would rank #8 in Europe (between Denmark and Norway), while the rest of the UK would come in somewhere around #25, between Spain and Italy.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1168072/uk-gdp-per-head-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
Not just them, but I'll leave it at that.
Some years ago when the United Nations started critiquing colonies, the British overseas ones were rebranded as "territories" and "dependencies." (The French still have overseas colonies, the so called DOM-TOMs, and also some nearer to home.)
Some of these overseas ones like Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands have overwhelming support for British rule thanks to an aggressive neighbour. Some of these remaining colonies have active independence movements with varying support.
According to what? Laws can be whatever a country says, so long as they have the mechanism to enforce it.
See: the US using special forces to kidnap Maduro
I am not sure why you think running a website where people are free to say awful things about powerful people would be profitable.
This is a mis-truth which has been spread by Joe Rogan and his ilk. Political speech is very much protected in UK law. You won't get in "trouble" if you make posts against immigration or trans people. J.K. Rowling and Ricky Gervais certainly haven't been locked up.
Yes, there have been cases, such as the infamous Cowley Hill School case where Hertfordshire police arrested a couple over their posts in a school WhatsApp group. However, such arrests are illegal and in that case the police had to apologise and pay compensation.
What will get you in trouble in the UK is threatening violence against people or posting hate speech that encourages others to do so. But this is also true in the USA and in most countries.
Next steps would be blocking the site uk wide.
We will likely see a future where uk puts out interpol notices on the individuals involved.
If they enter a country with extradition agreements they will get extradited.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
If the UK is not happy about how the site deals with such matters, the UK can block the site.
>Next on the escalation ladder is govt writing the rules for you that you either take or leave
No. This is not "next". This is "now" but the UK doesn't want to actually look to be doing what they are actively doing, and now we've got this mess.
> So-called "barely legal" pornography and content depicting sexual relationships between step-relatives are set to be banned amid efforts to regulate intimate image sharing.
> Peers agreed by a majority of one to ban videos and images depicting relationships that would not be allowed in real life.
> They also agreed by 142 votes to 140, majority two, to bring intimate pictures and videos of adults pretending to be children in line with similar images of real children.
There's actually a 200+ page government review of pornography https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/creating-a-safer-...
Wait did 4chan actually block UK addresses? My understanding was it hadn’t which makes your story fall apart.
The idea that a router is responsible for the packets it forwards rather than the person that made the content and put that content in those packets is getting silly.
Another advantage as the other reply has mentioned is that courts have broad authority but must narrow the effect of their rulings to the minimum necessary to address the suit. In this case it would certainly lead to 4Chan being blocked by UK ISPs by order of a UK court. I think even 4Chan would be fine with that.
Possessing pornography was a separate issue which may or may not be allowed. Typically (I think) authorities went after publishers not consumers - because they were easier targets to pin down.
Which would seem to imply that if you’re sending encrypted traffic at the request of a recipient the as a publisher of “obscene” material then unless you are delivering very clearly illegal content to a user then you should not prosecuted.
I haven’t got a single source for anything I’m saying, so I might be entirely wrong - I’m simply going off half-remembered barely-facts. So please do argue with me!
In the website scenario, there are no physical addresses with a geographic component to them. The physical topology of the network is only known by the operators of the network. Only they know where the routers are physically located.
This means geoip blocking can only ever be done on a best effort basis. Actual blocking can only be done by the operators of the routers, which is why it is unreasonable to expect the website operator to be responsible for perfect compliance.
Today building social network or a cloud provider is a trivial exercise. If the financial incentive is there (aka ban of US services), they will pop out like mushrooms.
Manuel Noriega and “el Chapo” Guzman were both convicted of crimes they committed outside the US but that caused other people to commit crimes inside the US.
Traveling to countries for child sex abuse is illegal and severely punished, although it appears that the law is about the traveling with intent, and not (officially) about the actions that take place overseas: https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/extraterritor... .
No countries have extraterritorial jurisdiction.
Some countries have a lot of influence over the local jurisdiction outside of their own territory.
The UK doesn't have much influence like that.
But if the UK has any minesweepers, I bet this could all be sorted out with a few phone calls.
Imagine this scenario, a major G7 country declares:
All bytes sent to a computer on their soil count as a transaction on their soil.
And the end client being on a VPN is not a defence UNLESS the website owner attempts to verify the user's identity.
Immediately have to pay local taxes, conform to local laws.
Unless you keep all your assets in the US and never fly abroad, our shady website operator is exposing them self to real risk of being snatched by police somewhere or having their assets seized.
The only thing stopping that from happening is the trade agreements the Americans have put in place, the very trade agreements everyone's now looking at and thinking 'what are these really worth?'.
Yeah, it's fantasy and it won't happend but it could.
The internet is not free, it runs on sufferance of a bunch of governments and some, like China, already lock it down.
The more America, who probably gains the most from it right now, plays with fire, the more risk something like this crazy scenario happens.
Another more plausible scenario is countries simply start repealing safe harbor laws. End of YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/etc. in those countries overnight.
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/middle-east/2026/03/18/bloc...
So yes, you are right in that activly start searching is the better way. But that insight is often lost on the target audience.
Laws are not a buffet. You choose to do business in a market, you've opted to be regulated in that market.
You are absolutely free to sell your services to whoever you want, but the US is equally free to refuse to allow you to operate domestically if you're breaking their laws (and otherwise make your life difficult if you e.g. rely on US banking infrastructure). If you want to do business in Iran, don't expect to do business in the US.
I don't like it same as you because it makes doing business on the internet complicated but it's how it works in practice.
I really hope for all the people in the UK that your country doesn't go down this route.
I would bet that some young people will be as reflective and independently minded as you were to integrate the material into their experience and be better off for it. Some (like me, because I was thin-skinned) won't and it will stress them out or traumatize them instead. Does that make them lesser human beings for not being capable of bettering themselves from seeing the unfiltered truth on their own?
For all the benefit of 4chan, and I do say there is some benefit only after having grown into an adult with better critical thinking skills and years of therapy, it self-selects for a certain type of poster capable of lurking enough, following the norms and having a thick skin. Not everyone will clear that bar and it's unreasonable to think that all young people will turn out like yourself having immersed themselves in it. Some could end up wasting a lot of time baited into petty arguments, or worse.
Right to vote was already established before the change of the name (subject->citizen).
So, what changed? Well subjects have “privileges” that are afforded from the monarch, and citizens have “rights” which are given from the state.
Except:
1) In olde english law, the monarch and the state are literally the same thing.
2) Rights seem to be pretty loosely followed if they’re actually, you know, RIGHTS, and not privileges afforded from the state.
I’d say that semantically the difference is how the words make you feel, not the actual applicability of the terms to anything that has been realised.
That is still an absurd amount of money
A reasonable case can be made that it should be Irish territory, not British, but that is a territorial dispute.
Fun fact: they've not been called that in 23y, they're DROM-COM
Okay then if you're just going to be cute and nonspecific there's no point in continuing this discussion. I'm not interested in trying to decipher vague insinuations.
That was very clearly illegal and has nothing to do with laws.
What difference does that make?
> I am not sure why you think running a website where people are free to say awful things about powerful people would be profitable.
I didn't say anything about them being profitable. And again, what different would that make?
Not to say anyone would actually get in trouble for just some opinion posts, but I don't know why you went with "against" here, I think "for" is the more likely one to make the current UK (or US) government upset.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/maga-traveler-dragged-o...
It already happened via GDPR to some degree. CJEU ruled in December that platforms can qualify as controllers for personal data published in user-generated advertisement. The given reasoning was basically that the platform determined the means and the purposes of the processing.
Due to that they can be liable for article 82 damages.
if it helps, feel free to apply the original quote to facebook or whatever when they do something good. but this article and comment chain is about 4chan. so i am talking about 4chan.
> The European Union does not recognise the extra-territorial application of laws adopted by third countries and considers such effects to be contrary to international law.
(yes the irony is palpable)
> The blocking statute prohibits compliance by EU operators with any requirement or prohibition based on the specified foreign laws.
It is illegal to comply with certain US sanctions in the EU. This is most likely what GP is talking about.
https://finance.ec.europa.eu/eu-and-world/open-strategic-aut...
In the second, a cult grabs hold of the person and isolates them from their families and loved ones so they can brainfuck them. And, I suspect this has happened to the UK. England doesn't want to be a land for the English, because to do so would make them racist. They have strength in their diversity. Blah blah blah. And the English can't be allowed to talk with anyone else or they might realize how fucked-in-the-head all that nonsense is. They are under the spell of a cult, not as individuals, but collectively. And that cult won't be done with them until it's taken everything from them and coerced them to sign a "billion year contract". And to top it off, you're blaming it on them.
Venezuela showed everyone what happens when you're a toothless country. USA shows up at your door uninvited, fucks your shit up, takes your oil and kidnaps your president for good measure, just to tack on some extra humiliation.
Don't get me wrong, Maduro deserved an even worse fate than what he got. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. It's still a cautionary tale for nations worldwide. It can happen to you. China continues to erode the economic power of the USA. They could very well discover one day that their military might is all they have left. Who's to say they won't suddenly decide to capitalize on their advantage before it evaporates?
An example in microcosm: a local village suffered road flooding due to failed maintenance of water pipes. Our rent-seeking privatized water company effected the minimum repair required by regulation.
The next section of old pipe burst almost immediately, flooding the road further for most of January, utterly destroying the surface, through the road base in many places. Even at a crawl it's difficult to avoid tyre damage.
Over a month later the water repairs were effected. Then shortly after some local roadwork notification signs were put up.
Those expecting repairs to the moonscaped road were disappointed: instead the relentless bureaucracy of British local government installed traffic calming measures on top of the broken road, as the work had already been booked and could not be stopped by any means as even basic roadworks lack any degree of dynamism in their execution.
All this still needs to be made right. These small scale failures will compound and compound until the entire state is drowned in the consequence of its incompetence.
It follows that the restaurant writes the address on every delivery. Do they ID each recipient?
With "protected political speech" being defined as which flavour of the established, incompetent elite you prefer this year.
People have been arrested in the UK for holding blank signs within vicinity of Palestine marches. People have been arrested over protesting Charles' coronation. To say nothing of thousands of people arrested every year over tweets.
Political speech is basically criminalised in the UK at this point. This is not an establishment worth any of our respect.
If I offer a service in US I still have to respect US law, it doesn't matter that I'm based in Luxembourg or New Zealand.
The same applies in reverse.
E.g. many US news outlets never cared to implement gdpr and geoblocked European users from accessing their websites.
The line is quite thin and ambiguous though. If they want to get someone they will and find that various remarks “encourage violence”.
Almost any opinion that isn't nice can be argued to encourage violence.
Looking through that article, one of the examples is "The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post."
But if you dig into what happened - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3wkzgpjxvo
"The wife of a Conservative councillor has been jailed for 31 months after calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire."
This is pretty clear incitement to violence.
The UK has problems, but it's not very useful to throw all of these cases together to make a big number, it really rather undermines the point.
(edit - looking at the video posted in a sibling comment is enlightening. The number actually convicted of anything is around ~400 and this includes a lot of direct incitement to violence, stalking and all sorts. Which are similarly illegal in the US. The US right-wing talking points are as usual a load of crap.
None of which is to say I think the UK has things right, and that number of arrests is clearly a problem in itself, but as usual the "OH MY GOD look at what's happening over there! Muh free speech!" from the US commenters is hypocritical and myopic)
The US is not going to let all US companies get fined out of retaliation, so there would be more retaliation from the US against the EU, and everyone else. In the end everyone loses, except for China, which as you mentioned is not stupid enough to play these games and decided to simply pick a lane.
China locks down the Internet and blocks foreign players (to varying levels of success). They don't reach overseas to prosecute foreign executives or fine Meta for not removing Party-critical content from Facebook. Of all the parties that could be involved in this censorship drama, China is somehow the most honest.
I don't think this is how the law works.
Think of it this way: any customer from Libya makes it customary for my female co-workers to wear hijab at the workplace.
Thus a customer who voluntarily purchases services from a company in a different jurisdiction does NOT automatically makes this company subject to his jurisdiction.
I mean I find this quite plausible, but you should tell the guys in the thread above, who are all posting "ha, the UK thinks it can tell a non-UK website what to do, how absurd!" and metaphorically pouring their tea out in Boston Harbour.
You send a packet to your ISP with an address on top. That packet physically travels to your nearest exchange and then the network figures out how to route it to the recipient's real location.
In addition, the recipient's IP address tells you nothing about who or where they are. It's fundamentally un-knowable from the sender's perspective, no matter what the UK wants you to think. IP addresses are not evidence of physical location.
When you receive a packet, there is no way to know where in the world it came from or where it wants to go. It's just a number. You can make guesses but it's still just reading tea leaves.
To believe that IP geolocation is in any way reliable is a gross misunderstanding of TCP/IP and networks in general.
But of course, citizens typically also have duties -- commonly, the duty to take up arms to defend the state -- and subjects can legitimately expect a reciprocity of obligations from the sovereign (e.g. the enforcement of the "King's Peace"), which sounds quite a bit like rights to me.
(All of which is a verbose and not very coherent way of saying that I agree with you.)
There’s a motte-and-bailey fallacy happening with that “Meta spent $2 billion” report where the $2 billion number is used as a hook but then replaced with a different argument if the other parties are observant enough to see that it’s BS
The Online Safety Act 2023[1][2][3] (OSA) (c. 50) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. It was passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant secretary of state the power to designate, suppress, and record a wide range of online content that they deem illegal or harmful to children.[4][5]
"but whom's English"
Joking aside, that was one of the worst own goals in history.
But not all of Britain's colonies are far away.
> A retired Tennessee law enforcement officer was held in jail for more than a month this fall after police arrested him over a Facebook post of a meme related to the September assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/17/politics/retired-cop-jail...
You are entirely incorrect.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/17/politics/retired-cop-jailed-o...
Of course AFAIK this can happen pretty much everywhere at this point so your only hope is being a citizen of a country that doesn't allow it for locals (such as the US) and then not traveling. Or wipe your devices prior to traveling.
Well I guess sudden cardiac arrest is even worse than silly internet rules.
Why though? Libya has no jurisdiction over my business in the EU. I place no restrictions on who can purchase a subscription on my SaaS. I certainly can sell to customers in Libya.
All Libya can do is ban my business, but they can only implement that ban within their own sovereign borders.
If someone mails $ProhibitedItem at a USPS to the UK, then it's the job of local UK police and/or customs to reject the parcel if it is prohibited. It's the UK's problem, de facto if not de jure, because the sender is out of reach.
If someone with a UK subsidiary and local processing center mails $ProhibitedItem to their center and delivers it to someone in the UK, then that's more than the UK's problem.
Whether you agree with the law or not, it is important to be accurate when discussing it. The U.S. vs. U.K. (not) free speech law discussion online so often seems to frame them as fundamentally different, but they are on the same spectrum. The go-to example of the limits of free speech in context of the U.S. legal system is "Shouting fire in a crowded theater". The U.K. laws are the same in principle but a little further along the spectrum.
What the west wishes the world to be and how they think everyone does see the world, does simply not apply. No matter how Nash pure. The All defector defects in all games..
Your example only compares against the UK past.
It has zero relevancy because it says nothing about relative change against other countries.
Anecdotally for the USA, I went to New Orleans last year, and I was stunned at the rotting infrastructure. Coming from New Zealand, the USA seems to be trying to copy the trajectory of Argentina.
Then again, I see serious problems in my hometown (e.g. sewage treatment plant) and country (e.g. big problems with rail, ferry, air, electricity, 3 waters). Apart from the societal issues that it seems all countries are facing.
But the rant is entirely counterfactual. Britain is a very rich country with beautiful and recovering nature, a healthy and educated population, one of the more capable armies in Europe, a functioning deterrent, and a relatively healthy political system. We just got two new parties becoming credible threats to the "main" two (regardless of the parties' views, the political competition itself is a much healthier situation than the American duopoly)! We just abolished hereditary peers, which is a constitutional change (and it can just be done)! Below the everyday media noise, we're doing alright as a democracy.
Got a source on this one?
Supporting Palestine in the UK has never been illegal. Supporting the specific group "Palestine Action" has been as they were for a while a proscribed terrorist organisation due to what was (IMHO) some property crimes committed against defense contractors by some of their members. Totally wrong, and has now been struck down in the courts, but saying "you can't support palestine" is also wrong.
> Thousands of people arrested every year over tweets.
The source I saw on this one had clear examples of violent threats and calls to set buildings full of people on fire, so I'm not sure this is clear either.
The US right now cannot keep its bridges from collapsing. It cannot keep its children safe from men with guns. It cannot keep its citizens fed or housed. It is failing to provide adequate healthcare for a majority of its population, it cannot even keep its children vaccinated against measles. Our science agencies are being run by crackpots. Our mass media is being combined under one single owner.
This doesn't even consider the impending existential challenges of climate change.
And this nation, instead of fixing its crumbling domestic infrastructure - educational systems, health care systems, or anything that would benefit the citizens of the US - has chosen to launch an attack against a foreign nation that has already cost 10s of billions of dollars and will likely cost vastly more.
All the political and economic capitol that is required to maintain and improve stable conditions is instead being poured into murder in a desert thousands of miles from home.
Libya doesn't actually have a law requiring foreign companies to wear hijabs, but if they did, they could try to enforce it. The smart thing to do would be to stop doing business there. If you don't, they would probably force Libyan internet providers to block you, and maybe file charges against you and possibly your customers there. If you live in Europe, you could probably ignore the charges, but most people don't want that hanging over their heads, especially when your Libyan business has been shut down anyway.
Consider when Russia tried to impose a fine on Google that was worth more than the total amount of money that has ever existed globally. Google just stopped doing business in Russia, because obviously that was their only choice.
I sure hope I'll see you back here on 1/20/29 saying over and over again how wrong you were and how stupid this comment was but I'm sure you'll have some excuse, or pretend you never said it.
It’s extremely realistic to cut them out.
Genuinely what does the US sell that a country like Brazil or Canada or Australia can’t get elsewhere or live without?
Even if Musk did something in Pennsylvania, Trump still would have won the electoral college vote.
I think the good faith argument is that Musk confirmed they were secure so that the election wasn't stolen from Trump. But frankly Musk is too much of an idiot to steal an election or make sure it is secure so I don't know how to take it...
You choose to do business in a jurisdiction, you bind yourself to their laws. That means all laws, not just ones you like, or think that are relevant to your business. Laws are not a buffet.
Don't do business in jurisdictions where you feel like you cannot comply with domestic law. No one is requiring you to do business in the US. People choose to do business in the US so they can profit from US customers, and that's totally fine, but doesn't come with some magical immunity to US law.
> The go-to example of the limits of free speech in context of the U.S. legal system is "Shouting fire in a crowded theater". The U.K. laws are the same in principle but a little further along the spectrum.
They are completely different in principle. The principle in the US is preventing the inciting of violence or a situation that could cause physical injury to others. In the UK it has become about protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it.
You could've said that exact same thing about the US just 10 years ago when Obama was president.
A society that is unwilling to replace itself will inevitably decline.
Ref: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn5lxg2l0lqo
97% of trials in the UK don't have juries anyway.
The changes would mean instead of 3% having juries it would be down to 2.25%.
This would also be reviewed once the existing backlog has been seen to. "This means that currently a suspect being charged with an offence today may not reach trial until 2030."
> Got a source on this one?
Not quite arrested but the closest I can find is someone threatened with arrest if they wrote certain things on the blank sign:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/anti-monarch...
The UK Police seem to have switched to a policy of knowingly arresting people erroneously and then releasing them and apologising afterwards.
(At least it is just arresting people and releasing them rather than shooting them and then apologising afterwards whilst also exonerating the officers involved.)
The article does link to an incident in Russia where a protester was dragged away for holding up a blank sign.
They're both examples of Country A putting a law on the books that constrains sites in Country B. "Don't sell", "don't serve", "don't stand on one leg while fulfilling orders", they're all the same class of overreach.
The group itself offered training courses on Ho to sabotage the U.K. military
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/palestine-ac...
I wonder what would happen in the US with such a group
If my services are available in US, I need to comply with US laws as well.
Being jailed with some books and lots of time to work out sounds nice sometime, especially during times when home life is toddlers or baby screaming at you and waking you 24/7 and all your time is spent tending to others' needs so you have no personal agency anyway, the rest does not.
If the government thinks there are ones and zeros on the internet it’s citizens should not be allowed to see, they should block them from entering the country.
So, no.
1. This isn't about business but charges. There's no way in hell US can e.g. prosecute non us citizens from trading with Cuba e.g. the embargo applies to US individuals and companies. The rest of the world, e.g. European countries, have normal relations with Cuba and nobody gives two damns about the embargo.
2. The same thing happens in reverse and applies to US companies doing business overseas.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
It hasn't happened yet. Is there something you perceive as especially problematic now, as opposed to the last 30 years?
China has been preparing for a global energy crisis for years. It is paying off now
As other Asian economies race to conserve energy, China has huge reserves of oil and gas as well as alternative energy sources like wind and solar
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/20/china-oil-rese...I also live within a floodzone. There is a high probability I will learn how we deal with flooding in the future (different flooding - shallower and lacking the winds and hopefully better pre-planning for avoiding harm).
> everything looked brand new
Absolutely not, to me.
And the conversation is regarding infrastructure. A bunch of Christchurch infrastructure is brand new.
And before you argue that there is no such thing as emotional violence: do you agree that some emotional harm can be worse than some physical harm? I'd much rather be punched than subjected to the worst emotional trauma I've experienced in my life.
> In the UK it has become about protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it.
I'm not going to defend U.K. laws but it is patently absurd to say something like this is in the context of a conversation about U.S. vs. U.K. free speech laws when the U.S. courts allow schools to ban certain books because of "protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it". Heaven forbid a Florida student learns about homosexuality, won't anyone think of the parents?
The us is the most harmless empire that ever was. The most extreme case in the us evangelical bullshit is a daily buisness case.
I've never once heard it from somebody who correctly anticipated China's rise though. The imminent collapse story just quietly changes every 5 years or so.
If the US has an imperial rival one thing you can almost guarantee is that the predictions of economic collapse will be as frequent as they are absurdly overblown and as always, This Time It's Different.
Trump isnt all that different in character to previous administrations he just takes bigger risks and doesnt bother with the mask.
A policy that ended a decade ago, and was only ever marginally successful (even at the height of the restrictions their birth rate was nearer 1.4 than 1.0)
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/no-freedom-of-s...
More concerningly, prescribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation had a suppressive effect on lawful protest against the Israel-Gaza war, since any supporter of Palestine might be considered a member of Palestine Action and therefore, legally, a terrorist suspect.
Anyone who sells to my enemies is my enemy. You yourself can be subject to embargoes.
Francesca Albanese cannot do banking with banks from her own country because the US said so. Read: third parties that have relations with the US are barred from doing business with you or else risk being blacklisted too.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-12-28/the-comp...
Even debanking only happens because the banks themselves face fines from the state, which if unpaid leads to loss of licensure, after which continued operation leads to... jail. You only need a passport because if you try to push through security without one, you're going to jail. I'm sure if I wanted to waste my time I could follow the thread on all the other ones too.
Social ostracism is a good point. Perhaps the exception that proves the rule?
Sure it can. It can do whatever it wants in its domestic courts. Turkmenistan can prosecute you and me right now for failure to pay insufficient deference to dear leader. Whether this impacts us in any way is the actual question. We presumably do not want to do business in Turkmenistan. But the OP wants to do business in the US. Ergo, the OP is subject to US law, irrespective of what he thinks US law should look like or what its limits ought to be.
OP doesn't have to do business in the US at all and be completely and utterly untouched by US law - he won't be extradited anywhere unless the offence in question is also an offence in his own country, which as you point out, the Cuban embargo (etc) isn't. This is how you and I stay safe from the many Turkmenistani indictments hanging over us.
This is not a case of someone bravely standing up for justice and freedom, this is a case of someone wanting to profit from US customers but somehow have total immunity from US law. And I'd respectfully point out that if the countries were reversed, and we were talking about e.g. Russia, the European countries would be apoplectic about anyone doing business there. Imagine a Brazilian company selling drone motors to Russia. Can its executives expect to travel freely through the EU without fear of arrest? Do business in the EU?
The reality of the USA post WW2 is one that is full of plenty of shame. It still might be the most harmless empire there ever was, but that's a relative statement - the US has done * a lot* of harm. Perhaps a lot of good, too. Maybe even more good than harm. But almost all of that harm was unnecessary. But the past is not the future, and the present shows us marching to a darker and darker future.
Better to raise the alarm now and stop that descent rather than letting it continue.
No it really isn't.
> You draw the line at physical violence, an entirely arbitrary line, whereas the U.K. goes further and continues to emotional violence.
It must appear as a spectrum to you because you've been taken in by propaganda used by authoritarians and fundamentalists to justify using actual violence and censorship to crush dissent and criticism.
There is no such thing as emotional violence. It's hurt feelings. There is no "before" about it, and we don't need to agree on anything, you're just wrong.
> And before you argue that there is no such thing as emotional violence: do you agree that some emotional harm can be worse than some physical harm? I'd much rather be punched than subjected to the worst emotional trauma I've experienced in my life.
Non sequitur.
A society where people are reliant on the government to protect them from having their feelings hurt by hearing other people's opinions is not a good or sustainable one.
The other thing is that I guarantee you this is totally selectively enforced and prosecuted, which is a hallmark of these kinds of authoritarian laws. People whose thoughts and opinions are considered verboten or threatening to the regime I'm sure have little or no protection of their feelings and sensibilities when they are insulted by other people's opinions and comments.
> I'm not going to defend U.K. laws but it is patently absurd to say something like this is in the context of a conversation about U.S. vs. U.K. free speech laws when the U.S. courts allow schools to ban certain books because of "protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it". Heaven forbid a Florida student learns about homosexuality, won't anyone think of the parents?
I don't know what point you are trying to make here or if you know what freedom of speech is. Government schools and government education bureaucrats developing policies about curriculum and teaching materials doesn't seem to offer useful commentary about freedom of speech, so I really don't know how to respond to your question.
Of course it needn't be a centralized state per se. Somalis for example use 'xeer' law which is a scalable legal system that starts peer to peer and appealable upwards, mostly based on restitution/fines and ostracizing those who do not pay (eventually to the point, they could become 'outlaws' that have no protection from crime themselves).
I think restitution based legal system is ideal, but of course that would flip on its head the current system where the state ousts the victim and becomes the victim themselves and deprives the victim of restitution instead turning it into a big cronyism money making machine for themselves at the expense of everyone else. It would also mean the end of most 'victimless' crime, and god knows the wailing and nashing of teeth that would come when you couldn't prosecute someone for smoking a left handed cigarette because there is no victim to prosecute the case [or on behalf of].
> The other thing is that I guarantee you this is totally selectively enforced and prosecuted
Unlike all other laws? Tell me, who is more likely to end up on death row? To be prosecuted for drug possession? How much jail time is a rich white student likely to receive for rape compared to a poor black student? All laws are selectively enforced and prosecuted.
> I don't know what point you are trying to make here or if you know what freedom of speech is. Government schools and government education bureaucrats developing policies about curriculum and teaching materials doesn't seem to offer useful commentary about freedom of speech, so I really don't know how to respond to your question.
You don't understand that Florida schools banning books because they contain references to homosexuality is a free speech issue? Judge Carlos E. Mendoza in Penguin Random House v. Gibson said "The state’s prohibition of material that ‘describes sexual conduct’ is overbroad and unconstitutional.”. Unfortunately, many other judges did not rule the same way.
The point is that the "free speech" you lord over other countries is arbitrary, those who proclaim the U.S. to have true free speech and countries like the U.K. to be oppressive anti free speech regimes are delusional and have been conned by U.S. exceptionalism.
You can disagree with another county's choice to draw the line somewhere other than where the U.S. draws it but to proclaim the U.S. has real free speech that stands alone from other countries is lying to yourself. What, exactly, is unique about the U.S. free speech laws? That it is a constitutional amendment?
We could debate where the line should be, whether the U.K. or the U.S. has it right or wrong, but to argue that the U.K.'s laws are somehow distinct from the U.S. laws is nonsensical. I do not agree with where the U.K. draws the line. I also do not agree with where the U.S. draws the line.
> It must appear as a spectrum to you because you've been taken in by propaganda used by authoritarians and fundamentalists to justify using actual violence and censorship to crush dissent and criticism.
And for one last final point: how many protestors has the U.S. government killed this year? How many protestors have been killed by the U.K. government for protesting against government policy? I'm sure Renée Good and Alex Pretti and all the other murdered U.S. protestors are comforted in their graves by the glorious anti-authoritarian pro-dissent free speech laws that protected their dissent and protest so well.
It's not an arbitrary line. It's the definition being discussed. It's not a "spectrum", it's not a "slope". The line drawn is the line.
> > The other thing is that I guarantee you this is totally selectively enforced and prosecuted
> Unlike all other laws?
In an authoritarian regime like the UK no doubt they also selectively enforce and prosecute other crimes, you're right about that. But absolutely the threshold to meet these kind of ludicrous statues is so arbitrary it's laughable, a bureaucrat or law enforcement agent for the state can just make things up as they go really.
> I don't know what point you are trying to make here or if you know what freedom of speech is. Government schools and government education bureaucrats developing policies about curriculum and teaching materials doesn't seem to offer useful commentary about freedom of speech, so I really don't know how to respond to your question.
> You don't understand that Florida schools banning books because they contain references to homosexuality is a free speech issue? Judge Carlos E. Mendoza in Penguin Random House v. Gibson said "The state’s prohibition of material that ‘describes sexual conduct’ is overbroad and unconstitutional.”. Unfortunately, many other judges did not rule the same way.
I don't think government agents and lawmakers setting curriculum and teaching materials for government schools is a freedom of speech issue, no.
> The point is that the "free speech" you lord over other countries is arbitrary, those who proclaim the U.S. to have true free speech and countries like the U.K. to be oppressive anti free speech regimes are delusional and have been conned by U.S. exceptionalism.
Just repeating that it's arbitrary doesn't make your case, sadly.
> You can disagree with another county's choice to draw the line somewhere other than where the U.S. draws it but to proclaim the U.S. has real free speech that stands alone from other countries is lying to yourself. What, exactly, is unique about the U.S. free speech laws? That it is a constitutional amendment?
I don't know about unique, but I know the state can not easily intimidate, bully, censor, and prosecute you for posting your thoughts online under the pretense that it might hurt peoples' feelings. Unlike the UK, for example.
> We could debate where the line should be, whether the U.K. or the U.S. has it right or wrong, but to argue that the U.K.'s laws are somehow distinct from the U.S. laws is nonsensical. I do not agree with where the U.K. draws the line. I also do not agree with where the U.S. draws the line.
Why are the British so angry when confronted by the fact that they do not have freedom of speech, then in the next sentence go on to talk about how great it is their government protects their feelings from being hurt by hearing what other people in their country (and even around the world) think? It's bizarre. It's a phrase that has long been understood around the world to be American style freedom of speech, i.e., that the state should not have the power to censor or prosecute its people for speech. UK does not have it.
"You can say what you want as long as the government does not decide it might offend somebody" is not freedom of speech. If that is what you think freedom of speech is, then North Korea and Pakistan have it.
Simply bizarre.
> And for one last final point: how many protestors has the U.S. government killed this year? How many protestors have been killed by the U.K. government for protesting against government policy? I'm sure Renée Good and Alex Pretti and all the other murdered U.S. protestors are comforted in their graves by the glorious anti-authoritarian pro-dissent free speech laws that protected their dissent and protest so well.
This isn't an argument because my claim isn't that US is not authoritarian nor that it never violates the rights of its citizens.
A more relevant question would be, how many people have the countries arrested and prosecuted for what they have said or written? And the answer for USA quite well might be non-zero because all governments are by nature corrupt and power-hungry and will violate the rights of their citizens to maintain the power of their regime, as is obviously the case in the UK. The US government is not fundamentally different in that regard, but the staggering difference in the rate of such cases shows that in the US it has been much more difficult for the government to do this.
The US government is still authoritarian and thirsts to take rights from its citizens, and has -- rights to privacy/unreasonable search/seizure, rights to arms, have been flagrantly violated. So has freedom of speech for that matter as leaks like the Twitter files have exposed, but at least for now those cases are still considered wrongdoing by the government and the people often have recourse with government courts, which is why I would say it still generally has freedom of speech.
The UK simply doesn't. It doesn't even pretend it does (except to just claiming freedom of speech means something it doesn't).