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Aurornis 22 hours ago [-]
This was such a weird case. Usually when a country goes after a foreign business they enforce it by imposing restrictions within their own borders and threatening the operators with legal action if they ever enter the country. If the operators don’t visit the country and their banking doesn’t cross a business that must follow those laws (which is hard), it’s otherwise symbolic.
I may be reading too much into the editorialized writeups about Ofcom but even their statements imply they thought they were just going to impose their laws globally and that other countries would line up to help them do it?
This quote from the court is amazing:
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution
Indeed. Who could have predicted this?
Which raises the scarier question of why they tried this at all? Was the defeat a planned showing to justify future action to justify more control of the internet, as Preston Byrne speculates? Are they using this as a demonstration of why internet censorship is the only solution? It’s hard to imagine why they thought they were going to get anywhere with this case, unless failing was the goal
vr46 21 hours ago [-]
The write-up from the lawyers is unintentionally hilarious
The judge dismissed its lawsuit against Ofcom for lack of jurisdiction, because Ofcom was protected by foreign sovereign immunity.
2. The judge's comments were obiter dicta observations that were not necessary to decide the case, rather than a binding ruling that Ofcom's actions were unconstitutional, making the headline somewhat selective, it's hardly the defeat of a giant regulatory system. Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.
We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here:
Cuba. ABC being hassled over Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk. The White House restricting reporting. Ending support for public broadcasting. Book bans, the CLOUD act, the TIKTOK DIVESTITURE fercrissakes. Sanctions on the ICC.
bothers 23 minutes ago [-]
> We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here
And then you didn't. Don't throw 'obiter dicta' to the rubes and then completely fumble your distraction with the incoherent legerdemain of 'double standards.' Show some art, at least.
dofm 20 hours ago [-]
> We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here
They have tariffs on foreign double standards because it's a key export business.
gcanyon 13 hours ago [-]
> Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk
Please point out where Jimmy Kimmel did that. I'll help, here's a transcript:
Kimmel landed on a completely erroneous conclusion based on an insane false flag conspiracy theory – and voiced that live on air:
"the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it"
If you think that is not worth attempting to get a host taken off the air for (at least for a while), I don't think you understand how dangerous amplified disinformation can be.
Propelloni 5 hours ago [-]
Well, people are not trying to take Fox News off the air for their many incidents of amplified disinformation, so maybe people think freedom of speech should be protected, even if people disagree with said speech?
Now consider that one is a comedian and the other is a news outlet, what does that tell you about your argument.
gadders 4 hours ago [-]
Now do CNN and MSNBC, or is it a case of "It's only wrong if your guy does it?"
SideQuark 3 hours ago [-]
Did CNN or MSNBC lose a billion dollar lawsuit for knowingly promoting false stories while, and I quote from the Fox case, calling their own viewers “stupid, stupid, stupid” for believing their content? Did CNN or MSNBC shareholders sue them due to the damage caused by promoting false stories on purpose?
Maybe there is some demonstrable difference to size and scale of willful dishonestly among outlets.
skarz 37 minutes ago [-]
1. Jury awards $5,000,000 in defamation lawsuit against CNN
Comparing either CNN or even MSNBC to Fox like this is a clear indication that you have never critically viewed these three channels in comparison.
The ridiculousness Fox gets away with and have gotten away with for decades is mountainous compared to anything else that boomers watch. Ailes and Murdoch wrote the playbook on modern disinformation and it is laughable to compare Fox to any other news channel.
Unfortunately, Fox has been so successful as an entertainment “news” organization that the other competing ones, praise be capitalist ingenuity, have adopted much of their scumbag playbook.
gadders 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you for proving my point.
Propelloni 2 hours ago [-]
You clearly have not followed the thread. This is inane.
emsixteen 2 hours ago [-]
What you've quoted does not line up with what you're describing it as.
tempfile 3 hours ago [-]
This isn't misinformation. The MAGA gang were trying to do that. They were trying to score political points from it. They still are.
Of course, they were also correct. But these quoted statements are primarily about intention and motive, not really arguing (or even speculating particularly strongly) that the shooter actually was MAGA.
Incidentally, this does not seem like particularly dangerous misinformation at all. MAGA supporters are probably the safest group in America (it is, after all, not a safe country for anyone).
buckle8017 2 hours ago [-]
"Of course they were also correct"
That's the important part here, touch grass.
windowliker 2 hours ago [-]
>4chan actually lost its case in the US District Court on 15 September 2026
Correct, but this update is in regards to Ofcom's evidence of 20th October in front of the parliamentary select committee to which they have to report, and at which they conceded that their ability to make legally binding cross-jurisdictional enforcement actions is limited when faced with the laws of another country. The wording she used is in fact very interesting: "If foreign courts decide to... try and get in our way, there will be a point at which we have to accept that we won’t be able to recover that money."
>Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.
They have taken on the case pro bono.
jsLavaGoat 18 hours ago [-]
1. It's a Pyrrhic victory at best, read it. In reality, 4chan won even though they technically "lost" their argument. They aren't enforced up. That's the win.
2. It's not really obiter dicta because it's a district court order it's not something you cite, really as binding precedent. But if you read between the lines, the court is only dismissing Ofcom because it is part of a sovereign, which means it cannot maintain it's other position. The judge was making it clear he thought Ofcom needed to stop. The ruling is addressed to the parties not really to a future court. If I were Ofcom's lawyer, I wouldn't be celebrating this.
American double standards have nothing to do with this case and it's just a sort of throw in everyone seems to need to mention here. So what? Are they good or bad? If you think they're bad to extend jurisdiction, then take the win.
Long arm jurisdiction is the opposite of what happened here. That's where you pull people into US courts that might not be US citizens for things that happened not in the US. Somehow that implies that foreign companies should be able to reach into the US and bug people in the US not doing anything in their own country? Oh, but USA bad so you scored that point.
I think you're just seeing Lincoln's hat in the clouds.
Everyone on HN apparently thinks they have a law degree.
8note 16 hours ago [-]
> Somehow that implies that foreign companies should be able to reach into the US and bug people in the US not doing anything in their own country?
well yeah. whats good for the goose is good for the gander. if the US wants to go bug people in their own countries, even going so far as to murder a bunch of people to kidnap a sitting president of a country, youre gonna get others looking to do it in response, and as the US loses its privileged position on the world stage, its gonna have to start complying
StanislavPetrov 12 hours ago [-]
>its gonna have to start complying
This is only true if, to quote the article being responded to:
>Unless Ofcom is prepared to sail a British invasion fleet here and land ground troops
amanaplanacanal 15 hours ago [-]
That seems... Unlikely?
16 hours ago [-]
vr46 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tzs 13 hours ago [-]
> We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here: [...]
> [...], the CLOUD act, [...]
The CLOUD Act doesn't do what you think it does. Here's a comment from a while ago with more detail [1].
That comment, your comment, is misleading and legally selective - much like Preston Doo-dah's post.
The CLOUD Act bypasses traditional MLAT procedures, faced significant civil liberties opposition (EFF), and resolved a genuine jurisdictional dispute, not a mere drafting oversight. Claiming that data location is irrelevant ignores foreign laws and national sovereignty. Explaining why the US wants extraterritorial powers doesn't establish that it should have them.
kernal 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
EA-3167 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
LoganDark 18 hours ago [-]
International politics is done via Twitter now
EA-3167 18 hours ago [-]
In the same way that a child tumbling down a hill is an Olympic gymnast.
LoganDark 18 hours ago [-]
I mean if they're in the Olympics then that is essentially true.
EA-3167 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
LoganDark 17 hours ago [-]
I'm saying that right now, certain high-profile idiots are making it matter by definition. Once they stop using Twitter for that, then it'll stop mattering again.
EA-3167 16 hours ago [-]
The high profile idiots might matter, their participation on Twitter doesn’t.
Twitter isn’t the active ingredient.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
They didn't say it was, they said it was VIA twitter.
flir 16 hours ago [-]
The medium is the message.
(Or at least, it heavily shapes the message).
LoganDark 16 hours ago [-]
They would literally announce new decisions on Twitter before anywhere else. High-impact political decisions and international decisions. You would be a fool to ignore it just because of the platform. You'd die on that hill.
> Twitter isn’t the active ingredient.
The idiots aren't an active ingredient either. Russia and Iran could have used any puppets. These ones just happen to also twitch like a frog leg.
EA-3167 11 hours ago [-]
I’ve never had a twitter account so yeah, color me dead on that hill. I’ve been getting my information several minutes behind you, but in a much more honest, reliable, useful, and complete form.
Turns out that when it comes to info quality is genuinely important, and I have no inclination to fish through raw sewage.
db48x 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mrandish 14 hours ago [-]
> That’s incitement to violence
While actual incitement to violence isn't protected speech, that wasn't even close to incitement to violence, which requires meeting three prongs clearly defined by SCOTUS.
I encourage you to review actual statements which SCOTUS has previously ruled are NOT incitement to violence. It's so incredibly narrow and particular, I was left wondering if anything can meet the definition. Jimmy Kimmel is so far from it your assertion is ludicrous.
zahlman 13 hours ago [-]
True, but irrelevant given that ABC is not in any way part of government. It was justified that the general public deemed those comments unacceptable, specifically because they were an attack on the very principles that made them legally permissible; and ABC was capable of, and morally justified in, punishing them (and also legally permitted to punish them).
tzs 13 hours ago [-]
> It was justified that the general public deemed those comments unacceptable
Is this the same general public whose backlash over the suspension got it reversed a few days later by the network, and by Nextstar and Sinclair a few days after that?
da_chicken 13 hours ago [-]
The prohibition against inciting violence has nothing to do with whether or not the speaker is a government entity.
Indeed, I think you should look at the speech that SCOTUS ruled is protected in the landmark Brandenburg v Ohio[0] case to see how extremely narrow the "imminent lawless action" standard is. It's ridiculously hateful and inflammatory, and filled with several non-specific threats of violence against minority groups. This was labelled protected speech. Brandenburg was a private citizen here, and he prevailed over the state of Ohio.
Not true here in Florida. The governor banned and burned books that taught slavery was bad, revoked tenure and fired all teachers who were reported teaching that slavery was bad. The new state-approved textbooks teach that slavery taught blacks useful skills and that there was violence on both sides.
tick_tock_tick 7 hours ago [-]
So you can't just go to a local book store and buy a copy or order it on Amazon? Oh wait you can? Crazy damn I really thought a banned book would mean I couldn't buy it at literally any book store.
Aurornis 14 hours ago [-]
> Not true here in Florida. The governor banned and burned books
The books are not banned.
The public schools don't allow them, which is the case for many things.
Whether you agree with it or not, calling this "banning books" is dumb. There are a lot of things that are not allowed in schools, but we don't go around saying "Florida banned alcohol" or "Florida banned smoking" or "Florida banned pornography" because they're not allowed in schools.
otterley 13 hours ago [-]
> The books are not banned...The public schools don't allow them
What's a word that means "forbidden from being included" or "disallowed"? "Banned"! Check your local dictionary, or just type it into your favorite search box.
> Calling this "banning books" is dumb. There are a lot of things that are not allowed in schools, but we don't go around saying "Florida banned alcohol" or "Florida banned smoking"
No, it's not dumb. Children don't go to school for the purpose of getting drunk or smoking. They do go to school to learn things, including things that might be politically controversial or divisive.
You know what is dumb? Gatekeeping truthful information from being accessible to kids because the curiosity it sparks might inconvenience some people.
theshackleford 13 hours ago [-]
The acrobatics ya'll are performing to reach these conclusions sure are impressive.
lesuorac 13 hours ago [-]
It's not a war, just a special military operations that lasts longer than WW 2.
CursedSilicon 13 hours ago [-]
Remember. Over 20% of America still supports this fascism.
Statistically some of them would be here
om2 15 hours ago [-]
Praising a murderer for committing a murder is not incitement and is protected speech. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), speech loses protection only if it is directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to produce it. A comment on a murder after the fact can’t meet this standard unless the comment is “go do another murder right now!”
Kimmel also did not praise the murderer. He implied (incorrectly as it turns out) that the killer was right-wing.
Your misstatements of the well-known facts and law in this case cast doubt on the effort you put into researching the other issues mentioned.
zahlman 13 hours ago [-]
He did more than imply the falsehood. He implied that people had no good reason to disbelieve the falsehood, and that the right wing was seeking to deceive on this basis for political gain. In doing so, he (perhaps inadvertently) ran cover for the ideology that was actually responsible.
Right-wingers have lost their jobs in the US many times for far less, even when their comments were on social media accounts unrelated to the job. When these responses are described as unjust or disproportionate, American left-wingers have consistently and repeatedly (across a span of many years) told me the same line about how 1A only applies to government and not corporations. Which is correct, but also entirely missing the point about bias.
otterley 10 hours ago [-]
> Right-wingers have lost their jobs in the US many times for far less, even when their comments were on social media accounts unrelated to the job.
You make it sound like losing one’s job for being an embarrassment to their company is a bad thing.
tzs 13 hours ago [-]
> Jimmy Kimmel’s “gags” were praising a murderer for the murder he committed.
Citation needed.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
sauce is 404
vr46 7 hours ago [-]
You're right, and I can't edit it now. Here's the corrected URL:
Damages awarded for libel/slander in UK courts are outsized super pay days, and many a foreign sheikh or business mogul has tried to establish that the matter under question was made known to UK citizens and therefore UK has jurisdiction, because the damages will beat anything awarded anywhere else in the World.
Weirdly, Trump has argued that this was damaging to his election chances (reminder: he won the election he's arguing about), and in a jurisdiction that the BBC can show the material wasn't available in, at least not legally and through their enablement.
As a result, even the BBC's critics in the UK (of which there are many), are seeing this as just a grifter trying to shakedown an organisation he doesn't like the reporting of, because he can't do it to a US network without getting into a first amendment quagmire.
vidarh 5 hours ago [-]
The size of awards is just part of it. The burden of proof is just as much of an issue.
In the UK, an alleged defamatory statement is presumed false and the defendant needs to prove it is true, and that burden is unusually low compared to most other jurisdictions, and certainly much lower than in the US where the burden is on the accuser to prove the statement is false.
philipallstar 17 hours ago [-]
Not for any speech. For misleading cutting his speech together.
amanaplanacanal 15 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure misleading speech is still protected by the first amendment. The president is trying to throw his weight around because he thinks his fans will like it. He's an idiot.
philipallstar 5 hours ago [-]
> I'm pretty sure misleading speech is still protected by the first amendment.
Is clipping a video together to create a lie "speech"?
chimprich 4 hours ago [-]
Are all errors "lies"?
The BBC admitted a mistake. The error was reported by an internal BBC investigation, not because Trump's team complained (it is highly unlikely they saw it originally, because it was an UK broadcast).
The BBC makes thousands of hours of video annually. You can't expect perfection, or to sue them for billions of $CURRENCY for every mistake.
The mistake in this case was to make their quite reasonable case (that Trump encouraged the violence of January 2021) very slightly more emphatically than was perhaps justified.
Trump of course showed his disapproval of the violence by pardoning all the rioters, including those convicted of injuring police with weapons.
gadders 1 hours ago [-]
I think you are bending over backwards to be as massively charitable as possible to the BBC. They are notorious for their left wing bias.
Their mistake was to twist Trump's speech to make it say the actual opposite of what he did say.
chimprich 51 minutes ago [-]
> They are notorious for their left wing bias
They are notorious for their left wing bias by right-wing commentators and for their right-wing bias by left-wing commentators. By law they are neutral.
> Their mistake was to twist Trump's speech to make it say the actual opposite of what he did say.
I don't see how you can argue that. His speech involved 70 minutes of falsely claiming that the election was stolen (how's that for twisting the truth?) and encouraging his supporters to march on the Capitol. He wasn't stupid enough to explicitly call for violence, but the implication was there.
The circumstantial evidence supports this: the actual ensuing riots and violence, Trump refusing to condemn it, and then pardoning the rioters.
gadders 12 minutes ago [-]
>> They are notorious for their left wing bias by right-wing commentators and for their right-wing bias by left-wing commentators. By law they are neutral.
No-one except the most nutty of leftists claims they are right wing. What they might say is that they don't ally with hard left positions on Israel, Jeremy Corbyn etc.
>>I don't see how you can argue that. His speech involved 70 minutes of falsely claiming that the election was stolen
Yes, there were no postal vote irregularities anywhere. Everything was 1,000% above board. Would you like buy a bridge?
>>the actual ensuing riots and violence, Trump refusing to condemn it, and then pardoning the rioters.
Political prisoners, ushered in by the docents. I don't think putting your feet on Pelosi's desk is worth 4 years in jail.
geoduck14 15 hours ago [-]
>I'm pretty sure misleading speech is still protected by the first amendment.
Is it protected if you are challenging a UK company in the UK?
amanaplanacanal 14 hours ago [-]
It sounds like it's in a US court.
stinkbeetle 15 hours ago [-]
> I'm pretty sure misleading speech is still protected by the first amendment.
It is, the government can not prevent or punish people speaking on the basis that the government decides it was misleading.
A civil dispute between private parties is entirely different though. One can be found liable for misleading speech that causes damage to another party.
> The president is trying to throw his weight around because he thinks his fans will like it. He's an idiot.
amanaplanacanal 14 hours ago [-]
What damage? He's rich as fuck, and President of the United States!
philipallstar 5 hours ago [-]
A sniper also shot him in the ear. Should nothing have happened about that for those reasons too?
stinkbeetle 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not aware of what damages Trump alleges in the suit or if it has any merit at all. Being rich does not mean there is no damage or disqualify a person from restitution though. And holding public office or a government job doesn't disqualify a person from protecting their private interests, although I imagine it could make the case a lot more complicated.
Aside, using civil courts to attack opponents is certainly a problem, but in USA it favors the speaker a compared to a lot of other countries. In US the plaintiff has to prove the speech is false and for public figures that there was malice. Which in my opinion goes a bit too far and gives media corporations more power over politicians and other public matters. I think the public figure stipulation is reasonable and important to allow private citizens to discuss politicians and public matters so that's good, but I think there should be a counter to that which requires organizations reporting the news to have more duty to report truth and not mislead.
743947630229 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
otterley 12 hours ago [-]
If misleading speech weren't protected by the First Amendment, Trump himself would be first in the frying pan.
Tostino 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
AlexCoventry 10 hours ago [-]
Well, it's been clear for a decade that Trump doesn't respect American values.
17 hours ago [-]
Razengan 18 hours ago [-]
> Cuba. ABC being hassled over Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk. The White House restricting reporting. Ending support for public broadcasting. Book bans, the CLOUD act, the TIKTOK DIVESTITURE fercrissakes. Sanctions on the ICC.
You guys are basically Russia in denial at this point. Carried on by the momentum of your products that is heading straight for a massive disruption by AI.
vr46 18 hours ago [-]
The UK is Russia in denial? I am massively confused
icantevenhold 17 hours ago [-]
Basically everyone is Russia in denial at this point
trollbridge 16 hours ago [-]
From the last few conversations I've had with Russians, they aren't remotely in denial but also feel powerless to change anything.
Razengan 9 hours ago [-]
> but also feel powerless to change anything.
Is that also the case with the common Brit or American?
That was most of the point. America and the UK have become the evil twin of Western Freedom™ and still believe they're better, or know they've fallen but can't/won't do anything.
When you see a litany of bad shit like in one of the GP comments, like book bans etc, you can't be sure if they're talking about the US or the UK, they're basically equally as shit now.
vr46 7 hours ago [-]
I don't want to waste my red pen marking this comment but thinking the UK is anything like the US or slightly similar in these regards is like using song lyrics as a source in your essay.
Razengan 7 hours ago [-]
Hence the "in denial"
trollbridge 35 minutes ago [-]
No, America is utterly different than in Russia. In America people can freely and openly criticise the government under their own name. When I talk to someone who is in Russia they're very careful to use a communications medium not tied to their identity and where what they say will expire.
Likewise the talk of book bans is just silly. What books are banned in America?
myko 15 hours ago [-]
Absolutely, Brexit was a Russian psyop
Razengan 16 hours ago [-]
Oh sorry I assumed you were Murican
Oh well, same thing. At this point the UK is basically the mutant kid sprouting from the body of that guy in Total Recall :)
The same shitty some of the worst authoritarianism among the Western world etc.
afpx 13 hours ago [-]
sounds like you live in the bastion of righteousness. can we move in?
8note 16 hours ago [-]
huh? the case here is the UK trying to get the US to enforce some UK law in the US
vr46 7 hours ago [-]
No, the UK regulator was asking a service provider owned by a Japanese guy to comply with UK laws in order to do business in the UK, and the service provider sued the regulator in a US court. 196 other service providers agreed to comply
Razengan 9 hours ago [-]
Well symbionts kinda work both ways :)
(yes I know Kuato was a good guy but I mean the UK seems like a hanger-on of the US now, both trying to make shit worse for their own citizens)
zahlman 13 hours ago [-]
Kimmel's comments supported a narrative that justified the murder of a US citizen for his opinions (not even that, but third parties' understanding of those opinions). Kirk himself never proposed anything violent; the narrative was promoted based on wild misrepresentations to that effect.
But all of your objections here (or rather, more specifically, the choice to present them all together as a list of grievances, given that they are connected by a theme but not otherwise related or coordinated) are 1) blatant whataboutism and 2) an attempt to wage "ideological or political battle" in violation of HN commenting guidelines.
gcanyon 13 hours ago [-]
> Kimmel's comments supported a narrative that justified the murder of a US citizen for his opinions
Please point out where Jimmy Kimmel did that. I'll help, here's a transcript:
By pinning the blame on the wrong ideology (with full confidence, apparently based on nothing but his own world view, and implying that others were dishonest in coming to a different (ultimately shown to be correct, and strongly evidenced at the time) conclusion, he ran cover for the ideological group responsible, and their narrative.
otterley 12 hours ago [-]
Are you suggesting that it's not OK to take a side in a debate, or that by doing so, you are sympathizing with a murderer?
You're going to need a jet pack to traverse the logical leaps you're making here.
hardbass 7 hours ago [-]
All muslims should die, all republicans should die are all protected free speech.
StanislavPetrov 12 hours ago [-]
Neither Kimmel or Kirk ever said anything that wasn't fully protected under the 1st Amendment, and anyone claiming otherwise is either ignorant of the law, a blind political partisan, or (more likely), both.
fidotron 22 hours ago [-]
While Ofcom were barmy to even try this there is a level of understandable annoyance outside the US that the US does get to project what it wants and other countries don't, and somewhere that will have contributed to supporting the effort to do this.
While the US isn't perfect it is also far from the worst conceivable entity to be in that position (and current UK and Australian governments provide easy examples). If they want to use their influence to promote free speech then good, because we need it. Just less of the mass surveillance of absolutely everyone at the same time, then we'd be good.
margalabargala 21 hours ago [-]
> While Ofcom were barmy to even try this
Quote from the article:
> Ofcom has targeted 200-ish American platforms with censorship orders; only four of those sites, all of which are my clients, refused
Seems like Ofcom broadly got the result they wanted. A 98% success rate is not going to be particularly discouraging to them.
fidotron 21 hours ago [-]
Standard regulator strategy: try to make the one thing you actually want to comply be the odd one out and then point at them going "but why not you too?" (The FTC do this as well).
4chan was absolutely the defining target of this wave of noise, but X is what really bothers the UK establishment.
quietbritishjim 19 hours ago [-]
X is different because it does have a business presence in the UK: UK advertisers
ycombinatrix 17 hours ago [-]
The rest of them presumably wanted to continue doing business in the UK & did not want to IP-block the entire country.
margalabargala 11 hours ago [-]
Right, thus Ofcom were not in fact "barmy to even try this".
BikiniPrince 19 hours ago [-]
How many of those organizations had business within Ofcoms jurisdiction? No one operating outside of their legal jurisdiction should have complied.
andybak 21 hours ago [-]
Presumably a decent chunk of those might now reconsider?
echoangle 20 hours ago [-]
And also this only worked once, but in the future other entities getting sued now know they can just ignore it.
shadowgovt 20 hours ago [-]
it depends on what those other orgs want.
Not being able to do business in (or, depending on how serious they are about enforcement action, visit) the UK is actually pretty constraining. It's understandable if other companies decided they would prefer to find a middle ground that lets them provide one face to the US and another to the UK, or even that they're not interested in 4chan-style maximalism and found it non-onerous to comply with the UK asks because they're pretty in-line with the site's existing standards (I'd have to see the list of sites that complied to have a real opinion on that part).
mschuster91 19 hours ago [-]
> A 98% success rate is not going to be particularly discouraging to them.
The thing is, you can afford sticking the finger to the UK if you do not have any business interests there. A platform like 4chan won't be bothered even if the UK government says "all payments to be made towards 4chan for advertising are hereby seized until the fine is paid off". But places like Twitter or Meta, that derive millions if not billions of euros a year from the UK and European advertisers? Now that's a lot of money to lose, money that even American shareholders will complain about it being missing from the revenue sheet.
ozyschmozy 18 hours ago [-]
> from the UK and European advertisers
Why would "European" advertisers come into this, I don't think ofcom has jurisdiction outside of the UK?
mschuster91 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but I'm pretty sure that you can still enforce garnishment orders from the UK and Europe and vice versa. Brexit did not sever all ties.
Bender 18 hours ago [-]
Did any of them move to a .onion? I would expect commercial sites to cave and some small sites to just move to Tor which probably accomplishes the same thing as far fewer people use the Tor Browser or Brave. I could also be delusional.
Aurornis 22 hours ago [-]
> there is a level of understandable annoyance outside the US that the US does get to project what it wants and other countries don't
In my comment I explained how countries, including the US, project their laws by imposing controls within their jurisdiction.
The weird part about this case is how they thought they could directly project their laws into another country in a way that overrides that country’s constitution, and they expected the other country to override their own constitution in agreement.
That’s not the same. This was something weirder, which is why there is speculation that it was designed to fail as a demonstration.
fidotron 22 hours ago [-]
That's exactly what the US do though. We recently saw server seizures in Amsterdam, there is the US Cloud act and so on.
The US fundamentally disagrees with other countries on the limits of their own jurisdiction to include basically anything tangentially related to the US.
Again, I am far from anti-US but any outsider can see this for what it is: a one way street.
appplication 22 hours ago [-]
Was this in violation of the Netherlands constitution or just not explicitly illegal in Amsterdam? I don’t know the details or the incident you’re referencing, but there is generally a distinction.
fidotron 22 hours ago [-]
Basic property rights. If they weren't breaking Dutch laws then the server shouldn't be seizable.
Let's see the Dutch get a US based server that is violating Dutch laws. It will never happen.
telotortium 21 hours ago [-]
Were they actually not breaking Dutch laws? Around terrorism-related activities I would guess the laws are fairly similar across Western countries, partly due to 9/11. Speech regulation has been consistently different between the US and Europe, including the UK - the US even passed laws to refuse to enforce UK libel judgments 15 years ago after Americans became aware of their abusive effects.
If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
A/I didn't break any laws at all, not even US ones. But the US president currently gets to override US laws, so they still committed a crime in the US despite not breaking any law, but even the US president doesn't have that power outside the US. No crime was committed in the Netherlands, nor in Italy. It's actually illegal in Italy for their Italian bank to keep A/I's money, since that's plain old theft - they're currently figuring out a way to give it back to them without triggering the mango.
piltdownman 21 hours ago [-]
European countries need to get off Mastercard/Visa and US Tech and Energy dependencies first, otherwise it's just a shakedown by the US every time they hit an external legal system.
// If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
That's a very good way to force the Hague Invasion Act to manifest in some form or another.
Trump personally intervened when two US spooks were driving on the wrong side of the road in London, with the driver most likely on her phone, killed someone, and then fled the country.
Compare this with a hispanic american who severely injured someone in similar circumstances. Extradition granted and was convicted for a 32 month prison sentence in the UK.
> That's a very good way to force the Hague Invasion Act to manifest in some form or another.
You may note from the title that this is the "American Service-Members' Protection Act".
The current attempt to destroy the ICC is not due to protection of American service members, but Israeli ones.
The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
The admin (and perhaps many in the country) might like to think they can go alone, but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies.
While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
piltdownman 4 hours ago [-]
It's colloquially known as the Hague invasion act as it's ultimate mandate is to invade the seat of the ICC. Literally the first line of the the wiki article.
//The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
NATO's founding multilateral principles and the USA have been leading parallel lives for quite some time. Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation, described them as a 'paper tiger' repeatedly. As the Wpost reported on 3rd April '22, Bolton claimed that Trump came very close to leaving NATO in 2018, and Russian President Vladimir Putin “was waiting for that.” [1]
In addition, the executive branch will take no notice of any 'binding' mandates or statutory notice periods, as already demonstrated in the 2020 withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty.
Indeed, Congress literally had to enact 22 U.S.C. § 1928f (the Kaine-Rubio provision) in 2023 which expressly prohibits the president from exiting the North Atlantic Treaty without prior congressional authorization. But since any subsequent enforcement is dependent on legal resolution by the Supreme Court, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
//but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies
Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
// While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
A false equivalence. Trump intervened in a case where the ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent based on their inability to drive on the right side of the road or stay off their phone.
The point was that if he'll personally intervene in such a contextually miniscule matter for an intelligence asset, then he can be assumed to intervene with significant force in the case of the ICC taking custody of an 'ally'.
> It's colloquially known as the Hague invasion act as it's ultimate mandate is to invade the seat of the ICC. Literally the first line of the the wiki article.
The nickname is irrelevant.
The first line of the wiki does not support your claim: "all means necessary and appropriate" is much vaguer than "must invade", and no domestic law would change that an invasion of the Netherlands would be a violation of the sovereignty of a NATO ally.
> Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
Read further in my previous comment and find out.
> Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation
None was needed for that, not from NATO at least. Should've raised it with the UN, if that's what you meant?
> Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
I'm not saying they won't do such things, but it's bad for the US if they do. That said, Iran is looking like it'll be another Vietnam only this time with an oil crisis to match the OPEC crisis, so this is already bad with regard to energy sources.
And that's without everyone else in NATO is likely gearing up for fighting against the USA and Russia at the same time even if we'd very much rather not, and Israel itself (the country for which they are doing this to the ICC) is looking somewhat unstable and even the most allied parts are distancing themselves from the USA.
> A false equivalence.
That's my point: the behaviour with regards to Harry Dunn is a false equivalence with regards to these other things.
> ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent
No, not even close; even in the most egregious cases, and this wasn't an egregious example:
A person convicted of causing death by dangerous driving is liable to imprisonment for up to 14 years and a driving ban of at least 2 years for an offence committed before 28 June 2022
She was convicted in absentia and got "8 months in prison, suspended for 12 months, and disqualified from driving for 12 months".
8note 16 hours ago [-]
maduro definitely wasnt breaking venesuelan law, as a clearer example, nor is Brazil's non-visa/mastercard payments system
The servers were seized under a mutual legal enforcement agreement and it remains to be seen if it underwent a separate Dutch legal review.
Quite of a bit of legal footwork gets skipped when the “terrorism” charge is invoked.
But it looks like the servers are not being physically turned over, the disks are being imaged and that is what is being transferred.
GeorgeWBasic 14 hours ago [-]
Why be far from anti-US if this is what the US does?
AlotOfReading 22 hours ago [-]
The US also has laws imposing restrictions on institutions outside their borders/jurisdiction. FATCA for example.
kloop 18 hours ago [-]
But they do that via things in their control. For example, banks that don't follow FATCA cannot access the US banking system. It's rare for the US to send law enforcement to banks that don't comply
The UK would have been perfectly justified in saying 4chan can't access any of their systems.
kitd 21 hours ago [-]
Ofcom knows it's barmy. They are pursuing foreign sites because a) they are required to by law, and b) they are under political pressure to do so. But I suspect they are quite happy that it has backfired, to help relieve some of that pressure and bring into the open the barminess of the OSA enterprise.
rcxdude 18 hours ago [-]
This. The regulation organisations can sometimes try to make a point when they're tasked with enforcing an unenforceable or otherwise unworkable rule.
tracker1 22 hours ago [-]
As a US citizen, I'm inclined to agree.
Gibbon1 18 hours ago [-]
The US in particular had to proactively not enforce British Libel judgements against US citizens. Because the vast majority violate free speech rights.
philipwhiuk 21 hours ago [-]
Ofcom didn't "try this"
4chan is suing Ofcom, not the other way round.
squidmaster 21 hours ago [-]
Ofcom started it. They sent nasty legal letters to 4chan first.
malfist 19 hours ago [-]
Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who, this is supposed to be a happy occasion!
jack_pp 22 hours ago [-]
It's about honor, I remember Saddam Hussein saying that after they held against the US for 40 days they "won" the war, because in their culture when a higher power entity goes against a weaker one, it is without honor and the weaker entity "wins" honor by being able to defend for that long.
nilamo 22 hours ago [-]
That's not unique to their culture. Remember The Alamo? That was 190 years ago and we still celebrate our defeat.
qup 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nilamo 17 hours ago [-]
The greater meaning of... holding a position over a period of time that seems unreasonable against a far superior force? Exactly like the GP described for Hussein? It certainly sounds like we're celebrating the same things, unless I misunderstood your point...
btilly 18 hours ago [-]
The greater meaning of a revolution that was fought to preserve slavery.
When we remember history, what we remember tends to be white-washed.
Der_Einzige 18 hours ago [-]
The Mexican government and especially Santa Anna were not even close to saints and were not primarily fighting the Texans for reasons of slavery. The Mexican empire carved out slavery as being explicitly allowed in the Mexican state that become known as Texas.
btilly 15 hours ago [-]
This is no different than what happened in the Civil War.
Each side had a list of grievances. A big one on one side, was the preservation of slavery in perpetuity. The other side wanted to preserve the unity of the nation as a whole.
You are right that Mexico was not fighting to ban slavery. But it was clear that eliminating slaver was still in their roadmap. Texas had only gotten an extension.
Similarly the election of Lincoln wasn't an immediate threat to slavery in the Confederacy. But the Confederacy still was motivated to head off the long-term threat to their economic system.
So the fact that Mexico wasn't fighting to end slavery, doesn't contradict the fact that Texans were fighting to preserve it.
lesuorac 13 hours ago [-]
> [1]: The Republican Party was founded by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas–Nebraska Act
I mean, Lincoln being elected is a direct threat to slavery.
Opposition to that act was, "We're not going to create new states with slavery." It wasn't, "We're getting rid of slavery in places that already have it." Which meant that it was not a direct threat to existing slave states. (Though there was a prospect that maybe, some day...)
Lincoln didn't like slavery. But he wasn't trying to ban it. It wasn't until the war had been going on for nearly two years that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Which basically said, "If you're still in rebellion a couple of months ago, we're going to free your slaves." It didn't eliminate slavery for any slave state that was part of the Union. It was an incentive to surrender. It was 2 years after that until the 13th amendment was passed.
It is very unlikely that slavery would have been banned during Lincoln's time in office, if the Civil War hadn't happened.
Was there a long-term prospect of a threat? Obviously. But there was no immediate threat. And so the fight wound up with protecting slavery on the one side, and asserting the indivisibility of the nation on the other side.
This is exactly parallel to the Mexico-Texan issue. Slavery was not being banned in the rebelling states.
lesuorac 3 hours ago [-]
> Opposition to that act was, "We're not going to create new states with slavery."
Pretty sure you’re arguing in bad faith.
A group of anti-slavery people organized into a political party and elected a man who gave a speech declaring that slavery itself needs to be abolished.
Pretending that Lincoln wasn’t going to attempt to abolish slavery is just as bad as pretending the civil war was about states rights (states in the confederacy had mandatory slavery; no right to choose).
Mexico was about to end that carve out. But slavery was only one of the causes (and you're right about Santa Anna).
The myth is that Bowie and Crockett battled until their last breathes. The truth is that Bowie was sick and died in bed. Crockett gave up and was executed.
That's all from the 2021 book Forget the Alamo.
16 hours ago [-]
ruined 16 hours ago [-]
exactly, defeat.
drnick1 19 hours ago [-]
Iran is pulling the same trick now, claiming it "won" just because the regime did not fall (yet). This is despite having lost most of their conventional army, navy, and air force, and having also mostly lost control of the straits of Hormuz.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
I thought the claims of Iran winning were based on Iran's opponent collapsing. But it's a very slow collapse, and still not definitive yet, but some people are extrapolating the trajectory, to see that at the current rate, Iran's enemy will fall long before Iran does.
rcxdude 18 hours ago [-]
I mean, the Iranian regime has had one goal the whole war: survive. So it is a victory of sorts so far: the US has not achieved its strategic goal of regime change, and Iran has managed to inflict a fair amount of pain in retaliation.
(You could say the Taliban were even more thoroughly 'defeated' in Afghanistan while the country was occupied by the US, but it can hardly be said that it was a victory for the US either, given what happened as soon as they left).
stale2002 18 hours ago [-]
> I mean, the Iranian regime has had one goal the whole war: survive.
No it wasn't. If Iran's only goal is to survive then it would have made peace with the USA and surrounding Middle Eastern territories decades ago.
This whole war is happening because Iran had great political ambitions than just thriving on its own.
Iran has been funding proxy terrorist groups for a long time now, specifically because it is trying to achieve larger goals than just surviving.
And on those fronts, well those proxy groups have taken a ton of damage and aren't long for this world.
rcxdude 12 hours ago [-]
I'm not talking about beforehand (I said 'the whole war' for a reason). When the US attacked Iran, the Iranian government were either going to fight the war or they (the individuals that made up most of that government) were going to die. It's not surprising they are picking the first option by any means necessary, regardless of how they got into the situation in the first place. It's also what made the attack a very high-stakes gamble on the part of the US government, because either the somehow the Iranian government was going to crumble quickly in the attack (despite the best efforts of people who are quite literally fighting for their lives and still quite widespread support amongst the population), or the US was going to find itself embroiled in yet another overseas war with dubious benefits and high costs. To be clear, I have a level of love for the Iranian government that makes me think the first option is perhaps a little too good for them, but it still doesn't make the US's strategic decisions make sense.
stale2002 8 hours ago [-]
> the Iranian government were either going to fight the war
You missed the perfectly reasonable 3rd option. Iran could stop shooting missiles at oil tankers, stop funding proxy groups, and make an arrangement for peace.
We both know though, that they are unwilling to do that. Because peace was never their goal. Instead, they wanted to achieve regional hegemony, and funded proxy groups to do that. But whatever, look how well that worked out for them.
Sure, if taking out the regime is the only pathway to stop Iran from continuing on its current path, then the USA is of course going to try that. But if there was an actual path the peace here, where Iran simply stopped its attacks, things could get back to normal fairly quickly.
hardbass 7 hours ago [-]
Israel can stop attacking and taking over land of random sovereign countries, shooting missiles into peaceful countries like Dubai. What is stopping them?
viler 4 hours ago [-]
Israel has shot a grand total of zero missiles at Dubai. Which is not a country; the country is UAE, at which Iran has launched some 2,500 missiles.
What's stopping Israel from attacking "random" countries? Perhaps the fact that they're hardly "random", rather they all host proxy groups of the occupying regime in Iran, who have very openly been subverting those countries into bases from which to attack Israel.
Try again.
istjohn 13 hours ago [-]
This whole war is happening because after his easy coup in Venezuela, Trump thought he could just do it again in Iran, and now he can't extricate himself without losing face. And American politicians on both sides of the aisle are subserviant to Israel.
OkayPhysicist 15 hours ago [-]
They did make peace with the US. It was a whole thing, papers were signed, agreements were made, they pinky-promised to not make nukes, everyone walked away happy. Except the Israelis, who don't like their regional power status being challenged, and apparently Trump, who... didn't like that the Iranians gave up on their nuclear armament program?
Either way, the US and Iran were at peace right up until we decided to pull out of our disarmament treaty with them. And then executed a decapitation strike against them.
viler 3 hours ago [-]
Yep. They "pinky-promised" and continued enriching Uranium to 60%, which is completely unnecessary for any civilian use of nuclear power. Not only has the IAEA openly called it out, but actual officials of the occupying Islamic regime in Iran have now pretty much admitted that they have always been going for nukes. [1] [2]
The only thing JCPOA did was funnel billions into their hands so they could continue oppressing their own population within their own borders, and destabilizing the entire region outside of them.
> Iranians gave up on their nuclear armament program?
They never gave up. The plan was always to lie and get sanction relief from the West, in order to to sell oil and fund Islamist terrorism throughout the region and the world. It isn't only about the nukes. Fundamentally, this is about containment of a dangerous anti-Western ideology. Same thing in Cuba.
hardbass 7 hours ago [-]
If it is about containing anti-western ideology why isn't American launching a Stuxnet on Israeli nukes?
viler 4 hours ago [-]
Because Israel isn't the one who, I don't know, has been in open declared war on the US for 47 years ago and has turned "death to America" into its official stated policy. The Islamic Republic is.
Your only defense of the astounding level of evil represented by the occupying regime in Iran is to keep frothing at the mouth about Israel? That shows quite a lot. Try again.
potatototoo99 16 hours ago [-]
Their goals are to survive and control the strait of Ormuz. And they will do both because eventually the US will pull out, because to try to hold the strait is a financial drain. Just like Afghanistan. So it's a waiting game and everyone knows Iran will win. Orange man can say he won every day and after a year, 5 years, 10 years, 50 years eventually the US will have to admit defeat.
drnick1 11 hours ago [-]
> Their goals are to survive and control the strait of Ormuz.
The surrounding states, which have been attacked by Iran and use the strait to export their oil, should grow a pair, close their borders with Iran, and use all the weapons they bought over the years from the U.S. and finish off once and for all the "Islamic Republic." It seems that, at last, the Saudis are stepping up to the plate and doing something about the Houthis. This is all because they did not finish the job last time.
stale2002 15 hours ago [-]
> Their goals are to survive
As I just said before, if this was their only goal, they could have had it decades ago by choosing peace instead of funding proxy milita groups en mass.
The fact that they fund all they proxy groups shows that actually yes they have other goals beyond surviving (They they are quickly failing to achieve as their proxy groups get dismantled), and they are actually willing to risk war and risk their survival to attempt to achieve them.
GeorgeWBasic 14 hours ago [-]
Quite the contrary. It doesn't matter what Iran does: their crime is existing without being under the control of the US. The US installed a puppet regime in Iran in 1953, and had a powerful vassal in the middle east, close to the Soviet Union. They freed themselves in 1979, gaining control of their own resources, and the US never forgave them for it. The only way the US would have allowed them to go on existing without attacking would be for them to become slaves again.
viler 4 hours ago [-]
The whole tale of the 1953 supposed US "coup" has been started and amplified by Soviet propaganda, then taken up by the Islamists and their wilful servants, as we can see here. The coup was Mosaddegh's; the Shah prevented it. Read some real history.
As for "freeing" themselves in 1979... please talk to some actual Iranians and ask them how much of their country's resources are actually benefitting them, instead of going to regional terror proxies and into enriching corrupt Mullahs so that their sons and daughters could go live in luxury in the West they so despise. Ask them, too, how "free" they really feel.
istjohn 13 hours ago [-]
You're forgetting that a perfectly serviceable truce was established with the JCPOA until Trump tore it up to satisfy Israeli interests.
drnick1 13 hours ago [-]
JCPOA was horrible. It was a lifeline to the regime and allowed it to build a massive arsenal of drones, ballistic missiles, etc., while it got to keep underground enrichment facilities. That nuclear program did not have a civilian purpose, its sole purpose was projecting power in the region and intimidating Israel.
The only durable way achieve peace in the Mideast is the collapse of Iran and of its regional proxies. Disarming Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis is a necessity before things like rebuilding Gaza is possible at all.
viler 4 hours ago [-]
Mostly yes. Just a small correction - Iran does not need to collapse; its occupying Islamic regime does. It's what has already driven Iran into pretty much a state of collapse already; when it's gone Iran can be rebuilt.
hardbass 7 hours ago [-]
It is simply common sense for any country that is not the USA to develop nukes against the USA. It doesn't matter what your morality is or if you are a dictatorship or democracy, the USA just gets strange ideas and starts shooting and bombing random countries sometimes.
GeorgeWBasic 12 hours ago [-]
"The only durable way achieve peace in the Mideast is the collapse of Israel and of its regional proxies"
There, fixed it for you. No charge.
viler 4 hours ago [-]
What are Israel's "regional proxies", and how have they been acting against peace in the region in any way that's more destabilizing than Hamas, Hezbollah, Hashd ash-Shaabi, the Houthis, the Fatimioun, the Zainabioun, and all those other tentacles of the occupying Islamic regime in Iran?
stale2002 8 hours ago [-]
Israel has 100+ nuclear weapons dude. And if it was in any real danger of actually being collapsed, I can promise you that it would use them. You better hope that never happens and instead Iran makes peace with them.
hardbass 7 hours ago [-]
Excellent, that clearly shows who is the volatile ultra terroristic madman in the region. All the more reason to check Israel right now.
stale2002 8 hours ago [-]
No, actually. Iran did not stop funding proxy militant groups.
If Iran stopped funding Hezbollah then real peace could have been achieved.
hardbass 7 hours ago [-]
If Israel stopped randomly invading sovereign countries and launching missiles anywhere and everywhere into unrelated foreign countries like Dubai, spraying chemical toxins on farms in random countries, then real peace could have been achieved.
GeorgeWBasic 12 hours ago [-]
That's true: Obama bucked the trend. Overall, there were still many powerful interests in the US who despised Iran waiting to take power. I'd still call it just a matter of time.
stale2002 8 hours ago [-]
> 1953
You are going to go back a whole 70 years to make your point? Isn't it time to get over it?
All the surrounding governments are at peace with everyone else. Iran could have had the same thing if it wanted. All it had to do what stop funding proxy militant groups.
Dylan16807 6 hours ago [-]
> You are going to go back a whole 70 years to make your point? Isn't it time to get over it?
The US government needing to get over it is their point.
Also the relevant year they're going back to is 1979.
kstrauser 15 hours ago [-]
> Indeed. Who could have predicted this?
Notably, the two countries involved literally fought a war about one's wish to enforce laws in the other, with the latter declaring that no, it'd prefer to operate independently of those laws.
Look, that was 250 years ago, and we've buried the hatchet. We've had our spats, but it's more like siblings arguing. Let someone else attack one of them and they get reminded that only these 2 are allowed to pick on each other. That said, our entire country was literally built on a legal system that says Americans aren't subject to British law. It's kinda part of our national character.
onetimeusename 18 hours ago [-]
Well, my reading of this is Ofcom did not lose overall and 4chan technically lost the lawsuit despite Ofcom having no way to enforce fines. I don't think Ofcom's purpose was ever to collect the fines either. Now keep in mind, 4chan is the first website that had ever been issued a fine by Ofcom under the UK's Online Safety Act. I think that is interesting because it's a noteworthy site which suggests the selection of it was more targeted. Note that is my speculation.
4chan sued Ofcom over the fines. Ofcom has been perhaps waiting for the outcome of this suit and is announcing they can't collect fines but I don't think that was the purpose. They have the power to instruct ISPs to block domains and to me it seems more likely that is what they will do and that was perhaps what they wanted from the beginning.
nonethewiser 17 hours ago [-]
This is how the UK gets it's own great firewall.
Demand online services change their services to conform to their law. Because its accessible from the UK.
Services refuse.
Up goes the wall.
miohtama 7 hours ago [-]
The UK has has this for years.
4chan was already blocked by ISPs and you need to call them to unblock it on your connection.
Because of this, it is questionable why Ofcom picked 4chan as a target it the first place.
windowliker 1 hours ago [-]
>4chan was already blocked by ISPs and you need to call them to unblock it on your connection.
Correct. UK ISPs already implement a fairly wide-ranging block list (which even includes archive.org) for any subscribers who do not explicitly opt-in to 'adult' content access privileges.
vr46 15 hours ago [-]
I guess you don't know what actually happened. All but four of the 200 companies Ofcom asked for compliance, complied. The point is about any business that operates in the UK, and especially if it generates income from the UK, should be subject to certain laws in the UK. Not because they're accessible from the UK.
everforward 22 hours ago [-]
I actually wouldn’t have been shocked if other countries had helped, and the powers that be may regret enforcing their sovereignty here.
Countries used to enforce this at their borders (for foreign information) because it largely worked. They couldn’t stop 100% of the copies of the book, but they could stop there being enough copies for it to be part of the cultural zeitgeist (most of the time).
Not anymore. The companies don’t have a local HQ to harass, and the information doesn’t flow through infrastructure the government owns. They’ve pretty much entirely lost the ability to control the flow of information, and they’ve largely lost the ability to control its direction either with the fall of major news outlets.
I don’t think they have the support for a China-style great firewall, but I’m not British so maybe I’m wrong.
I think it’s a good thing information is set free, but I see why they tried it. It’s the only politically tenable way they had to try to keep that control.
nephanth 18 hours ago [-]
No need gor a china-style great firewall. Just compel your local dns providers to stop resolving that website. That's what they do for copyright violations
Easy to circumvent ? Sure, but most people don't know how, so you've made the website inaccessible to the vast majority
Bender 16 hours ago [-]
The infrastructure is already in place for a global great firewall. One need only to compel Google and Cloudflare to block a site in their DNS and most of the planet will not be able to reach it.
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
I'm continually surprised there are no operating systems, not even Linux distros, that run their own resolvers by default.
philipov 22 hours ago [-]
Maybe they weren't allowed to not try? Like adding Denuvo to your game doesn't stop piracy, but your investors will be angry if you don't make the (wasted) effort at due diligence.
DANmode 22 hours ago [-]
Those toolkits don’t even seem to be intended to stop piracy - they seem to add value by slowing it down long enough to make the first 2 weeks (days) of sales. The people using them usually understand that.
Gormo 22 hours ago [-]
Yes, but the point is that the motivation for taking these actions isn't for them to be effective, but to satisfy performative requirements imposed by external parties.
munk-a 21 hours ago [-]
There is an old saying "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM". This is just yet another facet of CYA where we know it's of limited utility and the cracking will happen either way but if you specifically argued against Denuvo before the cracking happens it's your ass on the line for it.
DANmode 21 hours ago [-]
Yes
gambiting 7 hours ago [-]
Just to clarify something - these toolkits have gotten to a point where they can now go months without being broken. Yes everyone involved knows they will get broken eventually - but as you noticed the intention is to protect the majority of the sales which happen within the first weeks after launch. Just wanted to make it clear that the timescales have shifted from just hours and days to months lately.
account42 22 hours ago [-]
I would expect that they expected to not be able to enforce it. It's a play to get the british public on board with even more draconian surveillance state laws and technologies which will be needed to protect their children from evil american companies.
pyronik19 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nonethewiser 17 hours ago [-]
>I may be reading too much into the editorialized writeups about Ofcom but even their statements imply they thought they were just going to impose their laws globally and that other countries would line up to help them do it?
Yes this is exactly what they thought, and no it is not surprising. Section 204 of the Online Safety Act of 2023 specifically says the Act covers internet services provided from outside the UK as well.
Of course the rest of us think its stupid. But the UK government doesnt.
It's not just that courts generally decline. It's now also against US law for them to enforce the judgment without assessing the Constitutional issues. And the burden of proof is on those trying to enforce the judgment.
mattlondon 21 hours ago [-]
The other option (and this is I admit charitable) is that this was always obviously never going to work and this was all a performative political thing in the first place.
By deliberately going after unwinnable cases, there is perhaps here a deliberate attempt to project a "voice of common sense" - effectively demonstrating that this is uneforceable nonsense, regardless of what the then-current government and media insisted. So they make a big show of it being defeated in the hope that the powers that be seen sense and quietly drop it.
Or they really are delusional. I dunno.
Arch-TK 15 hours ago [-]
> Usually when a country goes after a foreign business they enforce it by imposing restrictions within their own borders and threatening the operators with legal action if they ever enter the country.
Yeah, unfortunately the UK isn't a country, it is actually a circus, so you can't apply any regular logic, you must apply circus logic.
lqstuart 10 hours ago [-]
GDPR set a pretty bad precedent (unless they were following another) of having a law that magically applies to their citizens everywhere in the entire world. And all of big tech followed it because of corporate greed I guess? Seems like it'd be pretty easy to just ignore it and then just not pay whatever fines. See how random countries like not having Google.
tamimio 6 hours ago [-]
It’s not weird when you add a missing detail, that it is a honeypot!
stinkbeetle 15 hours ago [-]
> Which raises the scarier question of why they tried this at all?
State censors in western countries are becoming increasingly brazen and desperate. Despite the Orwellian slogans about "safety" they all constantly recite, their objectives are securing the supremacy of the regime not the interests of the people.
chrisjj 15 hours ago [-]
>> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution
How this judgment do that?
immibis2 13 hours ago [-]
They're trying to punish someone purely for exercising freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
We all know the USA punishes its own people for that all the time, of course, but only when the current administration agrees with the ruling, which this one doesn't. It's not that the constitution can't be violated - it's that violating the constitution can be used as an excuse in cases like this one.
chrisjj 6 hours ago [-]
Thervare trying to punish violation of the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act.
What's that got to do with the US constition?
spacebanana7 48 minutes ago [-]
US courts consider enforcement of the Online Safety Act to be incompatible with the right of Americans to have free speech.
It's like the British government trying to enforce tea confiscations on US residents in a way that violates the fifth amendment protections against unreasonable confiscation of private property.
chrisjj 2 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
schleck8 22 hours ago [-]
> Was the defeat a planned showing to justify future action to justify more control of the internet, as Preston Byrne speculates
When something can be explained by both incompetence and conspiracy, the correct explanation is usually incompetence.
spwa4 17 hours ago [-]
> Indeed. Who could have predicted this?
Not European politicians.
You see, in the EU international treaties supersede individual countries' constitutions in theory. This is the other way the EU is moving power to executive governments away from parliament and judicial branches.
Of course, in practice, you have at least a good chance that courts just ignore it (of course the laws of many European countries are a good match, the big thing you get many conflicts about is if 2 governments act on the same company/crime/...). Then the EU court makes a counter judgement ... and is ignored, despite the law. Which is one of the reasons you keep reading the EU is about to fall apart.
nickdothutton 22 hours ago [-]
It’s largely political. Even the rank and file staff there agree that it’s nonsense, being done for appearances.
topspin 22 hours ago [-]
Exactly. Ofcom understood it needed a dog and pony show to answer the latest UK moral panic over 4chan. The headlines have moved on, and they can safely take off their costumes.
noja 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tick_tock_tick 7 hours ago [-]
He lived in the USA's hemisphere. The USA has always exercises it's control of Europe less directly.
qup 19 hours ago [-]
Yes.
What ties are there to the current conversation?
noja 16 hours ago [-]
Because we are discussing law outside of the borders to which normal legal boundaries apply.
743947630229 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
p-e-w 22 hours ago [-]
> they thought they were just going to impose their laws globally and that other countries would line up to help them do it?
Why is this surprising? The United States does this all the time, successfully.
Indian citizens living in India, who have never left India and only do business with Indian entities, have to declare compliance with US laws (FATCA) when opening a bank account in India with an Indian bank. This is enforced by the Indian government.
Muromec 21 hours ago [-]
>Indian citizens living in India, who have never left India and only do business with Indian entities
That's just one handshake away from their bank which does have business with US and their dollaridos.
22 hours ago [-]
thaumasiotes 20 hours ago [-]
> Why is this surprising? The United States does this all the time, successfully.
The surprise is that Britain is a local backwater and the United States isn't. You can't throw your weight around if you don't have any weight.
wonderwonder 22 hours ago [-]
The difference is that Britain is not a super power and has not been for a long time. There is only China and the US. All other western nations and many eastern ones are shells of what they once were.
cjs_ac 22 hours ago [-]
This fits quite neatly with Dominic Cummings' comments to the House of Lords Constitutional Committee[0] about how the British Civil Service can't do anything because no one with any talent wants to work there.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBBYvj4YQLE (full video is an hour and a half, but you can skip to any bit because he just makes the same handful of points over and over again)
I'm somewhat dubious of a Youtube channel called "Western Liberty" that was created the day of Cummings's testimony, which contains nothing but the session and short clips of it. Using the link above avoids any potential ad revenue going to that clearly political pointed channel.
For anyone that's interested, here are the links to the other sessions of this committee:
Dammit, my edit window ran out of time. Alas. While the 22nd April, 3rd June, and 10th June sessions are from that committee, they are unrelated to the inquiry of constitutional safeguards. Skip to the 15th July session. Here's a link to the inquiry: https://committees.parliament.uk/work/9861/the-uks-constitut...
Anyway, after watching the session with Cummings, I have to say I'm deeply unimpressed with his contribution. While I found his bluntness somewhat refreshing, he was clearly irritated at being (repeatedly) asked to suggest actual solutions instead of just using the session as a pulpit for his grievances.
pja 16 hours ago [-]
Failing to do anything constructive about the problems he’s identified is Cummings’ whole thing though.
He’s like an incompetent Cassandra: people keep on agreeing with his diagnoses, giving him power in the hope that he’ll fix things at which point he makes a complete hash of everything and leaves in a huff having made things worse than they were before.
If the right ever takes power in the UK in the near-ish future I expect us to go through exactly this cycle again. Cummings seems to be very bad at the politics of driving organisational change & making it stick, which is ironic given that criticising public bodies is what he spends so much of his time doing.
cjs_ac 18 hours ago [-]
Sure, but even if he provides no solutions, providing insight into the problems is a worthwhile contribution.
foldr 60 minutes ago [-]
"I'm smart but my colleagues are all useless idiots" is an insight now? That's pretty much everyone's complaint about their colleagues in all of human history.
Defletter 17 hours ago [-]
Except that his grievances are extremely surface level.
For example, he claims that legal experts, regardless of their political leanings, agree that the small-boats crisis cannot be solved without primary-legislative changes to the Human Rights Act. Does he mention how the HRA is obstructive? No. Does he mention even one change to the HRA that would help? No. Does he mention the scale of changes required? No.
What's funny is that I'd actually use his HRA example as an example of our constitutional safeguards working exactly as intended: it's for Parliament to decide what our human rights are and their extent, not the whims of ministers. That the Prime Minister and Parliament are refusing to make those changes because they find them to be politically untenable is actually how a democratic system ought to work.
In fact, I'd summarise his testimony as him being irritated at constitutional safeguards working as intended. For example, he claimed that the biggest enemy to British Special Forces is not Russia, China, or Iran but the Cabinet Office and Ministry of Defence lawyers. Oh no, our ministries are operating within the law! How terrible! He seems to advocate for ministers and ministries to instead adopt an 'ask for forgiveness, not permission' mindset with regards to the law, particularly given his testimony on how things were done during the chaos of the pandemic:
> That led to some very big decisions inside No. 10 where, essentially, I said on behalf of the PM, for example, "Call the airlines. Commandeer the planes. Fly the planes to China. Pick up all our PPE. Fly back here. We don't care if the officials all say it's unlawful. If we don't get all this PPE back, God knows how many doctors and nurses are going to die as a consequence. Do it, and, if there's a judicial review that says it's all illegal, whatever, the PM will deal with that down the line".
roryirvine 5 hours ago [-]
Cummings and people like him seem to think of officialdom as being something like a non-Newtonian fluid.
Trouble is, he thinks they're thixotropic - give 'em a big whack to get them moving faster - when they're actually by design closer to being rheopectic, absorbing sudden stresses to protect the nation.
So when faced with the multiple sudden gyrations in policy that we saw under the final five years of the last government, they of course acted as a dampener. That's what they're there for, that's why they're so valuable. But if you don't shock them and instead apply constant pressure in a consistent direction, they'll move smoothly, efficiently, and effectively.
For a good example of that, see Francis Maude's term in the Cabinet Office in the first half of the 2010s which changed the civil service very much for the better and was responsible for, amongst others, GDS, the Government Security Group, and a lot of open government initiatives.
pxeger1 18 hours ago [-]
"parliamentlive.tv" doesn't sound any more reputable, but apparently it's official despite the foreign TLD!
pjc50 17 hours ago [-]
Cummings is an absolute crank. He had the opportunity to try and he ended up failing spectacularly, like Liz Truss or Yannis Varoufakis.
braiamp 13 hours ago [-]
It’s funny because "no one with talent wants to work there" would explain an organization failure only if there were a competitive job market, one where talented people can freely choose their employer. There isn't, so the actual description is that the British Civil Service, due to having crappy managers and policies, can't do anything useful.
I'm pretty sure that if we ask the operative layer what should the policies be, they wouldn't even pursue this goal
Utter rubbish. Civil servants can't get anything done because they are chronically underfunded, and yanked around by the whims of the government of the day. Dominic Cummings' is not a reliable source either - he's ideologically at odds with the idea of government _doing_ anything, and because of that has caused a great deal of harm to the UK.
praptak 5 hours ago [-]
"Unless Ofcom is prepared to sail a British invasion fleet here and land ground troops[...]"
Let's not pretend this is the only way (some) laws are enforced abroad. A US company wants your country to put you in jail for hacking hardware you legally own? No problem, they lobby this in trade deal negotiations and they get their way.
This is economic coercion instead of the fleet, so people don't get as angry about this as they should.
spacebanana7 45 minutes ago [-]
But the fleet is a necessary condition for economic coercion, otherwise the adversary could escalate the dispute kinetically.
simoncion 20 hours ago [-]
In an ideal world, exclusively-US-based companies that host message boards, chat rooms, instant messaging services, and the like would look at this saga and
1) Notice that the odds that a foreign power is going to be able to harm them in any meaningful way for violating their "child 'safety'" laws that curtail freedom of speech and association are very low
2) Notice that 4chan is fighting harder to resist these attacks on free speech and association than many of big names in the sector and reflect on what it might mean when _4chan_ is the hero of the story
Alas.
philipkglass 20 hours ago [-]
Notice that 4chan is fighting harder to resist these attacks on free speech and association than many of big names in the sector...
Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based? Big American tech companies have employees, assets, or at least a business presence of some sort in countries outside the US, which means that they are exposed to legal systems in those other countries.
simoncion 19 hours ago [-]
> Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based?
That is an issue, but it's explicitly not what I was talking about. To pick one example, Discord is -AFAIK- US-based. They decided to knuckle under rather than tell the UK, Australia, and others to fuck right off with their free-speech-and-association-limiting horseshit.
Multinationals have their own problems, but they're -when we measure by number of businesses- a tiny minority of businesses. My commentary was exclusively about US-based companies.
And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be far less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.
philipkglass 19 hours ago [-]
According to Discord's careers page, they're currently hiring people in the US, UK, Singapore, Portugal, and the Netherlands:
Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other companies it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
simoncion 18 hours ago [-]
> They have a registered office in Schiphol:
Ah, I stand corrected. Discord has a branch office in the Netherlands. Thanks for the correction.
> Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other big names it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
As I said:
And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be *far* less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.
Trampling on fundamental rights in order to chase marginally more money is neither admirable nor prosocial behavior.
dogleash 17 hours ago [-]
>It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
You're agreeing with parent poster that they don't care to fight on principle (in the unlikely chance they hold any principle in the first place). You're just using avoidant terminology that skips the criticism inherent in parent's framing.
philipkglass 17 hours ago [-]
I'm commenting on how non-US laws may affect businesses, descriptively speaking, without prescriptively stating what I think that the law ought to be.
I am a US citizen and I approve of US-style free speech protection. If anything, I think that the US still has too much restriction on speech (e.g. DMCA limits on "anti-circumvention" software.)
However, I also approve of democratic government. If people in other countries vote to treat speech differently than the US, I wouldn't want to live under those laws, but I also wouldn't say that they are incorrect. I think that democratic principles mean implementing the will of the majority, even if I think that the majority is foolish. There are some things that I would fight against (not just lament) even if approved by the will of the majority; I can't fully reconcile my conflicting impulses, but I acknowledge them. All of this would have been a long and distracting aside to my original point, which was that most American businesses of note operate under multiple countries' jurisdictions.
gpm 19 hours ago [-]
Discord does business in the UK, Australia, and just about every other country of any relevance. It would be trivial for the UK courts to collect fines against them simply by ordering the payment processors handling payments for them in the UK to redirect those payments, for instance.
4chan is only reasonably immune from this because it's not really operating as a business...
simoncion 18 hours ago [-]
> 4chan is only reasonably immune from this because it's not really operating as a business...
4chan is absolutely operating as a business ("4chan community support LLC") that accepts payments [0], as is Kiwi Farms ("Lolcow LLC") [1]. There is zero doubt in my mind that both companies have users in the EU, UK, and other jurisdictions that have the sorts of awful regulations that we're discussing. I expect that they also receive payments from users in those jurisdictions.
Given that you report that it's trivial to do, I wonder why Ofcom declined to levy its fines by way of commanding UK-based payment processors...
Just bear in mind that many US states are implementing the so-called age verification laws, which will soon turn into identity verification laws. So simply being in the US doesn't protect them against having to comply with these things. Someone is going to have to fight the laws.
throwawayffffas 18 hours ago [-]
The main difference is that most of the big players have physical presence in the UK. You can't argue British law does not apply to you when you have a campus in Kings Cross.
tourmalinetaco 20 hours ago [-]
4chan and Kiwi Farms (via Lolcow LLC), to be more specific.
simoncion 20 hours ago [-]
Rad. Thanks for the correction.
shadowgovt 19 hours ago [-]
Here's the thing though: nobody has to agree 4chan is the hero of the story. It's also reasonable to look at 4chan and say "Gross and legally correct is still gross" and let them soldier on alone.
You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures. It doesn't say "First they came for the KKK." And, of course, it doesn't say "First they came for the Nazis."
simoncion 19 hours ago [-]
> You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures.
Just as saints and captains of industry deserve no less scrutiny and liability under the law than the rest of us, scoundrels and horrible people deserve no less protection under the law than the rest of us.
If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good, then you still have quite a bit of emotional maturity to develop.
To put the previous paragraph another way: It's entirely consistent to decry an someone as a loathsome scumbag that all upstanding people should shun and refuse to associate with while also remarking that that one time they dove into a freezing river to save a child being swept away was a good and noble thing to do, and behavior that we should all aspire to mirror.
Klonoar 13 hours ago [-]
You’re just deploying the standard 4chan argument tactic of appealing to some supposed higher level of emotional maturity.
It was cute in 2004.
shadowgovt 19 hours ago [-]
> scoundrels and horrible people deserve no less protection under the law than the rest of us.
And they got it. "I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake." But that doesn't mean anyone needs feel sympathy for the devil. We're not obligated to cheer when the wretched hive of scum and villainy keeps its liquor license another year. The law was followed and we can move on.
> If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good
... It is usually the case when we're talking about 4chan (and always when talking about Kiwi Farms) that "unalloyed" is doing a lot of the kind of load-bearing one probably wants an alloy for. 4chan's most positive benefit to society is as a litmus test for precisely how far the [xkcd-1357](https://xkcd.com/1357/) principle goes. They are 100% welcome, per their freedom of the press (and the freedom of speech of their users), to host their website. On their infrastructure. With their own DOS protection. In a country that recognizes those rights and protects them. That's the system working as intended.
simoncion 18 hours ago [-]
> ...that "unalloyed" is doing a lot of the kind of load-bearing one probably wants an alloy for.
No? Saving a child from being swept away in a freezing river is an unalloyed good, no matter how terrible the scoundrel that did it.
Like I mentioned, it looks like you still have quite a lot of emotional maturity to develop.
(You might also benefit from checking out 4chan boards that aren't /b/, /pol/, and /gif/.)
LoganDark 18 hours ago [-]
> Saving a child from being swept away in a freezing river is an unalloyed good
What if it's only as part of kidnapping the child and forcing them into grueling slave labor until the day they die? Is that still perfectly unalloyed?
(Not that I'm saying 4chan is metaphorically doing that here; just for the sake of argument.)
shadowgovt 16 hours ago [-]
Your twist on the argument is a fair one since the commenter you're responding to is equating fishing a drowning child out of a river with fighting formal scrutiny regarding their lax approach to policing CSAM on /b/ and /hc/.
Emotional maturity is important. So is platform maturity. We are long past the point where "reader beware" and "it's just a hobby site" are good enough in an era where under-policed fora result in actual harm. I appreciate 4chan's strong stance on the topic of it not being their job to police their house... But I do often find myself cheering when someone compels them, as a site that receives 22 million unique monthly visitors, to act like they have any host responsibility.
It's hard for me to be deeply supportive, beyond my legal requirements to be so, of a site that hosts /b/, /pol/, /hc/, and /gif/ because it chooses to host them too.
12 hours ago [-]
murphyslab 18 hours ago [-]
The original German of the poem does say, at the final line, "Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte." That is, "When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest."
So, yes, the poem does extend to all subcultures because it reaches out to include every voice of opposition to totalitarianism, until no one is left but the speaker.
It's also meant to be understood in the first four lines: The people mentioned — communists, trade unionists, social democrats, and Jews — were meant to be emblematic of people who are seen as enemies or outsiders to the author's cause. These are people whose values are seen to be radically different than our own.
Remember the context: the author of the speech, which was re-rendered as a poem, was a real person, Martin Niemöller, who was a pastor in the Confessing Church, which was an underground church movement organized in resistance to the Nazis.
However his speech, given in January of 1946, was an indictment of the Confessing Church. The movement was initially organized primarily as a form of resistance to governmental interference in religion, rather than to speak out for all people. Niemöller was, in fact, explicit that this was about people who were his "opponents" and his "enemies":
> "... The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?"
Instead, Niemöller points out, in a theologically poignant allusion to the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, that we have a responsibility to our fellow humans to look out for their wellbeing and their interests as our own.
So yes, that poem calls for you to look out for the wellbeing and interests — including freedom from oppression and censorship — for those folks who you might now perceive to be your enemies.
It should be noted that Niemöller was not the only one to draw on this story as an indictment of the church's inaction. Margarete “Marga” Meusel, a contemporary and correspondent of Niemöller wrote this in 1935 which was antecedent in the body of thought informing the 1946 speech:
> Why does the church do nothing? Why does it allow unspeakable injustice to occur? ... What shall we one day answer to the question, where is thy brother Abel? The only answer that will be left to us, as well as to the Confessing Church, is the answer of Cain. ("Am I my brother's keeper?" Genesis 4:9)
Unless your definition of "opposition to totalitarianism" is very different from mine, I would hope it is transparent that the examples given in the comment you replied to are not such voices.
shadowgovt 16 hours ago [-]
What of the wellbeing and interests of the vulnerable who stumble onto /b/ ill-equipped for the firehose? Are we their keepers also?
This may be one of those "not everyone gets to win everywhere" situations. And if I have to choose protecting 4chan vs. protecting children...
... I can see two positions on the topic which have merit. So it's a good thing there are separate nations to decide on different bars of safety.
I would have no problem with a world where 4chan is free to operate in the US and blocked in the UK. Different countries with different cultures.
Levitz 11 hours ago [-]
>This may be one of those "not everyone gets to win everywhere" situations. And if I have to choose protecting 4chan vs. protecting children...
Which to be clear, is nothing but a fiction you built yourself in order to insist on your failed arguments, 4chan is a 18+ site and it enforces the rule. It's literally the second rule of the site just below not posting illegal content.
lukewarm707 15 hours ago [-]
Think of the children!
This message was sponsored by SafetyTM.
Every single day
And every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I'll be watching you
StanislavPetrov 12 hours ago [-]
>What of the wellbeing and interests of the vulnerable who stumble onto /b/ ill-equipped for the firehose? Are we their keepers also?
No, in a free society the government doesn't decide, via its monopoly on violence, what it's okay for consenting adults to say or hear. And in a sane society, parents are responsible for policing what their children see and hear, and not the government.
mm263 22 hours ago [-]
This is just laying down the ground work for Russia-style deep packet inspection. “We don’t have a capability to censor the foreign internet, so we need measures to cut off the violating sites from our side”
windowliker 57 minutes ago [-]
The UK already has a very extensive block list which most ISPs already implement:
I don't see the need for extra tooling like DPI when the willingness and methodology to outright block sites at a higher level is already in place. Also bear in mind that the groups who have compiled the most widely implemented block lists are also major sponsors of the bill which this 4chan story refers to, so they have largely gotten what they wanted.
ifwinterco 22 hours ago [-]
I think it’s an open question whether the British state has the technical chops, money and willingness to implement a Great Firewall type solution.
The state isn’t totally incompetent but doing it properly would be a serious undertaking, the kind of thing where the recent track record of big government tech projects isn’t great
u8080 6 hours ago [-]
I heard the same argument for several years in Russia while government was building competences. They have money, so could just hire top tier commercial companies who are the best it their field.
jubilee33 15 hours ago [-]
Why are you assuming that they aren't totally incompetent?
They look pretty incompetent from my perspective.
Or they just want to present the appearance of incompetence for an ulterior motive? That seems needlessly complex when they are already admitting their malevolence daily.
ifwinterco 14 hours ago [-]
There are examples of the apparently ineffective British state suddenly gaining some teeth and some competence when they actually care.
One example is after the Southport riots, miraculously the justice system became hyperefficient and the perpetrators were found, arrested, charged and jailed within a week.
That suggests a lot of what looks like incompetence (potholes, petty crime, maybe also this) is actually just the state not really caring about a lot of issues.
If they decide they really care about internet censorship, I wouldn't rule out them suddenly becoming a lot more competent in that specific area
Orygin 21 hours ago [-]
They already track everything going through the undersea cables, why couldn't they start blocking at those points?
ifwinterco 20 hours ago [-]
Getting the raw data is relatively straightforward, but my understanding is doing real time DPI at country scale without being easily circumvented (and without breaking the rest of the internet you want to work) isn't so easy.
If you want to really make sure nobody in the uk can easily access 4chan (PRC style) it needs some effort, and you're in an arms race with attempts to mask/tunnel traffic so it gets through
superxpro12 19 hours ago [-]
i too love the idea of deep government inspection of every piece of data i send
dannyw 17 hours ago [-]
Splicing and mirroring a cable is about 10x easier than filtering it.
u8080 16 hours ago [-]
Sorry for copypaste, but I still hope people will see true intentions of govt.
Just a recap how it happened in Russia:
1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8
2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.
3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).
4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).
5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).
6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.
7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc ).
bnastic 18 hours ago [-]
That's already been done, on the ISP level, some time ago. For torrent sites and similar, if I remember correctly.
crimsontech 17 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure it was to protect the children, or fight terrorism, or to save the NHS, or lower taxes.
foldr 52 minutes ago [-]
That's not based on deep packet inspection; it's just low tech stuff like IP blocks. ISPs don't have the resources or expertise to DPI encrypted traffic (which is the majority of network traffic now).
TZubiri 22 hours ago [-]
deep packet inspection is not really necessary, headers contain information about the destination, as long as you don’t encrypt those, there is no need to do any decryption.
mm263 22 hours ago [-]
You just need to follow this to the logical conclusion. They’ll ban using your proposed method, people will switch to VPN and other modern methods and to combat people still accessing the forbidden internet they will need DPI and TSPU-like devices
9x39 21 hours ago [-]
I think the conclusion is more like mandating home and business web access is proxied at a national level and most other protocols disallowed. Use of VPNs without a VPN tax stamp and key escrow is prima facie evidence of violation of the Counter-Terrorism and Security act. Use of non-standard protocols is assumed to be criminal intent. Check with your approved internet provider for how to access the Internet safely.
TZubiri 20 hours ago [-]
What proposed method? I'm explaining how things work. In order to send a packet, the destination address needs to be known to the delivering entities. Encryption occurs by using enveloping, the envelope is unencrypted, but the content is encrpyted.
This is how it works, if you want I can explain to you why it works like this, or you can work it out from first principles. But this is not a proposal.
VPNs are an asterisk and they work not by avoiding this natural unavoidable principle, but by tunneling, the VPN or proxy vendor is putting themselves on the headers, and on the backend they still route the packets to the destination by putting the intended destination on the headers.
If these VPNs don't comply with local regulations and are used to evade national restrictions they can and are often themselves subject to bans. But even if not, it acts as a sort of waiver and compromising element for all illicit activity.
Sometimes it's not necessary to completely outlaw something, it is sufficient to make it so that engaging in the outlawed activity is sufficiently uncomfortable and clear that it is illegal, forcing users to undeniably acknowledge they are avoiding the law. An example of this is trying to watch pirated movies without paying for them, yeah you can do it, but you gotta do some shady shit and dodge a lot of malware, and eat shady gambling ads and etcetera.
In addition to making you feel like an asshole, it removes any recourse you may have, it's very hard to make any claim later, you cannot really complain later if you were accessing it illegally to begin with. Nobody is going to pursue you to the end of the world not to access a pirated movie or an illegal website, but they pursue the distributor and make things very uncomfortable enough so that you are effectively hiding like a fiending outlaw.
iamnothere 22 hours ago [-]
Likely yes IMO, especially since the UK is making moves to militarize.
hardbass 6 hours ago [-]
Sounds good. Why don't you want a strong military in European countries? They should pay their own military tab.
iamnothere 1 hours ago [-]
Did I say anything about not wanting nations to have a strong military? Why are you making shit up?
The bad thing would be tying that process in with growing internet restrictions.
andyhedges 22 hours ago [-]
I hate to break it to you, but the UK has had a military for some time now.
mahboi 21 hours ago [-]
This isn't what "militarize" means in this context or mostly anywhere
DANmode 22 hours ago [-]
So has France, but their nuclear weapons program is new.
I don’t think it’s weird to point out the little guys (especially former or current EU) getting strapped.
mig39 22 hours ago [-]
I think both the UK and France have had nuclear weapons programs since the 50s and 60s. Are you thinking about the "Northwood declaration" ? Where they both said they would coordinate their nuclear responses?
AnonymousPlanet 22 hours ago [-]
The first nuclear weapon tests for the UK and France were in 1952 and 1960, respectively. Nothing about that is new.
The French have always had a very strong submarine fleet with nuclear launch capability. Nothing new about this in the slightest. This puts them in a very select group and is what still gives them some clout on the international stage.
DANmode 19 hours ago [-]
> Nothing new about this in the slightest
Deep inland strikes from miles out while underwater/at sea.
foldr 49 minutes ago [-]
France has had submarine-launched ICBMs with nuclear warheads since 1971.
iamnothere 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
drawfloat 22 hours ago [-]
We're probably at the weakest point in our history militarily, with few recruits coming in. People in government saying they are "going to have" conversations about war with the public (FYI, UK would be behind most other countries on this, many already have done in last 5 years) is very different to "militarization" in any way that would relate to this 4Chan decision, it's not even "we are actually doing something".
And politicians have repeatedly stated the need for better control of information, connecting it directly to the Ukraine conflict and perceived threats from Russia.
I think there’s a strong case to be made that the push for information control is partly connected to military/defense goals.
miohtama 22 hours ago [-]
Think of the kids the world we failed to protect by not having passport checks and government snitch at the 4chan login.
But don’t worry! We will check your passport when you open your phone (already live in the UK, efforts supported by the GBP 2M secret donation of Meta to NGOs).
And what’s the worst thing that could happen? No one would for sure arrest you for being critical of a foreign government.
> No one would for sure arrest you for being critical of a foreign government.
Does _not_ need to be foreign.
People in Western Democracies assume we are immune to dictatorships.
Plenty of dictatorships in our modern history were regressions from at least some form of functional democracy, many even regressed from long lasting robust democracies.
So much of the UK, EU comission, Palantir moves is straight up Stasi playbook.
It is almost disrespectful of German History and collective suffering for VDL to stand on the wrong side of history with this corporate puppetering.
miohtama 4 hours ago [-]
You are right, in the case of UK, Israel is not the foreign government
22 hours ago [-]
kypro 17 hours ago [-]
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egorfine 3 hours ago [-]
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution
You don't say!
> American courts are not necessarily required to enforce foreign penal judgments
Shocking.
What's the rational point of existence of Ofcom? Plain censorship?
windowliker 52 minutes ago [-]
>What's the rational point of existence of Ofcom?
They are supposed to regulate domestic broadcasters and communications companies, and frankly have done a terrible job of it to date, like all the other 'independent' regulators set up after the waves of privatisation which sold off our public utilities (huge conflicts of interest involved when ex-regulators frequently move into board positions in the companies they were previously responsible for keeping in line). This new mandate to police the internet is a recent one for Ofcom which has greatly widened the scope of their remit, and as we all know, authoritarians never complain about being given more power.
lifeisstillgood 16 hours ago [-]
I think this is just one more case of “we thought we lived in Western Civilisation and all agreed on how to handle the problems of the world”. And we are discovering that we actually live in American Civilisation, and the differences are becoming insurmountable.
The problem is America cannot stand alone - everyone needs friends
sampli 10 hours ago [-]
Because America courts should enforce foreign censorship?
nickdothutton 22 hours ago [-]
When European governments say they will lead in technology regulation, this is what they mean.
windowliker 49 minutes ago [-]
Would you prefer your iPhone still had a proprietary charger cable?
trinsic2 17 hours ago [-]
> I wish them luck in that important work. In the meantime, we Americans have plenty more work to do on this side of the pond to protect our border and prevent the British, Australian, Russian, and other foreign censorship regimes from crossing it.
We got our own problems with Authoritarianism. There is no need to protect our borders from something our own government and corporations are practicing day in and day out on our own people, in our own country. You might want to acknowledge that first, before assuming we got problems across the pond.
And BTW the real answer is to enforce antitrust and put an end to Citizens United to prevent money from flowing into our political institutions and reign in these corrupt business. You might want to add that as well to your point about the GRANITE Act
outoftheabyss 17 hours ago [-]
Your quote references censorship specifically and while there are some creaks in the first amendment here and there, it is nothing compared to the censorship machine running in the UK and Europe.
trinsic2 13 hours ago [-]
What the hell are you talking about? We have the same problems as the UK and they are just as bad. We are at the cusp, while the UK is further in, but we still have the same problems..
foldr 42 minutes ago [-]
I think it would be more accurate to say that the UK and US have different problems when it comes to freedom of expression, and each country tends to notice the problems in the other one more readily than its own problems (especially because the US right likes to use the UK as a whipping boy).
From a UK point of view, what stands out currently is the cowed state of the US media. There is very little sense of a free press effectively holding the administration of the day to account. Extraordinary levels of corruption and incompetence are remarked on merely in passing.
Number of US media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with Donald Trump in recent years: 4 (totalling about $67 million).
Number of UK media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with a UK Prime Minister in recent years: 0†
† The last instances appear to have been Tony Blair in 2007 (who settled with the Daily Mail over photos of his family taken during a private holiday), and John Major in 1993 (who successfully sued the New Statesman over allegations that he'd had an affair).
14 hours ago [-]
gupti 21 hours ago [-]
I hope the precedent doesn't change to trying to enforce fines on foreign companies by instead arresting and fining employees upon arrival to the UK.
Though I guess we've already seen something similar in 2024 with France and Telegram...
gupti 21 hours ago [-]
I hope the precedent doesn't change to trying to enforce fines on foreign companies by instead arresting and fining employees upon arrival to the UK.
Though I guess we've already seen something similar in France with Telegram...
game_the0ry 17 hours ago [-]
Its adorable that the UK gov thought they could beat the internet.
The world wide web remains undefeated.
not-kinsale-joe 22 hours ago [-]
It's annoying, in the UK you can browse 4chan but not Imgur
jubilee33 15 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure who the other three clients are,
But in the case of 4chan, people are also forgetting that it is well known to be an intel gathering and propaganda disseminating platform closely aligned if not run indirectly by the US government.
It's not blocked anywhere that much more tame sites are usually blocked, perhaps china is the only one I know of and even google is blocked there, and that makes me suspicious.
Yes there are organic users on there outside of the political places,
But many, especially those that are disgusted by the site, forget the very real impact that 4chan has had on current events, I just don't see any of this situation as organic.
neuroticnews25 4 hours ago [-]
>It's not blocked anywhere that much more tame sites are usually blocked
Any examples?
lukeify 18 hours ago [-]
We need to start collectively shaming individuals in the tech sector who work for these censorious government agencies and do their bidding.
MisterMunchkin 20 hours ago [-]
Good, fuck off ofcom. We always mocked Chinese censorship but we’re not really any different now.
TZubiri 22 hours ago [-]
does this mean the UK will block 4chan in the UK? if the defense is jurisdictional then 4chan can continue to serve US users, but there would be no recourse if the UK blocks it in their jurisdiction
miohtama 22 hours ago [-]
The UK ISPs already did this earlier. What Ofcom really wanted is to flex their muscle and kill 4chan because it represents Satan for them.
What Ofcom wants next is to make VPNs illegal.
pjc50 17 hours ago [-]
It is not blocked in the UK.
I think OFCOM themselves recognize the problem with trying to ban VPNs, but extremely dim MPs and extremely angry newspapers (who are the underlying enemies of free speech here) don't.
EmbarrassedHelp 16 hours ago [-]
They only temporarily backed down on targeting VPNs, while also saying that online platforms should block all VPN users who don't verify their ages.
Using a nationwide default blocklist to address 4chan would be appropriate behaviour for Ofcom, given its duty to protect kids.
Beyond that, it is just madness to try to control the US company or fine it. Going beyond this duty shows that not all biscuits are present at the afternoon tea.
It's not like Facebook, or anyone's personal life or business, depends on 4chan.
ryankrage77 21 hours ago [-]
In my experience, ISPs just 'block' it at the DNS level. Using another DNS provider 'unblocks' everything.
TZubiri 17 hours ago [-]
This is my experience too, I don't know why they don't do IP level blocks. It's pretty trivial to evade a lot of bans.
I think the Spain-Cloudflare case does IP level blocks and it has a lot of side effect damage, but if I recall they do IP-block level blocking because the vendor, cloudflare, provides header/envelope encryption and pooling, so the Spanish courts considers it legal to block the whole service even, alleging that they are not collaborating with court orders, they just choose not to block the whole provider to reduce the collateral damage, even if they consider they have jurisdiction to block all of CF
miohtama 16 hours ago [-]
Pirate streams have better access to public IP addresses than legitimate services, so blocking Cloudflare does nothing but destroy legitimate businesses.
tourmalinetaco 20 hours ago [-]
4chan and Kiwi Farms, which is something the article intentionally glosses over. Honestly, KF is a far more “dangerous” place in the eyes of the UK government, as 4chan hasn’t been relevant for around a decade, and the combined efforts to deplatform KF traditionally has been fruitless.
whywhywhywhy 18 hours ago [-]
Why would they block it if they hope to get money from it.
metalman 15 hours ago [-]
4 chan is the most bent place on the internet that is just wide open, and in my short forrey I did see and read a bunch of horrible stuff, but there are other areas in there where certain counter culture groups with no violence or ranting seem to be hiding out for the privacy, and there are also people who go in to challenge some of the worst obscenities, and as it turned out I have a friend who does just that, even going so far as to learn the intricasies of these groups and chase them around the net to pick there horrible theories and causes apart, driving some of them completly insane in the process.
it's not like there are not worse places, and 4 chan realy is sort of cartoonish and juvenile, so the best thing is to openly acknowledge it and like all the bad stuff label it and remind people of the risks of getting caught up in this, or any, cult.
cindyllm 13 hours ago [-]
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maxlin 12 hours ago [-]
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yieldcrv 22 hours ago [-]
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draw_down 22 hours ago [-]
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draw_down 23 hours ago [-]
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution
Good grief. This is sad stuff.
mahboi 22 hours ago [-]
What else should happen in this case?
drnick1 19 hours ago [-]
No, it's called sovereignty.
ImJamal 20 hours ago [-]
Are you saying it is sad that American courts do not enforce foreign laws if they violate the US constitution? If so, then are you in favor of Russian, Chinese, various Muslim countries' laws being enforced in the US?
chihuahua 19 hours ago [-]
Iranian Fatwas enforced/carried out by American courts, that could get interesting.
deaux 19 hours ago [-]
I think you meant to ask "are you in favor of the CLOUD Act and FACTA (among others) being enforced outside the US?"
19 hours ago [-]
743947630229 19 hours ago [-]
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nullbio 11 hours ago [-]
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hansvm 7 hours ago [-]
The "may" in that statement (may be moving towards...) is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but I think it's true that if you want to predict future harmful manosphere beliefs then one of your best predictors is current actions aligned with the top of the funnel. That doesn't even necessarily mean those actions are bad, but the combination of all of them is suggestive of a certain reading diet.
Separately, are they all good? Testosterone has a lot of negative side effects, and I know I certainly wouldn't mind having about half as much. Jawlines and fiber have similar issues when focused on in the wrong way. Eating healthy, feeling good, and looking good are mostly orthogonal to those trendy behaviors. If they work for you then great, but there are other options too, and I don't think she's saying that you shouldn't want to eat healthy, feel good, and look good. Indeed, she explicitly says that fibermaxxing is bad because it replaces a healthy diet. She agrees with at least some of your goals and really only (potentially) disagrees with the implementation.
Dylan16807 6 hours ago [-]
> So basically, if you're a male that wants to eat healthy, feel good and look good, you are an evil misogynist with dangerous beliefs.
This is the most disingenuous argument I've seen in a while.
That sentence does not describe a shift to eating healthy. Some of looksmaxxing is reasonable, but a lot is unsafe or being upset about things you can't really change. And nothing in there was "feel good", do you think having abnormally high levels of testosterone is "feel good"?
sampli 10 hours ago [-]
But 4chan hurt my feelings!
drnick1 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nonethewiser 17 hours ago [-]
This isnt unique to the UK. China does the same thing. The UK will have its own firewall in time. They cant actually force foreign companies to comply with these laws so they'll have to blacklist them. It's exactly the same as China.
8note 16 hours ago [-]
its the exact same as the US vis a vis tiktok as well
StanislavPetrov 12 hours ago [-]
>China does the same thing.
No, China is smart enough not expect foreign courts to carry out the work of the Chinese censorship regime.
urbandw311er 17 hours ago [-]
Maybe you could post your unwanted political opinions somewhere else?
philipwhiuk 21 hours ago [-]
This was a fairly stupid case. Ofcom didn't try to enforce it abroad, 4chan sued Ofcom in case it did (mostly for PR purposes).
Ofcom knows its rulings don't apply internationally.
So yes, the status quo is enforced by the US courts, as if it was ever in doubt and nothing at all has changed.
Orygin 21 hours ago [-]
Didn't Ofcom send multiple threat letters to 4chan, requesting they comply with UK laws? That counts as trying to enforce it
tourmalinetaco 19 hours ago [-]
Yes. Ofcom sent multiple extortion letters to 4chan and Kiwi Farms, demanding they pay up and/or submit to British rule. Saying it was for “PR purposes” is equivalent to saying that reporting blackmail is for PR. GP also fails to understand that specifically US courts have no jurisdiction to stop international extortion, which is a loophole through the FSIA. For now, this creates a gridlock: the UK has no ability to seize assets from non-UK entities, but are free to fine and declare non-UK entities as in violation, which aids internal and even international pressure to censoring speech critical of the UK government. In response, US legislation is being proposed (GRANITE Act) that aims to close this loophole.
mellosouls 18 hours ago [-]
Note this nonsense headline and article is just more puffery from the theatrical 4chan side and doesn't represent any official legal position.
Of course ofcom knows its power is limited, that shouldn't stop it attempting to do it's job, however much that job might irk foreign operators publishing to ofcoms jurisdiction.
The fact is the US has different standards to the UK. It doesn't mean one is right and one is wrong but it does mean that those differences will cause cultural and legal friction that responsible operators will attempt to diminish within reason, while others will attempt to capitalize for publicity.
weberer 17 hours ago [-]
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jalev 21 hours ago [-]
Cool. So 4chan is going to get DNS blocked in the UK and I can finally stop hearing about this and all the Americans takes on what my country's enforcement mechanisms should be.
privacyishuman 20 hours ago [-]
What should the rules and enforcement mechanisms be? It seems your country is unfree and getting worse in terms of digital freedom.
I may be reading too much into the editorialized writeups about Ofcom but even their statements imply they thought they were just going to impose their laws globally and that other countries would line up to help them do it?
This quote from the court is amazing:
> American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution
Indeed. Who could have predicted this?
Which raises the scarier question of why they tried this at all? Was the defeat a planned showing to justify future action to justify more control of the internet, as Preston Byrne speculates? Are they using this as a demonstration of why internet censorship is the only solution? It’s hard to imagine why they thought they were going to get anywhere with this case, unless failing was the goal
1. 4chan actually lost its case in the US District Court on 15 September 2026. (sauce: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-court-dismisses-...
The judge dismissed its lawsuit against Ofcom for lack of jurisdiction, because Ofcom was protected by foreign sovereign immunity.
2. The judge's comments were obiter dicta observations that were not necessary to decide the case, rather than a binding ruling that Ofcom's actions were unconstitutional, making the headline somewhat selective, it's hardly the defeat of a giant regulatory system. Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.
We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here:
Cuba. ABC being hassled over Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk. The White House restricting reporting. Ending support for public broadcasting. Book bans, the CLOUD act, the TIKTOK DIVESTITURE fercrissakes. Sanctions on the ICC.
And then you didn't. Don't throw 'obiter dicta' to the rubes and then completely fumble your distraction with the incoherent legerdemain of 'double standards.' Show some art, at least.
They have tariffs on foreign double standards because it's a key export business.
Please point out where Jimmy Kimmel did that. I'll help, here's a transcript:
https://www.readtpa.com/p/read-the-jimmy-kimmel-monologue-th...
If you think that is not worth attempting to get a host taken off the air for (at least for a while), I don't think you understand how dangerous amplified disinformation can be.
Now consider that one is a comedian and the other is a news outlet, what does that tell you about your argument.
Maybe there is some demonstrable difference to size and scale of willful dishonestly among outlets.
2. CNN settles out of court in defamation lawsuit
[1] https://apnews.com/article/cnn-guilty-defamation-afghans-137...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us/cnn-settles-defamat...
Of course, they were also correct. But these quoted statements are primarily about intention and motive, not really arguing (or even speculating particularly strongly) that the shooter actually was MAGA.
Incidentally, this does not seem like particularly dangerous misinformation at all. MAGA supporters are probably the safest group in America (it is, after all, not a safe country for anyone).
That's the important part here, touch grass.
Correct, but this update is in regards to Ofcom's evidence of 20th October in front of the parliamentary select committee to which they have to report, and at which they conceded that their ability to make legally binding cross-jurisdictional enforcement actions is limited when faced with the laws of another country. The wording she used is in fact very interesting: "If foreign courts decide to... try and get in our way, there will be a point at which we have to accept that we won’t be able to recover that money."
>Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.
They have taken on the case pro bono.
2. It's not really obiter dicta because it's a district court order it's not something you cite, really as binding precedent. But if you read between the lines, the court is only dismissing Ofcom because it is part of a sovereign, which means it cannot maintain it's other position. The judge was making it clear he thought Ofcom needed to stop. The ruling is addressed to the parties not really to a future court. If I were Ofcom's lawyer, I wouldn't be celebrating this.
American double standards have nothing to do with this case and it's just a sort of throw in everyone seems to need to mention here. So what? Are they good or bad? If you think they're bad to extend jurisdiction, then take the win.
Long arm jurisdiction is the opposite of what happened here. That's where you pull people into US courts that might not be US citizens for things that happened not in the US. Somehow that implies that foreign companies should be able to reach into the US and bug people in the US not doing anything in their own country? Oh, but USA bad so you scored that point.
I think you're just seeing Lincoln's hat in the clouds.
Everyone on HN apparently thinks they have a law degree.
well yeah. whats good for the goose is good for the gander. if the US wants to go bug people in their own countries, even going so far as to murder a bunch of people to kidnap a sitting president of a country, youre gonna get others looking to do it in response, and as the US loses its privileged position on the world stage, its gonna have to start complying
This is only true if, to quote the article being responded to:
>Unless Ofcom is prepared to sail a British invasion fleet here and land ground troops
> [...], the CLOUD act, [...]
The CLOUD Act doesn't do what you think it does. Here's a comment from a while ago with more detail [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226822
The CLOUD Act bypasses traditional MLAT procedures, faced significant civil liberties opposition (EFF), and resolved a genuine jurisdictional dispute, not a mere drafting oversight. Claiming that data location is irrelevant ignores foreign laws and national sovereignty. Explaining why the US wants extraterritorial powers doesn't establish that it should have them.
Twitter isn’t the active ingredient.
(Or at least, it heavily shapes the message).
> Twitter isn’t the active ingredient.
The idiots aren't an active ingredient either. Russia and Iran could have used any puppets. These ones just happen to also twitch like a frog leg.
Turns out that when it comes to info quality is genuinely important, and I have no inclination to fish through raw sewage.
While actual incitement to violence isn't protected speech, that wasn't even close to incitement to violence, which requires meeting three prongs clearly defined by SCOTUS.
I encourage you to review actual statements which SCOTUS has previously ruled are NOT incitement to violence. It's so incredibly narrow and particular, I was left wondering if anything can meet the definition. Jimmy Kimmel is so far from it your assertion is ludicrous.
Is this the same general public whose backlash over the suspension got it reversed a few days later by the network, and by Nextstar and Sinclair a few days after that?
Indeed, I think you should look at the speech that SCOTUS ruled is protected in the landmark Brandenburg v Ohio[0] case to see how extremely narrow the "imminent lawless action" standard is. It's ridiculously hateful and inflammatory, and filled with several non-specific threats of violence against minority groups. This was labelled protected speech. Brandenburg was a private citizen here, and he prevailed over the state of Ohio.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
When the government declares under penalty of law that libraries cannot stock certain books, that is a book ban.
> If you really want to cite American double standards, how about American banks denying service to Americans based on their stated political and religious beliefs? <https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2026/nr-occ...>
Unlike your other examples, banks are private entities and can generally refuse to do business with whomever they like.
Not true here in Florida. The governor banned and burned books that taught slavery was bad, revoked tenure and fired all teachers who were reported teaching that slavery was bad. The new state-approved textbooks teach that slavery taught blacks useful skills and that there was violence on both sides.
The books are not banned.
The public schools don't allow them, which is the case for many things.
Whether you agree with it or not, calling this "banning books" is dumb. There are a lot of things that are not allowed in schools, but we don't go around saying "Florida banned alcohol" or "Florida banned smoking" or "Florida banned pornography" because they're not allowed in schools.
What's a word that means "forbidden from being included" or "disallowed"? "Banned"! Check your local dictionary, or just type it into your favorite search box.
> Calling this "banning books" is dumb. There are a lot of things that are not allowed in schools, but we don't go around saying "Florida banned alcohol" or "Florida banned smoking"
No, it's not dumb. Children don't go to school for the purpose of getting drunk or smoking. They do go to school to learn things, including things that might be politically controversial or divisive.
You know what is dumb? Gatekeeping truthful information from being accessible to kids because the curiosity it sparks might inconvenience some people.
Statistically some of them would be here
Kimmel also did not praise the murderer. He implied (incorrectly as it turns out) that the killer was right-wing.
Your misstatements of the well-known facts and law in this case cast doubt on the effort you put into researching the other issues mentioned.
Right-wingers have lost their jobs in the US many times for far less, even when their comments were on social media accounts unrelated to the job. When these responses are described as unjust or disproportionate, American left-wingers have consistently and repeatedly (across a span of many years) told me the same line about how 1A only applies to government and not corporations. Which is correct, but also entirely missing the point about bias.
You make it sound like losing one’s job for being an embarrassment to their company is a bad thing.
Citation needed.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-court-dismisses-...
In a UK court, of course.
Damages awarded for libel/slander in UK courts are outsized super pay days, and many a foreign sheikh or business mogul has tried to establish that the matter under question was made known to UK citizens and therefore UK has jurisdiction, because the damages will beat anything awarded anywhere else in the World.
Weirdly, Trump has argued that this was damaging to his election chances (reminder: he won the election he's arguing about), and in a jurisdiction that the BBC can show the material wasn't available in, at least not legally and through their enablement.
As a result, even the BBC's critics in the UK (of which there are many), are seeing this as just a grifter trying to shakedown an organisation he doesn't like the reporting of, because he can't do it to a US network without getting into a first amendment quagmire.
In the UK, an alleged defamatory statement is presumed false and the defendant needs to prove it is true, and that burden is unusually low compared to most other jurisdictions, and certainly much lower than in the US where the burden is on the accuser to prove the statement is false.
Is clipping a video together to create a lie "speech"?
The BBC admitted a mistake. The error was reported by an internal BBC investigation, not because Trump's team complained (it is highly unlikely they saw it originally, because it was an UK broadcast).
The BBC makes thousands of hours of video annually. You can't expect perfection, or to sue them for billions of $CURRENCY for every mistake.
The mistake in this case was to make their quite reasonable case (that Trump encouraged the violence of January 2021) very slightly more emphatically than was perhaps justified.
Trump of course showed his disapproval of the violence by pardoning all the rioters, including those convicted of injuring police with weapons.
Their mistake was to twist Trump's speech to make it say the actual opposite of what he did say.
They are notorious for their left wing bias by right-wing commentators and for their right-wing bias by left-wing commentators. By law they are neutral.
> Their mistake was to twist Trump's speech to make it say the actual opposite of what he did say.
I don't see how you can argue that. His speech involved 70 minutes of falsely claiming that the election was stolen (how's that for twisting the truth?) and encouraging his supporters to march on the Capitol. He wasn't stupid enough to explicitly call for violence, but the implication was there.
The circumstantial evidence supports this: the actual ensuing riots and violence, Trump refusing to condemn it, and then pardoning the rioters.
No-one except the most nutty of leftists claims they are right wing. What they might say is that they don't ally with hard left positions on Israel, Jeremy Corbyn etc.
>>I don't see how you can argue that. His speech involved 70 minutes of falsely claiming that the election was stolen
Yes, there were no postal vote irregularities anywhere. Everything was 1,000% above board. Would you like buy a bridge?
>>the actual ensuing riots and violence, Trump refusing to condemn it, and then pardoning the rioters.
Political prisoners, ushered in by the docents. I don't think putting your feet on Pelosi's desk is worth 4 years in jail.
Is it protected if you are challenging a UK company in the UK?
It is, the government can not prevent or punish people speaking on the basis that the government decides it was misleading.
A civil dispute between private parties is entirely different though. One can be found liable for misleading speech that causes damage to another party.
> The president is trying to throw his weight around because he thinks his fans will like it. He's an idiot.
Aside, using civil courts to attack opponents is certainly a problem, but in USA it favors the speaker a compared to a lot of other countries. In US the plaintiff has to prove the speech is false and for public figures that there was malice. Which in my opinion goes a bit too far and gives media corporations more power over politicians and other public matters. I think the public figure stipulation is reasonable and important to allow private citizens to discuss politicians and public matters so that's good, but I think there should be a counter to that which requires organizations reporting the news to have more duty to report truth and not mislead.
You guys are basically Russia in denial at this point. Carried on by the momentum of your products that is heading straight for a massive disruption by AI.
Is that also the case with the common Brit or American?
That was most of the point. America and the UK have become the evil twin of Western Freedom™ and still believe they're better, or know they've fallen but can't/won't do anything.
When you see a litany of bad shit like in one of the GP comments, like book bans etc, you can't be sure if they're talking about the US or the UK, they're basically equally as shit now.
Likewise the talk of book bans is just silly. What books are banned in America?
Oh well, same thing. At this point the UK is basically the mutant kid sprouting from the body of that guy in Total Recall :)
The same shitty some of the worst authoritarianism among the Western world etc.
(yes I know Kuato was a good guy but I mean the UK seems like a hanger-on of the US now, both trying to make shit worse for their own citizens)
But all of your objections here (or rather, more specifically, the choice to present them all together as a list of grievances, given that they are connected by a theme but not otherwise related or coordinated) are 1) blatant whataboutism and 2) an attempt to wage "ideological or political battle" in violation of HN commenting guidelines.
Please point out where Jimmy Kimmel did that. I'll help, here's a transcript:
https://www.readtpa.com/p/read-the-jimmy-kimmel-monologue-th...
You're going to need a jet pack to traverse the logical leaps you're making here.
While the US isn't perfect it is also far from the worst conceivable entity to be in that position (and current UK and Australian governments provide easy examples). If they want to use their influence to promote free speech then good, because we need it. Just less of the mass surveillance of absolutely everyone at the same time, then we'd be good.
Quote from the article:
> Ofcom has targeted 200-ish American platforms with censorship orders; only four of those sites, all of which are my clients, refused
Seems like Ofcom broadly got the result they wanted. A 98% success rate is not going to be particularly discouraging to them.
4chan was absolutely the defining target of this wave of noise, but X is what really bothers the UK establishment.
Not being able to do business in (or, depending on how serious they are about enforcement action, visit) the UK is actually pretty constraining. It's understandable if other companies decided they would prefer to find a middle ground that lets them provide one face to the US and another to the UK, or even that they're not interested in 4chan-style maximalism and found it non-onerous to comply with the UK asks because they're pretty in-line with the site's existing standards (I'd have to see the list of sites that complied to have a real opinion on that part).
The thing is, you can afford sticking the finger to the UK if you do not have any business interests there. A platform like 4chan won't be bothered even if the UK government says "all payments to be made towards 4chan for advertising are hereby seized until the fine is paid off". But places like Twitter or Meta, that derive millions if not billions of euros a year from the UK and European advertisers? Now that's a lot of money to lose, money that even American shareholders will complain about it being missing from the revenue sheet.
In my comment I explained how countries, including the US, project their laws by imposing controls within their jurisdiction.
The weird part about this case is how they thought they could directly project their laws into another country in a way that overrides that country’s constitution, and they expected the other country to override their own constitution in agreement.
That’s not the same. This was something weirder, which is why there is speculation that it was designed to fail as a demonstration.
The US fundamentally disagrees with other countries on the limits of their own jurisdiction to include basically anything tangentially related to the US.
Again, I am far from anti-US but any outsider can see this for what it is: a one way street.
Let's see the Dutch get a US based server that is violating Dutch laws. It will never happen.
If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
// If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
That's a very good way to force the Hague Invasion Act to manifest in some form or another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Trump personally intervened when two US spooks were driving on the wrong side of the road in London, with the driver most likely on her phone, killed someone, and then fled the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn
Compare this with a hispanic american who severely injured someone in similar circumstances. Extradition granted and was convicted for a 32 month prison sentence in the UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y89k07we3o
You may note from the title that this is the "American Service-Members' Protection Act".
The current attempt to destroy the ICC is not due to protection of American service members, but Israeli ones.
The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
The admin (and perhaps many in the country) might like to think they can go alone, but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies.
While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
//The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
NATO's founding multilateral principles and the USA have been leading parallel lives for quite some time. Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation, described them as a 'paper tiger' repeatedly. As the Wpost reported on 3rd April '22, Bolton claimed that Trump came very close to leaving NATO in 2018, and Russian President Vladimir Putin “was waiting for that.” [1]
In addition, the executive branch will take no notice of any 'binding' mandates or statutory notice periods, as already demonstrated in the 2020 withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty.
Indeed, Congress literally had to enact 22 U.S.C. § 1928f (the Kaine-Rubio provision) in 2023 which expressly prohibits the president from exiting the North Atlantic Treaty without prior congressional authorization. But since any subsequent enforcement is dependent on legal resolution by the Supreme Court, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
//but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies
Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
// While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
A false equivalence. Trump intervened in a case where the ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent based on their inability to drive on the right side of the road or stay off their phone.
The point was that if he'll personally intervene in such a contextually miniscule matter for an intelligence asset, then he can be assumed to intervene with significant force in the case of the ICC taking custody of an 'ally'.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/04/bolton-sa...
The nickname is irrelevant.
The first line of the wiki does not support your claim: "all means necessary and appropriate" is much vaguer than "must invade", and no domestic law would change that an invasion of the Netherlands would be a violation of the sovereignty of a NATO ally.
> Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
Read further in my previous comment and find out.
> Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation
None was needed for that, not from NATO at least. Should've raised it with the UN, if that's what you meant?
> Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
I'm not saying they won't do such things, but it's bad for the US if they do. That said, Iran is looking like it'll be another Vietnam only this time with an oil crisis to match the OPEC crisis, so this is already bad with regard to energy sources.
And that's without everyone else in NATO is likely gearing up for fighting against the USA and Russia at the same time even if we'd very much rather not, and Israel itself (the country for which they are doing this to the ICC) is looking somewhat unstable and even the most allied parts are distancing themselves from the USA.
> A false equivalence.
That's my point: the behaviour with regards to Harry Dunn is a false equivalence with regards to these other things.
> ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent
No, not even close; even in the most egregious cases, and this wasn't an egregious example:
She was convicted in absentia and got "8 months in prison, suspended for 12 months, and disqualified from driving for 12 months".The servers were seized under a mutual legal enforcement agreement and it remains to be seen if it underwent a separate Dutch legal review. Quite of a bit of legal footwork gets skipped when the “terrorism” charge is invoked. But it looks like the servers are not being physically turned over, the disks are being imaged and that is what is being transferred.
The UK would have been perfectly justified in saying 4chan can't access any of their systems.
4chan is suing Ofcom, not the other way round.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/how-leaders-texas-r...
When we remember history, what we remember tends to be white-washed.
Each side had a list of grievances. A big one on one side, was the preservation of slavery in perpetuity. The other side wanted to preserve the unity of the nation as a whole.
You are right that Mexico was not fighting to ban slavery. But it was clear that eliminating slaver was still in their roadmap. Texas had only gotten an extension.
Similarly the election of Lincoln wasn't an immediate threat to slavery in the Confederacy. But the Confederacy still was motivated to head off the long-term threat to their economic system.
So the fact that Mexico wasn't fighting to end slavery, doesn't contradict the fact that Texans were fighting to preserve it.
I mean, Lincoln being elected is a direct threat to slavery.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_(United_State...
Opposition to that act was, "We're not going to create new states with slavery." It wasn't, "We're getting rid of slavery in places that already have it." Which meant that it was not a direct threat to existing slave states. (Though there was a prospect that maybe, some day...)
Lincoln didn't like slavery. But he wasn't trying to ban it. It wasn't until the war had been going on for nearly two years that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Which basically said, "If you're still in rebellion a couple of months ago, we're going to free your slaves." It didn't eliminate slavery for any slave state that was part of the Union. It was an incentive to surrender. It was 2 years after that until the 13th amendment was passed.
It is very unlikely that slavery would have been banned during Lincoln's time in office, if the Civil War hadn't happened.
Was there a long-term prospect of a threat? Obviously. But there was no immediate threat. And so the fight wound up with protecting slavery on the one side, and asserting the indivisibility of the nation on the other side.
This is exactly parallel to the Mexico-Texan issue. Slavery was not being banned in the rebelling states.
Pretty sure you’re arguing in bad faith.
A group of anti-slavery people organized into a political party and elected a man who gave a speech declaring that slavery itself needs to be abolished.
Pretending that Lincoln wasn’t going to attempt to abolish slavery is just as bad as pretending the civil war was about states rights (states in the confederacy had mandatory slavery; no right to choose).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln%27s_Peoria_spe...
The myth is that Bowie and Crockett battled until their last breathes. The truth is that Bowie was sick and died in bed. Crockett gave up and was executed.
That's all from the 2021 book Forget the Alamo.
(You could say the Taliban were even more thoroughly 'defeated' in Afghanistan while the country was occupied by the US, but it can hardly be said that it was a victory for the US either, given what happened as soon as they left).
No it wasn't. If Iran's only goal is to survive then it would have made peace with the USA and surrounding Middle Eastern territories decades ago.
This whole war is happening because Iran had great political ambitions than just thriving on its own.
Iran has been funding proxy terrorist groups for a long time now, specifically because it is trying to achieve larger goals than just surviving.
And on those fronts, well those proxy groups have taken a ton of damage and aren't long for this world.
You missed the perfectly reasonable 3rd option. Iran could stop shooting missiles at oil tankers, stop funding proxy groups, and make an arrangement for peace.
We both know though, that they are unwilling to do that. Because peace was never their goal. Instead, they wanted to achieve regional hegemony, and funded proxy groups to do that. But whatever, look how well that worked out for them.
Sure, if taking out the regime is the only pathway to stop Iran from continuing on its current path, then the USA is of course going to try that. But if there was an actual path the peace here, where Iran simply stopped its attacks, things could get back to normal fairly quickly.
What's stopping Israel from attacking "random" countries? Perhaps the fact that they're hardly "random", rather they all host proxy groups of the occupying regime in Iran, who have very openly been subverting those countries into bases from which to attack Israel.
Try again.
Either way, the US and Iran were at peace right up until we decided to pull out of our disarmament treaty with them. And then executed a decapitation strike against them.
The only thing JCPOA did was funnel billions into their hands so they could continue oppressing their own population within their own borders, and destabilizing the entire region outside of them.
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/ex-nuclear-chief... [2] https://www.iranintl.com/en/202204245312
They never gave up. The plan was always to lie and get sanction relief from the West, in order to to sell oil and fund Islamist terrorism throughout the region and the world. It isn't only about the nukes. Fundamentally, this is about containment of a dangerous anti-Western ideology. Same thing in Cuba.
Your only defense of the astounding level of evil represented by the occupying regime in Iran is to keep frothing at the mouth about Israel? That shows quite a lot. Try again.
The surrounding states, which have been attacked by Iran and use the strait to export their oil, should grow a pair, close their borders with Iran, and use all the weapons they bought over the years from the U.S. and finish off once and for all the "Islamic Republic." It seems that, at last, the Saudis are stepping up to the plate and doing something about the Houthis. This is all because they did not finish the job last time.
As I just said before, if this was their only goal, they could have had it decades ago by choosing peace instead of funding proxy milita groups en mass.
The fact that they fund all they proxy groups shows that actually yes they have other goals beyond surviving (They they are quickly failing to achieve as their proxy groups get dismantled), and they are actually willing to risk war and risk their survival to attempt to achieve them.
As for "freeing" themselves in 1979... please talk to some actual Iranians and ask them how much of their country's resources are actually benefitting them, instead of going to regional terror proxies and into enriching corrupt Mullahs so that their sons and daughters could go live in luxury in the West they so despise. Ask them, too, how "free" they really feel.
The only durable way achieve peace in the Mideast is the collapse of Iran and of its regional proxies. Disarming Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis is a necessity before things like rebuilding Gaza is possible at all.
There, fixed it for you. No charge.
If Iran stopped funding Hezbollah then real peace could have been achieved.
You are going to go back a whole 70 years to make your point? Isn't it time to get over it?
All the surrounding governments are at peace with everyone else. Iran could have had the same thing if it wanted. All it had to do what stop funding proxy militant groups.
The US government needing to get over it is their point.
Also the relevant year they're going back to is 1979.
Notably, the two countries involved literally fought a war about one's wish to enforce laws in the other, with the latter declaring that no, it'd prefer to operate independently of those laws.
Look, that was 250 years ago, and we've buried the hatchet. We've had our spats, but it's more like siblings arguing. Let someone else attack one of them and they get reminded that only these 2 are allowed to pick on each other. That said, our entire country was literally built on a legal system that says Americans aren't subject to British law. It's kinda part of our national character.
4chan sued Ofcom over the fines. Ofcom has been perhaps waiting for the outcome of this suit and is announcing they can't collect fines but I don't think that was the purpose. They have the power to instruct ISPs to block domains and to me it seems more likely that is what they will do and that was perhaps what they wanted from the beginning.
Demand online services change their services to conform to their law. Because its accessible from the UK.
Services refuse.
Up goes the wall.
4chan was already blocked by ISPs and you need to call them to unblock it on your connection.
Because of this, it is questionable why Ofcom picked 4chan as a target it the first place.
Correct. UK ISPs already implement a fairly wide-ranging block list (which even includes archive.org) for any subscribers who do not explicitly opt-in to 'adult' content access privileges.
Countries used to enforce this at their borders (for foreign information) because it largely worked. They couldn’t stop 100% of the copies of the book, but they could stop there being enough copies for it to be part of the cultural zeitgeist (most of the time).
Not anymore. The companies don’t have a local HQ to harass, and the information doesn’t flow through infrastructure the government owns. They’ve pretty much entirely lost the ability to control the flow of information, and they’ve largely lost the ability to control its direction either with the fall of major news outlets.
I don’t think they have the support for a China-style great firewall, but I’m not British so maybe I’m wrong.
I think it’s a good thing information is set free, but I see why they tried it. It’s the only politically tenable way they had to try to keep that control.
Easy to circumvent ? Sure, but most people don't know how, so you've made the website inaccessible to the vast majority
Yes this is exactly what they thought, and no it is not surprising. Section 204 of the Online Safety Act of 2023 specifically says the Act covers internet services provided from outside the UK as well.
Of course the rest of us think its stupid. But the UK government doesnt.
It's not just that courts generally decline. It's now also against US law for them to enforce the judgment without assessing the Constitutional issues. And the burden of proof is on those trying to enforce the judgment.
By deliberately going after unwinnable cases, there is perhaps here a deliberate attempt to project a "voice of common sense" - effectively demonstrating that this is uneforceable nonsense, regardless of what the then-current government and media insisted. So they make a big show of it being defeated in the hope that the powers that be seen sense and quietly drop it.
Or they really are delusional. I dunno.
Yeah, unfortunately the UK isn't a country, it is actually a circus, so you can't apply any regular logic, you must apply circus logic.
State censors in western countries are becoming increasingly brazen and desperate. Despite the Orwellian slogans about "safety" they all constantly recite, their objectives are securing the supremacy of the regime not the interests of the people.
How this judgment do that?
We all know the USA punishes its own people for that all the time, of course, but only when the current administration agrees with the ruling, which this one doesn't. It's not that the constitution can't be violated - it's that violating the constitution can be used as an excuse in cases like this one.
What's that got to do with the US constition?
It's like the British government trying to enforce tea confiscations on US residents in a way that violates the fifth amendment protections against unreasonable confiscation of private property.
When something can be explained by both incompetence and conspiracy, the correct explanation is usually incompetence.
Not European politicians.
You see, in the EU international treaties supersede individual countries' constitutions in theory. This is the other way the EU is moving power to executive governments away from parliament and judicial branches.
Of course, in practice, you have at least a good chance that courts just ignore it (of course the laws of many European countries are a good match, the big thing you get many conflicts about is if 2 governments act on the same company/crime/...). Then the EU court makes a counter judgement ... and is ignored, despite the law. Which is one of the reasons you keep reading the EU is about to fall apart.
What ties are there to the current conversation?
Why is this surprising? The United States does this all the time, successfully.
Indian citizens living in India, who have never left India and only do business with Indian entities, have to declare compliance with US laws (FATCA) when opening a bank account in India with an Indian bank. This is enforced by the Indian government.
That's just one handshake away from their bank which does have business with US and their dollaridos.
The surprise is that Britain is a local backwater and the United States isn't. You can't throw your weight around if you don't have any weight.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBBYvj4YQLE (full video is an hour and a half, but you can skip to any bit because he just makes the same handful of points over and over again)
I'm somewhat dubious of a Youtube channel called "Western Liberty" that was created the day of Cummings's testimony, which contains nothing but the session and short clips of it. Using the link above avoids any potential ad revenue going to that clearly political pointed channel.
For anyone that's interested, here are the links to the other sessions of this committee:
- 22nd April 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/e79ae489-4db6-4159-88b...
- 3rd June 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/f27d8b93-b09d-433a-8e6...
- 10th June 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/097aadbd-b58d-4f76-90e...
- 15th July 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/87f1e00f-82b5-432b-af6...
- 2nd September 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/110f81a5-32c4-4577-bab...
- 16th September 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/ecf7a237-54c9-40be-922...
Anyway, after watching the session with Cummings, I have to say I'm deeply unimpressed with his contribution. While I found his bluntness somewhat refreshing, he was clearly irritated at being (repeatedly) asked to suggest actual solutions instead of just using the session as a pulpit for his grievances.
He’s like an incompetent Cassandra: people keep on agreeing with his diagnoses, giving him power in the hope that he’ll fix things at which point he makes a complete hash of everything and leaves in a huff having made things worse than they were before.
If the right ever takes power in the UK in the near-ish future I expect us to go through exactly this cycle again. Cummings seems to be very bad at the politics of driving organisational change & making it stick, which is ironic given that criticising public bodies is what he spends so much of his time doing.
For example, he claims that legal experts, regardless of their political leanings, agree that the small-boats crisis cannot be solved without primary-legislative changes to the Human Rights Act. Does he mention how the HRA is obstructive? No. Does he mention even one change to the HRA that would help? No. Does he mention the scale of changes required? No.
What's funny is that I'd actually use his HRA example as an example of our constitutional safeguards working exactly as intended: it's for Parliament to decide what our human rights are and their extent, not the whims of ministers. That the Prime Minister and Parliament are refusing to make those changes because they find them to be politically untenable is actually how a democratic system ought to work.
In fact, I'd summarise his testimony as him being irritated at constitutional safeguards working as intended. For example, he claimed that the biggest enemy to British Special Forces is not Russia, China, or Iran but the Cabinet Office and Ministry of Defence lawyers. Oh no, our ministries are operating within the law! How terrible! He seems to advocate for ministers and ministries to instead adopt an 'ask for forgiveness, not permission' mindset with regards to the law, particularly given his testimony on how things were done during the chaos of the pandemic:
> That led to some very big decisions inside No. 10 where, essentially, I said on behalf of the PM, for example, "Call the airlines. Commandeer the planes. Fly the planes to China. Pick up all our PPE. Fly back here. We don't care if the officials all say it's unlawful. If we don't get all this PPE back, God knows how many doctors and nurses are going to die as a consequence. Do it, and, if there's a judicial review that says it's all illegal, whatever, the PM will deal with that down the line".
Trouble is, he thinks they're thixotropic - give 'em a big whack to get them moving faster - when they're actually by design closer to being rheopectic, absorbing sudden stresses to protect the nation.
So when faced with the multiple sudden gyrations in policy that we saw under the final five years of the last government, they of course acted as a dampener. That's what they're there for, that's why they're so valuable. But if you don't shock them and instead apply constant pressure in a consistent direction, they'll move smoothly, efficiently, and effectively.
For a good example of that, see Francis Maude's term in the Cabinet Office in the first half of the 2010s which changed the civil service very much for the better and was responsible for, amongst others, GDS, the Government Security Group, and a lot of open government initiatives.
I'm pretty sure that if we ask the operative layer what should the policies be, they wouldn't even pursue this goal
Let's not pretend this is the only way (some) laws are enforced abroad. A US company wants your country to put you in jail for hacking hardware you legally own? No problem, they lobby this in trade deal negotiations and they get their way.
This is economic coercion instead of the fleet, so people don't get as angry about this as they should.
1) Notice that the odds that a foreign power is going to be able to harm them in any meaningful way for violating their "child 'safety'" laws that curtail freedom of speech and association are very low
2) Notice that 4chan is fighting harder to resist these attacks on free speech and association than many of big names in the sector and reflect on what it might mean when _4chan_ is the hero of the story
Alas.
Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based? Big American tech companies have employees, assets, or at least a business presence of some sort in countries outside the US, which means that they are exposed to legal systems in those other countries.
That is an issue, but it's explicitly not what I was talking about. To pick one example, Discord is -AFAIK- US-based. They decided to knuckle under rather than tell the UK, Australia, and others to fuck right off with their free-speech-and-association-limiting horseshit.
Multinationals have their own problems, but they're -when we measure by number of businesses- a tiny minority of businesses. My commentary was exclusively about US-based companies.
And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be far less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.
https://discord.com/careers
They have a registered office in Schiphol:
https://discord.com/company-information
Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other companies it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
Ah, I stand corrected. Discord has a branch office in the Netherlands. Thanks for the correction.
> Discord could keep all of its employees, infrastructure, and business within the United States, but like other big names it has not. It would rather pursue more business opportunities.
As I said:
Trampling on fundamental rights in order to chase marginally more money is neither admirable nor prosocial behavior.You're agreeing with parent poster that they don't care to fight on principle (in the unlikely chance they hold any principle in the first place). You're just using avoidant terminology that skips the criticism inherent in parent's framing.
I am a US citizen and I approve of US-style free speech protection. If anything, I think that the US still has too much restriction on speech (e.g. DMCA limits on "anti-circumvention" software.)
However, I also approve of democratic government. If people in other countries vote to treat speech differently than the US, I wouldn't want to live under those laws, but I also wouldn't say that they are incorrect. I think that democratic principles mean implementing the will of the majority, even if I think that the majority is foolish. There are some things that I would fight against (not just lament) even if approved by the will of the majority; I can't fully reconcile my conflicting impulses, but I acknowledge them. All of this would have been a long and distracting aside to my original point, which was that most American businesses of note operate under multiple countries' jurisdictions.
4chan is only reasonably immune from this because it's not really operating as a business...
4chan is absolutely operating as a business ("4chan community support LLC") that accepts payments [0], as is Kiwi Farms ("Lolcow LLC") [1]. There is zero doubt in my mind that both companies have users in the EU, UK, and other jurisdictions that have the sorts of awful regulations that we're discussing. I expect that they also receive payments from users in those jurisdictions.
Given that you report that it's trivial to do, I wonder why Ofcom declined to levy its fines by way of commanding UK-based payment processors...
[0] <https://4chan.org/pass>
[1] The link that leads to [2] is labelled "Donate", but a sixty-second search turns up no indication that Lolcow LLC is a registered US charity
[2] <https://kiwifarms.net/account/billpay-support>
You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures. It doesn't say "First they came for the KKK." And, of course, it doesn't say "First they came for the Nazis."
Just as saints and captains of industry deserve no less scrutiny and liability under the law than the rest of us, scoundrels and horrible people deserve no less protection under the law than the rest of us.
If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good, then you still have quite a bit of emotional maturity to develop.
To put the previous paragraph another way: It's entirely consistent to decry an someone as a loathsome scumbag that all upstanding people should shun and refuse to associate with while also remarking that that one time they dove into a freezing river to save a child being swept away was a good and noble thing to do, and behavior that we should all aspire to mirror.
It was cute in 2004.
And they got it. "I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake." But that doesn't mean anyone needs feel sympathy for the devil. We're not obligated to cheer when the wretched hive of scum and villainy keeps its liquor license another year. The law was followed and we can move on.
> If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good
... It is usually the case when we're talking about 4chan (and always when talking about Kiwi Farms) that "unalloyed" is doing a lot of the kind of load-bearing one probably wants an alloy for. 4chan's most positive benefit to society is as a litmus test for precisely how far the [xkcd-1357](https://xkcd.com/1357/) principle goes. They are 100% welcome, per their freedom of the press (and the freedom of speech of their users), to host their website. On their infrastructure. With their own DOS protection. In a country that recognizes those rights and protects them. That's the system working as intended.
No? Saving a child from being swept away in a freezing river is an unalloyed good, no matter how terrible the scoundrel that did it.
Like I mentioned, it looks like you still have quite a lot of emotional maturity to develop.
(You might also benefit from checking out 4chan boards that aren't /b/, /pol/, and /gif/.)
What if it's only as part of kidnapping the child and forcing them into grueling slave labor until the day they die? Is that still perfectly unalloyed?
(Not that I'm saying 4chan is metaphorically doing that here; just for the sake of argument.)
Emotional maturity is important. So is platform maturity. We are long past the point where "reader beware" and "it's just a hobby site" are good enough in an era where under-policed fora result in actual harm. I appreciate 4chan's strong stance on the topic of it not being their job to police their house... But I do often find myself cheering when someone compels them, as a site that receives 22 million unique monthly visitors, to act like they have any host responsibility.
It's hard for me to be deeply supportive, beyond my legal requirements to be so, of a site that hosts /b/, /pol/, /hc/, and /gif/ because it chooses to host them too.
So, yes, the poem does extend to all subcultures because it reaches out to include every voice of opposition to totalitarianism, until no one is left but the speaker.
It's also meant to be understood in the first four lines: The people mentioned — communists, trade unionists, social democrats, and Jews — were meant to be emblematic of people who are seen as enemies or outsiders to the author's cause. These are people whose values are seen to be radically different than our own.
Remember the context: the author of the speech, which was re-rendered as a poem, was a real person, Martin Niemöller, who was a pastor in the Confessing Church, which was an underground church movement organized in resistance to the Nazis.
However his speech, given in January of 1946, was an indictment of the Confessing Church. The movement was initially organized primarily as a form of resistance to governmental interference in religion, rather than to speak out for all people. Niemöller was, in fact, explicit that this was about people who were his "opponents" and his "enemies":
> "... The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?"
Instead, Niemöller points out, in a theologically poignant allusion to the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, that we have a responsibility to our fellow humans to look out for their wellbeing and their interests as our own.
So yes, that poem calls for you to look out for the wellbeing and interests — including freedom from oppression and censorship — for those folks who you might now perceive to be your enemies.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
It should be noted that Niemöller was not the only one to draw on this story as an indictment of the church's inaction. Margarete “Marga” Meusel, a contemporary and correspondent of Niemöller wrote this in 1935 which was antecedent in the body of thought informing the 1946 speech:
> Why does the church do nothing? Why does it allow unspeakable injustice to occur? ... What shall we one day answer to the question, where is thy brother Abel? The only answer that will be left to us, as well as to the Confessing Church, is the answer of Cain. ("Am I my brother's keeper?" Genesis 4:9)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessing_Church#Aftermath
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marga_Meusel
> every voice of opposition to totalitarianism
Unless your definition of "opposition to totalitarianism" is very different from mine, I would hope it is transparent that the examples given in the comment you replied to are not such voices.
This may be one of those "not everyone gets to win everywhere" situations. And if I have to choose protecting 4chan vs. protecting children...
... I can see two positions on the topic which have merit. So it's a good thing there are separate nations to decide on different bars of safety.
I would have no problem with a world where 4chan is free to operate in the US and blocked in the UK. Different countries with different cultures.
Which to be clear, is nothing but a fiction you built yourself in order to insist on your failed arguments, 4chan is a 18+ site and it enforces the rule. It's literally the second rule of the site just below not posting illegal content.
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Every single day And every word you say Every game you play Every night you stay
I'll be watching you
No, in a free society the government doesn't decide, via its monopoly on violence, what it's okay for consenting adults to say or hear. And in a sane society, parents are responsible for policing what their children see and hear, and not the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...
I don't see the need for extra tooling like DPI when the willingness and methodology to outright block sites at a higher level is already in place. Also bear in mind that the groups who have compiled the most widely implemented block lists are also major sponsors of the bill which this 4chan story refers to, so they have largely gotten what they wanted.
The state isn’t totally incompetent but doing it properly would be a serious undertaking, the kind of thing where the recent track record of big government tech projects isn’t great
One example is after the Southport riots, miraculously the justice system became hyperefficient and the perpetrators were found, arrested, charged and jailed within a week.
That suggests a lot of what looks like incompetence (potholes, petty crime, maybe also this) is actually just the state not really caring about a lot of issues.
If they decide they really care about internet censorship, I wouldn't rule out them suddenly becoming a lot more competent in that specific area
If you want to really make sure nobody in the uk can easily access 4chan (PRC style) it needs some effort, and you're in an arms race with attempts to mask/tunnel traffic so it gets through
Just a recap how it happened in Russia:
1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8
2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.
3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).
4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).
5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).
6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.
7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc ).
This is how it works, if you want I can explain to you why it works like this, or you can work it out from first principles. But this is not a proposal.
VPNs are an asterisk and they work not by avoiding this natural unavoidable principle, but by tunneling, the VPN or proxy vendor is putting themselves on the headers, and on the backend they still route the packets to the destination by putting the intended destination on the headers.
If these VPNs don't comply with local regulations and are used to evade national restrictions they can and are often themselves subject to bans. But even if not, it acts as a sort of waiver and compromising element for all illicit activity.
Sometimes it's not necessary to completely outlaw something, it is sufficient to make it so that engaging in the outlawed activity is sufficiently uncomfortable and clear that it is illegal, forcing users to undeniably acknowledge they are avoiding the law. An example of this is trying to watch pirated movies without paying for them, yeah you can do it, but you gotta do some shady shit and dodge a lot of malware, and eat shady gambling ads and etcetera.
In addition to making you feel like an asshole, it removes any recourse you may have, it's very hard to make any claim later, you cannot really complain later if you were accessing it illegally to begin with. Nobody is going to pursue you to the end of the world not to access a pirated movie or an illegal website, but they pursue the distributor and make things very uncomfortable enough so that you are effectively hiding like a fiending outlaw.
The bad thing would be tying that process in with growing internet restrictions.
I don’t think it’s weird to point out the little guys (especially former or current EU) getting strapped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
Now we’re both wrong!
The French are now using submarines (striking distance and speed, blah blah)
and are apparently being looked at as the leader of “forward deterrence” in the region.
https://tvpworld.com/93637117/frances-nuclear-umbrella-which...
Deep inland strikes from miles out while underwater/at sea.
And politicians have repeatedly stated the need for better control of information, connecting it directly to the Ukraine conflict and perceived threats from Russia.
I think there’s a strong case to be made that the push for information control is partly connected to military/defense goals.
But don’t worry! We will check your passport when you open your phone (already live in the UK, efforts supported by the GBP 2M secret donation of Meta to NGOs).
And what’s the worst thing that could happen? No one would for sure arrest you for being critical of a foreign government.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/palestine-action...
Does _not_ need to be foreign.
People in Western Democracies assume we are immune to dictatorships.
Plenty of dictatorships in our modern history were regressions from at least some form of functional democracy, many even regressed from long lasting robust democracies.
So much of the UK, EU comission, Palantir moves is straight up Stasi playbook.
It is almost disrespectful of German History and collective suffering for VDL to stand on the wrong side of history with this corporate puppetering.
You don't say!
> American courts are not necessarily required to enforce foreign penal judgments
Shocking.
What's the rational point of existence of Ofcom? Plain censorship?
They are supposed to regulate domestic broadcasters and communications companies, and frankly have done a terrible job of it to date, like all the other 'independent' regulators set up after the waves of privatisation which sold off our public utilities (huge conflicts of interest involved when ex-regulators frequently move into board positions in the companies they were previously responsible for keeping in line). This new mandate to police the internet is a recent one for Ofcom which has greatly widened the scope of their remit, and as we all know, authoritarians never complain about being given more power.
The problem is America cannot stand alone - everyone needs friends
We got our own problems with Authoritarianism. There is no need to protect our borders from something our own government and corporations are practicing day in and day out on our own people, in our own country. You might want to acknowledge that first, before assuming we got problems across the pond.
And BTW the real answer is to enforce antitrust and put an end to Citizens United to prevent money from flowing into our political institutions and reign in these corrupt business. You might want to add that as well to your point about the GRANITE Act
From a UK point of view, what stands out currently is the cowed state of the US media. There is very little sense of a free press effectively holding the administration of the day to account. Extraordinary levels of corruption and incompetence are remarked on merely in passing.
Number of US media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with Donald Trump in recent years: 4 (totalling about $67 million).
Number of UK media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with a UK Prime Minister in recent years: 0†
† The last instances appear to have been Tony Blair in 2007 (who settled with the Daily Mail over photos of his family taken during a private holiday), and John Major in 1993 (who successfully sued the New Statesman over allegations that he'd had an affair).
Though I guess we've already seen something similar in 2024 with France and Telegram...
Though I guess we've already seen something similar in France with Telegram...
The world wide web remains undefeated.
Any examples?
What Ofcom wants next is to make VPNs illegal.
I think OFCOM themselves recognize the problem with trying to ban VPNs, but extremely dim MPs and extremely angry newspapers (who are the underlying enemies of free speech here) don't.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vf2citudDA
https://www.blocked.org.uk/site/http://www.4chan.org suggests the latter to me, but the checks aren't very recent
Beyond that, it is just madness to try to control the US company or fine it. Going beyond this duty shows that not all biscuits are present at the afternoon tea.
It's not like Facebook, or anyone's personal life or business, depends on 4chan.
I think the Spain-Cloudflare case does IP level blocks and it has a lot of side effect damage, but if I recall they do IP-block level blocking because the vendor, cloudflare, provides header/envelope encryption and pooling, so the Spanish courts considers it legal to block the whole service even, alleging that they are not collaborating with court orders, they just choose not to block the whole provider to reduce the collateral damage, even if they consider they have jurisdiction to block all of CF
Good grief. This is sad stuff.
Separately, are they all good? Testosterone has a lot of negative side effects, and I know I certainly wouldn't mind having about half as much. Jawlines and fiber have similar issues when focused on in the wrong way. Eating healthy, feeling good, and looking good are mostly orthogonal to those trendy behaviors. If they work for you then great, but there are other options too, and I don't think she's saying that you shouldn't want to eat healthy, feel good, and look good. Indeed, she explicitly says that fibermaxxing is bad because it replaces a healthy diet. She agrees with at least some of your goals and really only (potentially) disagrees with the implementation.
This is the most disingenuous argument I've seen in a while.
That sentence does not describe a shift to eating healthy. Some of looksmaxxing is reasonable, but a lot is unsafe or being upset about things you can't really change. And nothing in there was "feel good", do you think having abnormally high levels of testosterone is "feel good"?
No, China is smart enough not expect foreign courts to carry out the work of the Chinese censorship regime.
Ofcom knows its rulings don't apply internationally.
So yes, the status quo is enforced by the US courts, as if it was ever in doubt and nothing at all has changed.
Of course ofcom knows its power is limited, that shouldn't stop it attempting to do it's job, however much that job might irk foreign operators publishing to ofcoms jurisdiction.
The fact is the US has different standards to the UK. It doesn't mean one is right and one is wrong but it does mean that those differences will cause cultural and legal friction that responsible operators will attempt to diminish within reason, while others will attempt to capitalize for publicity.
https://eylenburg.github.io/countries.htm