If 4chan continues to ignore Ofcom, the forum could be blocked in the UK. And 4chan could face even bigger fines totaling about $23 million or 10 percent of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, whichever is higher. 4chan also faces potential arrest and/or “imprisonment for a term of up to two years,” the lawsuit said.
4chan’s actual legal response to this can be summarized as “We are incorporated in Delaware which has not been subject to UK law since 1783. See the Treaty of Paris”.
British government fines an American company, based in America, for serving data from American servers that was compliant with American law.
This whole law is complete overreach. It’s like banning a book and then getting mad at the author when one of your citizens buys one on holiday and brings it back with them
If you’re ok with this then imagine your local lemmy instance getting fined by China/Qatar/Thailand/etc for posting something breaking their laws.
If they operate in China then it seems legit. If they don’t operate in China it’s a non issue.
This might be stupid, but the corollary of your statement is that a sovereign nation can’t impose laws on foreign business…
That what you want?
Unironically yes. Otherwise the internet as we know it is very much over, and what we have instead is a mesh of country-nets.
I mean, what is actually “doing business” when it comes a simple web page or a forum for example? Merely existing and being reachable.
Otherwise the internet as we know it is very much over, and what we have instead is a mesh of country-nets.
which, TBH, doesn’t seem so bad to me. as an european, i’m personally sick of all the sick (as in, unwell) culture from america swapping over via the internet and poisoning people’s minds.
i mean, all the culture war is literally instigated by american capitalists to disrupt society and to disrupt the people’s coherence, to make them weaker and therefore easier to exploit.
If it wasn’t for continuous exposure to american influence, europe would long have drastic left-wing political reforms, i guess.
4chan is likely using this to take it to the courts.
This censorship shit is out of control.
The UK should just block sites that don’t comply. They have no business trying to fine US websites.
People should fight for their rights and free speech and make pressure on the gouvernement. Blocking is isolationism.
This is a case of stupid laws that still don’t understand the internet (35+ years in to wide use, mofos)
If an http GET request initiated from country A traverses routers and wires around the globe to grab some data from a server in country B, then we have to accept that the owners of the server are not “operating in country A” and in fact the user in country A is responsible for import.
If some laws in country A have a problem with this, then they should unplug their internet wires at the border, or at least learn how to use them and/or govern their citizens.
All that is tongue in cheek to say they can fuck right off.
Yeah it’s a stupid law and they were told it wouldn’t work by industry experts. But the politicians that were in power when all this was first been decided were Conservatives and therefore arrogant and of the opinion that if they don’t like something, it’s realities responsibility to reconfigure itself.
Then Labour got in and for some reason implemented the stupid law anyway despite having heard none of the consultations, and of course now it turns out that the consultations told them not to do it. Now I’m sure the industry experts would have been ignored anyway but Labour look really daft now.
They have basically accepted that this law is unworkable and is basically going to be ignored by everyone, but they still have to go through all of the pantomime of trying to enforce it. I’m sure eventually they’ll quietly kill it because the whole thing has been such an embarrassment for them.
