It was obvious from the minute that idiots started creating IP location databases in the first place that people would demand that they be used like that... and those demands seem to be winning out.
What was known and not said when Parliament might have outlawed smoking in Paris is that there was literally nothing they could do to enforce such a law. Today the governments have options, hence the fight here. And many other places.
Basically all countries take that position legally. But there are norms and customs about how often you exercise it (as well as practical questions of power).
Extraterritorial regulation of Web sites is unfortunately in the process of being established as normal, but it's a bad norm. Not as bad as drone striking anybody who lights a cigarette in Paris (which could be made legal), but a bad norm nonetheless.
PS The UK doesn't have free speech and never has. Free Speech was invented by the Dutch and the US was the first to put it in a founding document.
PPS I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. That is outside the definition of sovereignty and something the UK government seems to have invented lately.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the entire founding political mythology of the United States is pretty much "The Parliament of the UK tried to regulate our freedom of speech without even giving us a vote, and that was intolerable." Specifically, the Stamp Act was seen as suppressing the right of the American colonies to engage in political speech. (This wasn't the only reason for the Revolutionary War, but it's one of the ones we still remember. We remember it in part because laws regulating the publishers of political pamphlets get complained about in political pamphlets.)
This isn't a political issue in the normal sense. It's more like Guy Fawkes and the "gunpowder treason and plot." The one thing that the "Tea Party" and the "No Kings" protestors can probably still agree about is that the Stamp Act was bad, because this issue is part of the fundamental political mythology of the country. "The British Parliament does not get to regulate our speech" is right up there with "The President does not get to wear a crown."
This is not a fight that the UK government can actually win, not in the long run. Any US politician who allows Parliament to regulate the speech of a US citizen will find themselves in the awkward position of British politician who proposed a national monument to Guy Fawkes. Allowing this is "Un-American" in these sense that it goes almost directly against our founding patriotic mythology and symbolism.
The UK should just accept the geo-IP block of the UK as a compromise, and walk away. This particular fight isn't worth it. Trust me on this.
We need to re-imagine the Parisian as an individual with exceptionally long arms lighting the tip of their cigarette in London...
I'm not entirely sure if you yourself understand the context or real meaning of that phrase, but for others at least, it was NOT meant to highlight that Parliament has a burning desire or real ability to legislate outside of its jurisdiction!
Just that it has the legal authority to create any such law, and that the legitimacy of a law is not dependent on its moral content. It's merely a paraphrasing/summary of H.L.A. Hart's legal positivism.
More democratically-elected legislatures ought to say, “We don't give a shit about what our predecessors agreed to.” when it comes to treaties requiring restrictions on their own citizens.
I don't think that's true at all. You be taking payment by credit card, which doesn't require you to have any local presence.
I think your bigger risk is that you get a judgement made against you by a UK court, which a court that has jurisdiction over you is willing to enforce. I'm not sure under what circumstances that is the case, but I believe that it being the case with libel judgements has been an issue for a while (since plaintiffs can 'forum shop').
I broadcast radio from my country, according to the rules of my country. If you tune in, and your country doesn't like it, they can enforce on you or broadcast something else on the same frequency if that's allowed by their rules.
This is quite obviously incorrect. I am a UK citizen, but live in the US. No company needs a UK presence to collect money from me.
You only have to have presence in the UK if you do some larger-scale commercial activity there (like X/Twitter), but of course you can easily sell goods and services to UK citizens without all that. But sites like 4cahn and SaSu don't even sell anything at all.
Please downvote the parent comment into oblivion.
Will the US embassy get involved? Of course. Will they get you released? Maybe, but it's not guaranteed. And you are in for a bad time regardless.
Source: https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/
1. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not.
2. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or processor not established in the Union, where the processing activities are related to:
(a) the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union; or
(b) the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union.
3. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data by a controller not established in the Union, but in a place where Member State law applies by virtue of public international law.
I read the article and I remain confused.
I've just come to this story after seeing it on HN so I might have misunderstandings from being unaware of the background. Also, I neither reside in the US nor UK so I'd have not seen local media reports.
In short, I gather UK's Ofcom is threatening a US web site for online content that is lawful within the US's jurisdiction and unlawful in the UK as it contravenes the UK's Online Safety Act.
I am bewildered that Preston Byrne has even bothered to acknowledge Ofcom's correspondence let alone respond to it as the UK (Ofcom) has no jurisdiction over actions of any entity or person within the continental US—or for that matter the actions of those outside its borders unless, say, covered by treaty, etc.
That Preston Byrne responded to Ofcom seems strange given the fact that he is not only a lawyer but also head of legal and compliance at Arkham law firm, thus he ought to be aware that is client is shielded from UK law by virtue that the UK has no jurisdiction on US territory.
If I'd been Byrne I'd not have even acknowledged Ofcom's correspondence with a 'fuck off/cease and desist' reply but filed it in the trash can. (If there's some mitigating matter I've missed here let me know.)
It's clear to me the the UK's Online Safety Act stops at its borders so the UK has full responsibility for blocking websites that are physically outside its jurisdiction, similarly blocking or stopping its citizens from accessing accessing them.
It seems to me many of the younger internet fraternity are unaware that there's longstanding precedent for how such matters are handled. Back in the days of the Cold War before the internet some countries used to broadcast propaganda on HF/shortwave radio bands to those that were their political enemies and recipient countries would attempt to jam the broadcasts so their citizens would not be able to listen to them. For example, Communist USSR, China etc. would jam the BBC or the US's VOA (Voice of America).
Simply, if a country did not want its citizens to listen to the broadcasts of another country it was its responsibility to jam the incoming signals. It seems to me all that has actually changed since then is that nowady the unwanted broadcasts come via internet circuits.
Frankly, Ofcom has an unmitigated hide to threaten people who are acting lawfully within the US. That said, it's not unexpected, in recent decades the UK's been acting like a petulant bully, it seems to have forgotten that without it's empire it can no longer enforce its bullyboy tactics.
BTW, the matter of what content is or is not acceptable online is completely separate issue from Ofcom's behavior. Personally, from what I've gathered I'd find content on the SaSu website unacceptable and I can understand why many in the UK want it blocked but bypassing another country's sovereign authority is not the correct way to go about it.
I think it's important to fight these sort of things even in cases where they can't actually enforce it. For one thing, say one of the site operators in question have a need or desire to visit the UK at some point in the future, but can't, because there's some sort of legal judgment against them because of this. That would be a shitty situation.
On top of that, ignoring these sorts of things also ignores possible efforts by the UK to convince other governments (like the US) to adopt similar laws, or at least agree to some level of extra-territorial enforcement. Fighting these cases sends a signal to everyone involved. You mention the UK acting like a petulant bully: yes, sometimes a good way to counteract a bully is to ignore them, but other times it's good to fight back, even when the current bullying wouldn't be effective... because future kinds of bullying might be.
Preston is not a legitimate lawyer and has never actually represented anyone. He only larps as an expert and spends an inordinate amount of time constantly trying to tell other lawyers how wrong they are, using his black-and-white god complex attitude.
Not defending UK's idiotic laws, but this doesn't hold. If you cannot regulate websites outside of the country of origin, then no internet regulation can hold for any subject. Openly selling stolen personal credentials or botnet usage? Piracy? Reselling personal information without disclosure?
So there are effectively three options for internet regulation;
- Require websites to operate region by region with IP blocks for any non-target market. This is much of EU law is applied. If you put an effort to not serve EU costumers, you can skip following EU rules. "comply or leave"
- Any country can regulate any website regardless of origin, like the UK seems to push for. This is an insane proposal and could easily create geopolitical disputes. Great firewall and banning VPNs would be the only proper way to achieve what they seem to aim for.... which i wouldn't put past them by now.
- Give up regulating the internet entirely. Some level of regulation is valuable so I don't think this will ever work. There are simply some things illegal and deplorable enough to require laws.
No Internet regulation can hold extraterritorially. You leave out the obvious and most important case: the country where the Web site or whatever is located enforcing its own laws. Which is actually how all law has mostly worked from day one.
> Openly selling stolen personal credentials or botnet usage? Piracy? Reselling personal information without disclosure?
If you find a jurisdiction where those are all legal, then I guess you just have to block your citizens from reaching it, or punish them if they do. Not particularly tricky.
It can, but instead of forcing other people to follow your laws, you have to block your country's residents from accessing the sites that break your laws.
I'm not saying I love this method either (China is famously very good at it, and I don't think their methods foster a healthy society), but I believe it should be the only lever you have. Forcing people outside your jurisdiction to follow your laws is a violation of another country's sovereignty.
As an aside, should I take pains to ensure any website I operate follows the laws of North Korea? Iran? China? Russia? Should we be complacent and accepting if HN were to be targeted by any of those governments because people here have undoubtedly said unflattering things about the leaders of those countries?
Of course not. But even though we're talking about a "friend"-type country here, it's not any different.
It would need to be set up by an extremely powerful country, either the US or an alliance of smaller countries through international treaty.
It would work as follows:
There'd be a "naughty list." Anybody on the list would be arrested upon entering a participating country. This would include past or current company employees (if employed after the listing date). Companies from participating countries would be prohibited from interacting with listed organizations in any way, under treat of sanctions. This would include VPN, cloud and hosting companies, ISPs, domain registrars, email hosts, payment processors and ad networks. This would provide basic site blocking.
Foreign companies wouldn't be subject to the sanctions, but participating countries would also put them on the list.
Good
You’re not going to extradite US site operators, period. Find another approach.
But it's the edges that get you.
I moved home a few years back, connected a new service with the same ISP.
They have an IP pool that is labelled as for one state (Victoria, Australia) but is also used for their services in Tasmania.
So now I have to fight every major website (Google, Amazon, Maxmind, etc) that does GeoIP lookups that I'm not in Victoria, I'm 500-800KM away.
Google was very confused for about 12 months because when I moved I also brought my wifi gear and so it would give me a precise location of my old address because it used wifi geolocation.
Comedically far.
Also, Britain isn't important enough to make this stick against e.g. an American.
If someone writes me a letter asking a question about material that is prohibited in his own country, that is not my problem. It is his responsibility to comply with local law and that of local government to seize material that is illegal there. They cannot deputize me to act, unpaid and without consent, on their behalf.
If the government of their country believes that accessing my website is a problem for their residents, then the onus is on them to sort it out on their own, without my involvement. They are perfectly capable of ordering ISPs that operate inside their borders to block my website from their customers.
The fact that Ofcom hasn't just done something like this in the case of SaSu, 4chan, etc., shows that they are not actually interested in "online safety"; they're making political statements and are trying to throw their weight around like the bullies they clearly are.
"Innocent"? That's a strange word to choose. Who cares what's "innocent"?
> It’s a choice, and has been the default for a long time, but it means one has chosen to speak outside the borders of their own country and that comes with rules, like them or not.
... or it means one has chosen to speak inside the borders of their country, and people outside those borders have chosen to import that speech. Web sites don't lob speech at you willy-nilly.
The bottom line is that that standard is impractical to implement, illiberal in its effects, and just generally a bad idea. For that matter, it's also at odds with most of the ways the world treats trade in physical goods.
I support the cause, but I don't think that's true. RIPE, the RIR responsible for UK, makes available a list of allocations per country. For UK:
https://stat.ripe.net/data/country-resource-list/data.json?resource=gb
Edit: RIPE actually has documentation on this fallacy specifically https://docs.db.ripe.net/RPSL-Object-Types/Descriptions-of-P...
> “country:” – Officially Assigned two-letter ISO 3166 country code or "EU" (exceptionally reserved). It has never been specified what this country represents. It could be the location of the head office of a multi-national company, where the server centre is based, or the home of the End User. Therefore, it cannot be used in any reliable way to map IP addresses to countries.
No edge cases, it is a matter of law.
Let's, for analytical clarity, set aside the UK and examine Germany as an isolated datapoint.
AWS, for instance, possesses and operates the entirety of the 3.0.0.0/9 address space – a range distributed across numerous jurisdictions and continents. Notably, significant CIDR allocations from 3.0.0.0/9 reside within German territory, yet remain absent from the RIPE registry. Such inadvertent obfuscation undermines efforts at precise geolocation.
One may, through inference and correlation – specifically via https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json – arrive at a reasonably accurate estimation of the German CIDR's by aggregating address ranges tied to a designate AWS region they are associated with. Such inference is only feasible due to the vendor’s decision to publish such data. I would reasonably conjecture that other cloud providers engage in a comparable practice.
Thus, whilst it is not altogether impossible to ascertain the geolocation of a given IP address, the exercise remains contingent upon the discretionary transparency of global infrastructure operators and multiple indirect information sources – a rather fragile foundation upon which to build certainty.
This is likely why someone living in the UK was able to access one of the sites in question despite the geoIP-based ban.
WITH A RAP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ql6tGu9aWg
It's been exceedingly obvious but it's nice to know that Ofcom never thought that anyone would bother to fight back. This is clearly not about public safety but about controlling American corporations.
Parliamentary forces seem to be directly suborning this corruption.
To me, this looks like the culmination of many years of ad hoc censorship breeding cadre of favored censors. They've all grown into a system of expectations where they can just finger frustrating bits of counter-narrative and have it disappeared.
The Powers That Be don't care to hear pesky details about jurisdiction. As such, there is no one around with the temerity to point out the inherent absurdities. So they pursue "offenders" despite the obvious futility, because not doing so means explaining difficult things to people that will not listen.
As I recently wrote[1], there is no metaphysical certitude that Ofcom and its intentions will be forever futile: all that is necessary is for the political vectors to align optimally (as they inevitably will,) and the LEOs of the US would be happy to oblige.
Not exactly. On the surface, it's about kowtowing to pearl-clutching UK NGOs that are empowered by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch's hysterical tabloids; and underneath, the real agenda is about restricting the influence of unsanctioned sites that could influence UK discourse - influence that established UK press barons (like the Murdochs, Lebedev, etc) want to keep very much to themselves.
The OSA is mostly supported by people who read The Guardian or The Times and watch the BBC. It was originally the work of academics (not big tabloid readers usually) like Lorna Woods, who is supposedly a professor of "internet law", a guy who is the founder of Ofcom, and Baroness Beeban Kidron. If you search Google News for their names you will find lots of left leaning broadsheets and not tabloids.
https://news.google.com/search?q=Beeban%20Kidron&hl=en-GB&gl...
The first five news sites for that search are: Financial Times, The Guardian, BBC, The Times, The Guardian again. Zero tabloids.
Is 4chan attempting to unfairly or unduly influence UK "discourse?" Or are they just _contributing_ to it as members of the public on an anonymous forum?
> Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch's hysterical tabloids
Which actually are an attempt to influence UK discourse. The framing errors are interesting.
I could see that last century. But do they even care about influence anymore? Isn't the money all they care about now?
There was never any chance that this would fly outside the country, least of all in the USA. Whoever gave Ofcom the extraterritorial power it has to pursue these goals clearly intended to ensure its failure, and for this I am grateful.
With enormous damage to global society, I might add
The UK (nor the US) has no advantage in providing services, all it can do is demand that other people be prevented from providing them.
English became the language of international trade, of course, because we’re all just so adorably stupid, and our countries are tiny and harmless. Plus it is such an easy language to pick up…
Given that, shouldn't you be able to answer the question?
Capitalists need more growth and more returns now and since innovating, producing goods, and providing customer service costs money, we simply charge people a monthly fee to use their heated car seats.
This is what the brutal, messy end of capitalism looks like. Relentless self-cannibalization, burning billions of dollars tomorrow to make one cent today.
If nothing makes sense, that's because it doesn't. There is no logic or reason or planning involved. It's more money now, period. Consequences don't matter because we get more money right this second.
Capitalists are apparently unaware of what happens when they've extracted all possible money from the economy.
Pretty much avoid entering Britain or its dependencies or you'll be nabbed on a Commonwealth Warrant and extradited to England.
Now, granted, the US is a freer country than the UK is so that doesn't usually matter all that much, but all the US would need to do to nullify its 1A would be to simply permit the UK to enforce its claims of extraterritoriality in US-friendly airspace.
What speech they might be permitted to prosecute would naturally change based on administration.
a us person could travel to a country x and that x could send this us person to a UK prison? I don't know if doing so would be legal but when the rubber hits the road, each country x is technically sovereign and does not have to honor the first amendment of the US constitution.
So even if it might be frowned upon to extradite foreign (US) nationals in country X (such as Canada or India) to the UK, they could do it anyway to send a message?
Traveling is no joke. Americans often act like the world is their playground, but you are subject to the laws of the jurisdiction you're standing in. Traveller beware.
When it's a matter of drug charges or other obviously criminal activity, the US embassy and diplomats don't normally raise a fuss, but for something like this where the person made first amendment protected speech in the US? That'd definitely raise all kinds of hell.
Are they? Is all speech protected? If so, how do you prosecute people who leak secrets?
Yes
> Is all speech protected?
No
> how do you prosecute people who leak secrets?
See above
altogether, if you dont care about following this UK law, whats the need to carr what the UK government does? just dont go there or do business with people who care about the UK government. same as US sanctions and secondary sanctions. the UK at least is a small market
And more to the point, many US states passing or attempting to pass laws which aren't all that different to the UKs OSA. Mississippi's version is in some ways even more onerous to enforce as it requires social networks to age-check all of their users, not just those who want to access adult or "harmful" content. Bluesky notably went along with the OSA but considered Mississippi's demands to be over the line and geoblocked them instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
What's the point exactly? That some US states also did something similar re porn so therefore it's a nothingburger and we shouldn't care about this lawyers campaign to protect the internet from censorship?
A some point, if you do not have any relationship with the UK, go as far as blocking its residents but they still want you to abide by their law, aren't they just declaring war on the entire world?
This is something very deranged that have become very common with the world "becoming smaller": somes will go on a rampage for something happening on the other side of the planet. At the same time they will pretend not to notice that their own house in on fire.
Ofcom appears to agree that geoblocking UK residents would satisfy the requirements of this law. They also however appear to believe the OPs clients are simply lying about actually geoblocking UK residents - and Ofcom appear's to be the quasi-judicial entity which decides (at least as a first step).
I can't imagine OP's response to Ofcom that "we aren't doing that, but we won't explain what we were doing when we created the domain you think we created to do that" was particularly convincing.
> aren't they just declaring war on the entire world?
No, that would only happen if they started attempting to enforce the law by going into "the entire world" by force. Just declaring that some foreign entity broke your laws and owes you money and maybe that you'll arrest them if they come to your country isn't an act of war. Acts of war look like drone striking alleged drug smugglers in some other countries territorial waters without that other countries permission.
They don't seem to claim that. They claim the block is imperfect, and they demand perfection.
Since perfection is in fact impossible, that means there's no reasonable, actually available action you can take to keep them from fining you, or at least trying to.
In a nutshell, I'm moderately confident that this will suffice to keep Ofcom away.
A handful of my friends work in the adult industry. This policy is an absolute failure and it's punishing websites that actually tried to be better.
Russian (etc) businesses are spinning up porn sites that have no age verification, but equally do not care about the content or any kind of laws. No worries if the UK blocks them, it's easy to spin it up with a new domain. People will find it (and Google will surface it) because people want free porn. It's whack a mole, you can't win, and the content isn't policed.
I'd love to say how this passed is beyond me, but talking to anyone with no tech literacy it makes sense to them. In practice it's just driving people to places they should be. Or VPNs.
By testing from.. a single VPN IP?
And as noted in other comments here he doesn't seem to understand how geo ip databases are maintained. I sure won't be asking this guy to represent me anytime soon.
>What appears to have happened is that SaSu had a site mirror and that someone figured out a way to hit the mirror – which was also subject to the geoblock, something which took me under a minute to personally confirm – without using a VPN.
> If I had to guess, it’s that some NGO found some UK-based IP addresses which weren’t captured by the block because they weren’t properly geolocated.
Ofcom's clarified contention is that the geoblock is unreliable, while the lawyer seems to be rebutting the original statements that they interpreted Ofcom as claiming no geoblocking was active ('remains accessible to UK users', 'was directly available to people with UK IP addresses (with and without a VPN)').
Lawyer: "I've confirmed that at least one UK IP address is blocked."
Regulators: "We've confirmed that at least one UK IP address is not blocked."
In what world is the correct response "Dear regulators, you're incompetent. Pound sand." instead of "Can you share the IP address you used so my client can address this in their geoblock?"
Any world in which US citizens in the US aren’t subject to UK laws in any case.
That would imply that the client actually would like to be contacted every time Ofcom found a leak in the geoblock. Not a good idea imho.
The UK should pound sand.
If this is your view, do not travel or do business in other countries. It's simple.
Who/what would defend a website in one place from stupidity in another place, were it not an enforced border between these places?
Or do you imply that the stupidity would not arise anywhere, if there were no borders?
This.
It's weird how it's not considered a basic human right to be able travel to where you want, and even live where you want as long as you can support yourself and comply with the local laws and customs.
And that's how it was for like 99% of the time that humans have existed.
When did keeping people locked inside "borders" even become a thing? I'm guessing post World War 1? Looking up history on Wikipedia says documents for "citizenship" existed maybe as far back as Ancient Egypt but there doesn't seem to be anything that forced people to remain within the nation of their birth.
The West literally bombed Japan and China to open their borders for "tRaDe" then pushed for strict borders after the world's worst wars that they started.
The "as long as you can" is exactly the reason. There is no way to ensure the travelers or migrants can (and want) to do that, if you don't have a border.
Eh, that literally is doing a lot of work. Where's evidence to this claim? And at what point did we bomb… checks notes, China?
Also keep in mind that “for like 99% of the time” people didn't move that much. People were very linked to their source of food, community, and what brought them stability. There isn't a lot of examples of 17-century travel influencers going around the world looking for The Best Places For Foodies.
Countries have tough challenges to contend with. Borders are arbitrary, yes, but we can't hand-wave them away now. What we can do is work together at the supra-national level.
based.
as someone from a country that had reached the bottom of many slippery slopes in less than ten years, it's very disheartening to see the West following us.
That has been happening for decades at this point. That doesn't make today's violations ok, but neither are they something new. The people of the USA gave up on freedom after 9/11.
Ofcom expects _you_ the foreign entity to implement geoblocking perfectly. And if not, they will try to fine you first before they even consider implementing blocking on their end.
That's the core issue here.
This has nothing to do with foreign entities circumventing UK based blocking and getting Ofcom letters for it.
It’s one thing to be talking about suicide or assisted suicide because you’ve decided it’s right for you and your situation.
It’s another to be dealing with depression from trauma, unable to get help and have no support system, and then be coerced by individuals on forums with ulterior motives.
I’m not saying I am in support of the UKs attempts, but it’s also not helpful to paint everything black and white on either side. Real solutions require dealing with the grays and the details.
edit: And for reference I have spoken to people in the later situations who have found all too many toxic individuals online who will say things like “you should definitely just kill yourself” in the midst of such situations, who after therapy consider those people to have been committing even more trauma (most likely because they get off on the control of another persons life, playing out murder fantasies etc, and who use the internets anonymity to further traumatize people at their most vulnerable)
What they cannot be allowed to do is tell organizations in other jurisdictions that they now suddenly fall under UK jurisdiction.
There are 195 countries in the world. If all of them followed a policy like UK's Ofcom, the internet would be gone in no time and world-wide user-to-user communication would become impossible for legal reasons. It's obviously not a sane position.
And that's what the site is for. They could improve by blocking all countries where there's free access to assisted suicide though.
> It’s another to be dealing with depression from trauma, unable to get help and have no support system, and then be coerced by individuals on forums with ulterior motives.
You've answered your own question. "And then" - exactly, THEN, not before. If they could get help, they would. But they can't so they end up there. If your alternative is that they should just suffer for years instead then I strongly disagree with this stance.
I remember one guy on a Polish forum announcing his plans which were stopped because someone called the police.. I kept checking his profile since then and it's clear that he continued to suffer and does to this day.. whoever thought that they "saved" him instead subjected him to literally years of suffering.
Maybe you consider it "Gubbbermenntt overreach" but I kind of consider suicide prevention as a reasonable function of state.
However, some random clicks on sasu found people who had been forum members for over a decade. Possibly not entirely mentally healthy - to be fair - but evidently still very much alive.
If the primary effect of participation was to increase the rate of suicide among its users, the forum would act as a sieve. While it might attract new members, the retention of long-term members (as observed) would be statistically improbable. The fact that a stable, long-term user base exists is evidence that for many, the forum serves a different function—likely as an outlet to manage and process ideation, not just to escalate it.
The state banning this outlet could, perversely, remove a coping mechanism and inadvertently have the opposite of the intended effect.
Separate from the free speech debate, the international law part of this seems pretty cut and dry. Here's the bolded parts:
So, it appears, as with 4chan, Ofcom has elected to proceed with a mock execution... Ofcom is trying to set the precedent that... you have to follow its rules – even if you’re American and you’re engaged in constitutionally protected speech and conduct. To that end, Ofcom has renewed its previous threats of fines, arrest, and imprisonment, against SaSu and its operators – all Americans.
More pointedly: what is this lawyer actually "representing" these "clients" for? I don't see any mention of any US legal action, and presumably you need to be british to represent people in UK court. Isn't this just activism, not representation?
I put up my cat picture website but because the UK is a tiny and barely known country, I don't realise that this cat website would be breaching laws there.
My website gets popular and I receive a strongly worded legal letter from an entity in the UK claiming that they want to take me to court and fine me for providing this website to their citizens.
I am like: WTF? Just fucking block it from your perspective if you don't want your citizens to see it? And I seek legal advice from my lawyer who says: Well, they have no jurisdiction here, so you can ignore this letter, but if you want to minimise hassle, you could just geoblock the UK and hopefully they'll stop coming to you.
So I implement basic geoblocking, which works 99.99% of the time (at least when it comes to figuring out which country an IP is in).
The UK entity acknowledges this in a letter and tells me that this is a sufficient solution for now, but they'll keep watching me.
I go about my business, for some reason or another I make a mirror, which I also implement the geoblocking on, now proactively, because I don't want any more annoying letters from the UK.
Some time later, the UK entity sends another letter claiming they're continuing the proceedings because someone in the UK told them that they could still access my cat website and provided evidence. Within 10 minutes myself and my lawyer both use VPNs to verify the geoblock is still working, and we're confused.
We ask the UK entity WTF, and they say: We have evidence, the fact that it's clearly still working from _our_ perspective is irrelevant, I bet you just geoblocked our IP address.
What do you do in this case?
Jurisdiction? Don't you first have to commit the crime in the jurisdiction in question?
The two may negotiate over that, in which case common sense ideas like "they didn't do it in your territory" may make one side look foolish, which may in fact have a real influence over the outcome of the negotiations.
If they can't come to an agreement, then it may become a matter of whether the "offender" happens to travel somewhere where they can be grabbed. In the end, jurisdiction is about who has the power to enforce their laws. There's no universally-agreed-upon uber-legal system to make it otherwise.
I really do think there should be a simple Cloudflare like services that ban all UK user as a form of protest. I say Cloudflare like and not Cloudflare because I am not sure if they are willing to risk supporting this feature.
I think that essentially this is probably the best way to do it, IF we must go down this route (and I think in some cases we probably have to).
Thank you
You're perfectly free to run these websites from the US. We just exercise our right to block these at our UK shores.
Where's the problem?
He can’t seem to decide if Ofcom’s position is that the geo blocking was disabled or that it’s not sufficient. He seems to flip flop between the two positions throughout the post.
This is really strange because he cites Ofcom’s statement! How can he not know what they’re investigating after he’s been told!
In addition, he seems under the impression that Samaritans (a suicide prevention charity) are either a part of Ofcom or if they’re a pro censorship pressure group.
Lesser issues are that he doesn’t understand the government operates out of Whitehall, not Westminster (which is Parliament) and that Parliament can put pressure on government organisations but ultimately it’s independent so Parliament and the government can only ask Ofcom to investigate (outside of passing legislation).
In addition, such an inference flies in the face of the fact that Ofcom have sent staff to conferences for pornographic websites to talk to them about compliance: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/sep/21/were-here-to...
I do not give a single solitary fuck what any Briton thinks of any American exercising their constitutional rights
If the American is lawfully exercising their rights, and the Briton has a reason to censor them, the American is right and the Briton is wrong
No exceptions
This probably sounds "cool" and correct to his supporters but this gung-ho black-and-white approach is hiding an important nuance:
The framing above (UK undermining US law) can immediately be reversed. The UK has laws (that we may disagree with) that are being undermined by US actors.
That's the nature of the internet, and the reason this is a complicated issue to resolve, not helped by showboating lawyers.
Well colour me surprised by that opinion
That's typical. What's their real target then, anti-Israel content like in the US TikTok forced-sale?
It's all total madness, and it's not just the UK there are even more crazy regulations coming from the EU. China, and others in Asia are well known for regulating too. A mess.
The First Amendment was created to protect against foreign governments impeding on your speech?
I feel like that's really missing the point of what this amendment is about, at a time when the First Amendment is at greatest threat from the current US government.
That means we defend every site, however small or controversial it may be, from foreign attempts to infringe on their constitutional rights. It means not giving up so much as an inch of ground without a major fight, if those are the instructions. It means we must not ever lose.
--
That is a powerful pro-bono defense message by the US person doing it.
Just like the Trump says climate crisis is a hoax and wins elections, can't somebody in the UK say Online Safety Act is nonsense and win election and repeal it?
>The UK regulator has now publicly confirmed that the “mirror” site for my client’s site is not accessible in the UK.
The writer then proceeds to describe the way in which the spinning up of a mirror lead to the site becoming available for people in the UK. And the author protests that:
>The reasons why SaSu had a mirror are SaSu’s alone/none of Ofcom’s fucking business; [...]
The way it is written makes for a string suspicion that SaSu thought they could obviate OSA with a cheeky mirror (standard fare for torrent sites - who also wish to bypass censorship - I gather) and got caught. I can't see why else the author would be so vociferous, nor how the mirror wouldn't block the very same UK addresses as the main-site except by design.
Suicide is illegal here (there is movement on this, thankfully). Helping people do illegal things, also illegal. Facilitating such help, also illegal. There seems no need to stoop to imagining some weird conspiracy or blaming a cabal of shadowy figures.
I guess you could think of it like we treat helping people kill themselves like USA treats UK people facilitating copyright infringement.
Even if you hate how this guy writes, which I can agree is questionably professional at times. There's no real way to read this other than that Ofcom, instead of simply complaining that an IP wasn't geoblocked correctly, took the first opportunity they could find to restart their extraterritorial attack on SaSu. All that to avoid the presumably incredibly bad optics of implementing a GFW. Although honestly I would be the least surprised if the UK implemented a GFW soon.
What's all the business about the mirror and the 'the mirror is none of your business' prose - which sounds very much like 'do not look behind the curtain'.
It really sounds a lot like the reason the gov 'went after' SaSu was they brought up a mirror that didn't block the UK access in the manner of the principle site. But I can't see how that's verifiable for us.
This (attempted circumvention of the block with a mirror; like pirate sites do) seems more likely to me than it being a vendetta; perhaps you have more info that would suggest otherwise?
If the UK wants to go full totalitarian it’s alright, they can even consider me a criminal or ban me from entering the country.
I usually avoid traveling to countries doing non sense or that would arrest me for ideological reasons.
The UK would be no different.
But as far as I know, where I live, I am not under UK’s jurisdiction.
They should just hand it back to the king, the democracy experiment has failed there.
Take this case: the law was enacted two years ago by a different government, the regulator follows the law as enacted, and yet no one cares about this little nuance.
In reality, it's a decent technocratic government trying to reverse a decade of mismanagement and fighting about five hundred fires at the same time. It's OK to good.
Democracy: everyone's somehow smarter than everyone else.
Like bees to honey
Edit: I appreciate the down votes but research him, he has never participated in a real case. He is not a practicing lawyer by any real measure.
Of course it's not literally 'violating the First Amendment', but it sure seems like the kind of thing the writers of Constitution would have tried to protect against if they knew it could happen someday.