Not quite.

Ofcom in their reply make their point clear: "The [Online Safety] Act explicitly grants Ofcom the legal authority to regulate online safety for individuals in the United Kingdom [...]"

They are stating that companies operating in the UK and providing services to UK individuals, are required to conform with UK regulations in relation to those services, under UK law.

As an American business, you can choose to ignore that, but that has consequences if any of your board of directors ever sets foot in the UK.

The US does this, and US lawyers understand this. If I open an online poker and sports bookmaking site in the UK (where such sites are completely legal), and take business from all over the United States thereby breaking federal law, I can expect to be met at the plane door the next time I take a shopping trip to NYC. Arguing that my servers and my business are located in the UK is not going to impress the federal judge I'd appear in front of in the morning. Stating the US laws against my activities have a snowball's chance in hell of being enforced in the UK is surely going to risk me being charged with contempt.

The Online Safety Act is ridiculous on many levels, but in the same way that Google does certain things in relation to Tiananmen Square searches in China, and every tech company engages in regulatory alignment for the entire Middle East, the UK has asked that US companies do certain things in the jurisdiction of the UK. I'd argue, less harmful and egregious things in some respects.

Should the UK do this? No, probably not. I think it will just make VPN software vendors richer, and UK citizens - particularly children - barely any safer.

Are Ofcom claiming jurisdiction in the US? No, they're claiming jurisdiction in the UK. Which, I hasten to add they are legally required to do by the Online Safety Act, by the government they are an agency of. If they didn't, the government would literally be breaking its own law.

TIL that 4chan's lawyer is about as grown up, mature and able to engage in critical thinking about the law as the people who post on his client's site.

The china point is interesting because it's false. Google doesn't censor their results in china. There was a five year period some 20 years ago where they did, but prior to that period, and after that period, they didn't. China still does business with google. This is because china understands that it is their own responsibility to censor their internet. If google is unwilling to do so, they are satisfied with blocking all google services in china.

At a certain point in internet censorship, you exit the arena of sensible, free countries, where everybody can agree to get along and enforce each other's blocks, and enter the realm of a censorious authoritarian country that must constantly patch holes in their filters to protect their citizens from badthink. The UK has entered the second realm, but hasn't realized it yet. They see someone refusing to enforce their block for them as the ultimate scorn. In fact, it is what the vast majority of websites already do to china, iran, or any other similar country. Following regulations implies a willingness to play ball. When you no longer want to play along, you ignore the regulation instead.

Not quite. There are well-established legal mechanisms for Ofcom (or anyone) to try to engage legally with companies domiciled in the US and with no locus in the UK. Rather than using these mechanisms, they have tried to short-circuit the process by sending emails that have no legal force.

>They are stating that companies operating in the UK and providing services to UK individuals

did you mean to say "companies operating in the UK and(including) companies providing services to the UK"? because the way you wrote it, it would not apply to 4chan

and what is not being mentioned by most commenters is, if the law is unenforceable on a US corp, what is the chance that an individual associated with 4chan Inc could find themselves individually arrested were they to set foot in a Commonwealth country or somesuch

>every tech company engages in regulatory alignment for the entire Middle East

Can someone expand on this a bit? I'm passingly familiar with the Chinese Google example (though I thought Google left the market rather than bend the knee?) but I know nearly nothing about the Middle East angle.

> They are stating that companies operating in the UK

They are not operating in the UK. ISPs in the UK have chosen to make content from the USA available in the uk (or more accurately, do nothing to prevent it being available)

> Google does certain things in relation to Tiananmen Square searches in China

What does Google do with Tiananmen square searches in China? I can't access google here at all.

> The US does this, and US lawyers understand this. If I open an online poker and sports bookmaking site in the UK (where such sites are completely legal), and take business from all over the United States thereby breaking federal law, I can expect to be met at the plane door the next time I take a shopping trip to NYC.

Countries do things like this when they're run by fools and they can do this because the fools have weapons and prisons. What good has it done the US? Can US patrons of offshore internet Bitcoin casinos no longer find them available? Not a chance.

But then on top of being completely ineffective, it causes exactly what you're saying -- other fools in other countries want to treat the foolishness as precedent for doing it themselves.

Which is why the people in the various countries should put a stop to all of it, before it spreads and they find themselves in a foreign prison because their flight had a layover in a country with a law they didn't know about. And countries themselves should retaliate like hell whenever anyone tries to do it to one of their citizens.

4chan is not "operating in the UK". They accept and respond to packets from the UK. If the UK government doesn't like this, they can block 4chan themselves.

your comment seems very insightful but for the layman that I am it seems to ignore the source of international law reach.

the usa does at lot of leg work to set up legal frameworks, suck as forcing transpacific "partnership", which enforce usa IP law overseas etc.

they can enforce some things, like gambling and financial rules, and now intellectual property overseas because there are specific accords for those. every thing else, even hacking and spying, they must wait for the "criminal" to land on it's jurisdiction.

why is this changing anything on all of that?

also, your example of google/china would let this play out opposite of what you suggest: uk gov would please US law to keep doing business there. i fail to see the relevance on that also.

>As an American business, you can choose to ignore that, but that has consequences if any of your board of directors ever sets foot in the UK.

The board of directors for a private company is generally secret in the US. Only the "manager" aka president/CEO/whoever at the top is generally named publicly, as well as legal agent.

> TIL that 4chan's lawyer …

…also suffers from delusions of grandeur, apparently: “Britain will be spinning hard to minimise the noise in the media.”

4Chan operates out of the US. The UK can ban it if it wants but it can not unilaterally make demands of 4chan and expect courts to enforce them, because it has no jurisdiction over 4chan's activities.