| ▲ | fidotron 5 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. |
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| ▲ | margalabargala 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | fidotron 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | | |
| ▲ | BikiniPrince 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How many of those organizations had business within Ofcoms jurisdiction? No one operating outside of their legal jurisdiction should have complied. | |
| ▲ | andybak 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Presumably a decent chunk of those might now reconsider? | | |
| ▲ | echoangle 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And also this only worked once, but in the future other entities getting sued now know they can just ignore it. | |
| ▲ | shadowgovt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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). |
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| ▲ | Bender an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > from the UK and European advertisers
Why would "European" advertisers come into this, I don't think ofcom has jurisdiction outside of the UK? |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | fidotron 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | piltdownman 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. 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 | | |
| ▲ | ben_w an hour ago | parent [-] | | > 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". |
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| ▲ | SomaticPirate 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This looks to be the case
https://decrypt.co/381296/terrifying-precedent-dutch-hand-us... 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. |
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| ▲ | AlotOfReading 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The US also has laws imposing restrictions on institutions outside their borders/jurisdiction. FATCA for example. | | |
| ▲ | kloop 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | kitd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | rcxdude an hour ago | parent [-] | | This. The regulation organisations can sometimes try to make a point when they're tasked with enforcing an unenforceable or otherwise unworkable rule. |
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| ▲ | Gibbon1 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The US in particular had to proactively not enforce British Libel judgements against US citizens. Because the vast majority violate free speech rights. |
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| ▲ | tracker1 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As a US citizen, I'm inclined to agree. |
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| ▲ | philipwhiuk 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Ofcom didn't "try this" 4chan is suing Ofcom, not the other way round. |
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| ▲ | squidmaster 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ofcom started it. They sent nasty legal letters to 4chan first. | | |
| ▲ | malfist 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who, this is supposed to be a happy occasion! |
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