> There is strong precedent for the US defending the 1st amendment against foreign interests.
How does this ruling affect the company's right to free speech in the US? It's a fine for refusing to comply with a law in the UK; any sufficiently competent organisation could choose to comply with censorship/age gating in one country and avoid those restrictions in all others.
> How does this ruling affect the company's right to free speech in the US?
As I understand it, not at all.
I don't think the British institutions care at all about their rights to do whatever they want outside the UK; the problem is, 4chan does provide access to people in the UK, so it's a bit like a pirate radio station that the UK would like to not be receiving owing to the station's complete lack of interest in following UK laws.
To put it another way, if 4chan blocked the UK, the UK would consider this development to be appropriate. UK might not cancel the penalty fine, but that's because the offence for which it has been issued has already occurred; after all, nobody gets out of an already-issued littering ticket during a holiday by returning to their home country.
> To put it another way, if 4chan blocked the UK, the UK would be fine with this outcome.
They really wouldn't, otherwise they would've done that already since it is well within their power to command ISPs to blackhole any offending website. That they chose to levy fines instead tells me all I need to know about their true intentions.
Where appropriate, in the most serious cases, we can seek a court order for ‘business disruption measures’, such as requiring payment providers or advertisers to withdraw their services from a platform, or requiring Internet Service Providers to block access to a site in the UK.
That sounds to me like they consider curtailing speech by blocking a website to be one of the last things to try, not the first.
That's the default when you host an app on the world wide web, though. Regardless of how big of a burden it is for 4chan (I would think it's as simple as flipping a switch in some control panel blocking UK access?), it still does compel the US-based company with no commercial presence in the UK to consider complex international law and to make changes to their US-based web app in response to a foreign jurisdiction's regulations, which feels wrong to me.
This is tangential to whether it affects "free speech" outside the UK, though, and I'm inclined to agree that it doesn't, but I guess it depends on how you define free speech. If 4chan's web app itself is considered speech, and not just the content that's posted there, maybe. But I think free speech advocates are a lot more concerned with the content.
But note that merely being accessible in the UK is not enough here. The service must either target the UK or have a significant number of users in the UK, or it provides harmful content. So the online forum for Oregon gardeners is quite safe even if, indeed, accessible from the UK.
But still it is an awkward legislation and it would be simpler to simply block rather than to threaten and fine services from around the world.
Ofcom attempting to enforce it's laws upon a US-resident corporation that has no business presence in the United Kingdom is the very definition of affecting one's right to free speech in the United States. This is why the US has a rich history of case law to draw upon for defining personal jurisdiction. In this case, Ofcom is perhaps hoping to exploit uncertainty regarding personal jurisdiction to impose its law upon foreign citizens who otherwise have no business in the United Kingdom. So, yeah, it definitely affects a company's right to free speech in the US. It affects EVERYONE's right to free speech in the US, and it should not be dismissed simply because 4chan is the defendant.
Mostly incorrect. The First Amendment limits the US government, not Ofcom or UK courts. UK law can regulate services with “links to the UK” even if the provider is abroad, and Ofcom’s enforcement does not itself abridge anyone’s US constitutional rights.
It's sovereignty that limits the UK courts from enforcing a fine against an organization without a physical, legal, or financial presence in the UK. They could ask US courts to enforce a UK judgment, but the First Amendment does bind US courts.
The first amendment is a natural right, not a civil right, but at any rate the matter of personal jurisdiction is what is at issue, which most definitely does regulate who can and cannot assert authority over a man (fictive or otherwise). Ofcom's attempt to enforce their law over corporations and people who do not in fact have "links to the UK" as defined under US law is the entirety of the issue. They are overstepping their jurisdiction and infringing upon the sovereignty of the United States.
A lot of the US rules in this area came from UK courts trying to enforce defamation/libel related claims on US authors and journalists.
The American consensus basically became that US courts don’t enforce overseas judgments on free speech stuff where the speech would be legal in the US. Even if that speech could be “heard” elsewhere.
See the Ehrenfeld v. Bin Mahfouz case (2005) and subsequent US SPEECH act (2010).
The thing about laws are they stop at the border. Unless you are sufficiently powerful that you can ignore the rights of other countries and their people, the UK isn't powerful anymore, but hasn't grasped that concept yet (I'm British, at this point it's just kind of sad).
So UK laws stop at the UK border.
4Chan is a US company, based in the US, with all its people and stuff in the US. It has never had a presence in the UK.
In the US people and companies have the right to free speech guaranteed under the first amendment, that includes speech conducted online. Many people would consider having the ability to speak, but having the government restrict hearing that speech to amount to a free speech violation.
The only jurisdiction 4Chan operates in is the US and they are defending their rights: they also have that right, the US isn't North Korea, or China, or the UK.
This isn't a matter of can they censor, of course they can. This is a matter of they don't have to, and they won't.
The UK has no jurisdiction, or reason to believe they have jurisdiction, or ability to enforce its laws extraterritorially over pretty much any foreign entity, but especially not the US.
Anyway you look at this, this is a jumped up little backwater not content with robbing their own citizens of their rights, they are now trying to rob others too.
As someone who's lived in the UK for years but no longer there (I'm American and currently live in another EU country) it's sad but also quite funny watching the rapid deterioration across multiple domains that has taken place in the last 20 years. At times it seems that the people at the upper strata of politics have completely broken with contemporary reality and went off into a fantasy make-believe space, but don't realize it and keep acting as if that's not the case.
You don't have to say, but I'm curious where you moved to.
I'm not originally from the UK, but have lived here for over 20 years. I'm fully settled here, with a family, children at school, sports, hobbies, friends etc, but lately it just feels more and more gloomy.
The annoying thing is, I had planned to use geoarbitrage at some future point to sell up and retire somewhere on the European mainland, but that arbitrage opportunity has or is disappearing as places like Portugal become more expensive.
I moved to Germany where my wife is from, and I currently split my time between a conservative US state where my kids are studying (I left California where I grew up when the liberal politics became too much to handle as I didn't want my kids to grow up in this sort of environment).
He's the ultimate product of a dysfunctional civil service; what else could be expected other than dis-empowering people, ignoring democracy, and increasing bureaucratic power?
Perhaps the contemporary fight back against 'woke' is really about the important and empowering choices in life being denied to too many?