The U.K. recently passed into law its sprawling and controversial "Online Safety" act, which requires web services to monitor content for unpleasantness such as terrorism, abuse, extreme pornography, hate speech, etc., and provides for heavy fines, prison sentences and court-ordered censorship against those who fail to comply. The costs of compliance and the legal uncertainties fall upon everyone, including innocuous sites, but now regulators have revealed some explicit targets: 4chan and various file-sharing platforms.
We have today opened formal investigations into online discussion board 4chan and seven file-sharing services – Im.ge, Krakenfiles, Nippybox, Nippydrive, Nippyshare, Nippyspace and Yolobit – having not received responses to our statutory information requests, to which services are legally required to respond.
We have received complaints about the potential for illegal content and activity on 4chan, and possible sharing of child sexual abuse material on the file-sharing services.
4chan is owned by a Japanese man, incorporated in Delaware, served from California, and operated by a chud named "RapeApe," all seemingly beyond the reach of English courts. So it suggests a perfect outcome as far as authorities are concerned: the legal costs and lack of local presence mean 4chan won't likely respond to the action (except, perhaps, recreationally), it'll be subjected to the various penalties, and end up entirely blocked in the U.K. As the French are finding out, these superficial "think of the children" laws are outstanding advertisements for VPNs.
Previously:
• 4chan hacked, obliterated and unlikely to be back soon
• AI text generator trained on 4chan
• Anonymous anime fan solves complex superpermutation puzzle on 4chan
• To understand trumpism, study the self-professed 'betas' of 4chan
