U.S.-based imageboard site 4chan was fined £20,000 (~$26,000) by Ofcom, the United Kingdom's communications regulator, after failing to respond to its inquiries. 4chan is an early target of the Online Safety Act, a recent law that requires age verification for adult content and makes sites liable for user-generated content, among many other provisions. It is the first penalty assessed under the legislation.
4chan must now respond to Ofcom's requests for information and may be fined up to 10 percent of it's worldwide turnover, be blocked in the U.K., and its executives arrested and jailed. 4chan, for its part, has no presence in the U.K. and has sued in the U.S. to block any foreign efforts to sanction it or collect fines.
Ars Technica's Ashley Belanger reports that it seems unlikely that 4chan will respond.
A lawyer for 4chan, Ronald Coleman, previously told the BBC that Ofcom's enforcement of OSA threatened "the free speech rights of every American." Specifically, 4chan opposes the OSA's risk assessment requirement. Forecasting the risk posed if users encounter various forms of disfavored content would allow the UK to overstep and censor "speech and content published and distributed in the United States and which is protected by the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution," 4chan and Kiwi Farms argued.
4chan's gameplan is plainly "just let them block us." U.S. authorities have already signaled their hostility to foreign regulation and pressured the U.K. government into backing off its demand to access Apple's global user data. Since the passage of the Online Safety Act and its welter of half-baked impositions, Britons have discovered en masse the usefulness of VPNs and become less visible to the authorities—a perfect illustration of the law's self-defeating approach to surveillance and censorship. The law prohibits VPN companies from telling users their services can be used to circumvent censorship, but somehow they figured it out.
