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4chan and Kiwi Farms Sue the UK Over its Age Verification Law (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/uk_politics@feddit.uk
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4chan and Kiwi Farms sued the United Kingdom’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) over its age verification law in U.S. federal court Wednesday, fulfilling a promise it announced on August 23. In the lawsuit, 4chan and Kiwi Farms claim that threats and fines they have received from Ofcom “constitute foreign judgments that would restrict speech under U.S. law.”

Both entities say in the lawsuit that they are wholly based in the U.S. and that they do not have any operations in the United Kingdom and are therefore not subject to local laws. Ofcom’s attempts to fine and block 4chan and Kiwi Farms, and the lawsuit against Ofcom, highlight the messiness involved with trying to restrict access to specific websites or to force companies to comply with age verification laws.

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

we can operate anywhere in the world and not care about its laws because we're American is genuinely quite harmful.

Philosophically I have trouble understanding how law has jurisdiction over anything digital.

If I encrypt a stream of zeros and ones and spread that around various geographical locations, why should the law care?

(BTW, I believe there is a line somewhere, I just want help finding it. I'm not convinced the current line is correct)

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The law regulates where your customers/users are, not where you are.

    If you run a website hosted in Zanzibar then your server may be subject to Tanzanian law. But if you want people from the UK to access your website, it also needs to comply with relevant UK law. If you don't, the government could order ISPs to block access for UK users.

    If we're talking about some no-name blog then you probably don't care about this. But if you're running an e-commerce site or you're monetizing clicks from UK users via advertising then having a large market cut off from you might hurt your bottom line.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    You are taking the government's position without consideration.

    In my example the numbers I have encoded don't care where they live or who sees them.

    Let's take any onion website as an example. We don't know where it lives. It doesn't know who is accessing it. How can any law be applied to anything .onion ?

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