4Chan lawyers have responded to the age verification fine by suggesting they will pay the fine with equally imaginary money.
Last year, we noted that Ofcom was going after 4Chan for not putting surveillance technology on their anonymous message board. Specifically, they wanted the site to implement age verification technology that is “highly effective”.
There’s two problems with that demand. First, there is the problem that such technology doesn’t actually exist. The “industry standard” that is the technology has been known to be defeated by things like sharpies and golden retrievers. Yup, the AI powered facial recognition technology that was declared to be state of the art is just that bad.
The second problem is the fact that Ofcom is enforcing a UK law on the website that is based out of the United States. So, jurisdiction is also legally problematic.
Nevertheless, the legal council for 4Chan filed a lawsuit in response to all of this.
This whole stupid saga bears a similarity to Swedish BitTorrent website, The Pirate Bay back in the day. Various US based organizations tried to file DMCA notices to enforce American copyright law in Sweden which worked about as well as you would expect. It’s starting to look like the same sort of hilariously stupid thinking where one country feels like they can enforce their laws on a website based in an entirely different country.
Well, there has been a recent development in this case. Apparently, Ofcom has issued an additional fine for failing to comply with UK laws. From the BBC:
Meanwhile, message board 4chan will be fined £520,000 for failing to comply with the UK’s Online Safety Law, according to its lawyer – who says the company will not pay.
Suzanne Cater, director of enforcement at Ofcom, said it was “non-negotiable” for adult sites to have highly effective age checks in place to prevent children accessing porn.
“Any company that fails to meet this duty – or engage with us – can expect to face robust enforcement action, including significant fines,” she added.
Under the Online Safety Act, the regulator can fine firms up to 10% of their turnover or apply for a court order to block a site in the UK.
Ofcom has given 4chan 10 working days to respond to its provisional notice that the site has broken its rules, including over age checks and a risk assessment of illegal content on the site.
The company’s lawyer Preston Byrne told BBC News Ofcom is “proposing to impose a £520,000 fine,” with added daily penalties if it does not respond.
Ofcom has so far not publicly said it will be implementing a £520,000 fine.
4chan has already refused to pay a £20,000 fine it received last year as part of a narrower investigation into its compliance with online regulation.
“My client has broken no law in the only jurisdiction that matters here – the United States,” Byrne, who is managing partner of law firm Byrne & Storm, told BBC News.
He said Ofcom should go to court in the US “to explain how enforcement of Ofcom’s orders in our country wouldn’t violate the First Amendment”.
It’s a perfectly reasonable response to all of this. You want to see how well those fines work out for you, come to the US and try to enforce UK law by going through the US court system.
Either way, as I’ve said in the past, collecting on those fines is going to prove to be exceptionally difficult here. While Ofcom seems to want to impose daily fines, that doesn’t change the matter of jurisdiction which has, thus far, seems to remain unresolved. So far, it doesn’t look like Ofcom has any intention of even trying to resolve that issue as well.
That will likely mean one of two things. First is the more probable outcome of UK ISPs being ordered to block 4Chan. Second is that lawyers are going to have to come to the US to hash this whole thing out in a US court as requested by the 4Chan legal council. At any rate, there is something ironic about the UK playing world police on an American website.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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