Hacker News

The write-up from the lawyers is unintentionally hilarious

1. 4chan actually lost its case in the US District Court on 15 September 2026. (sauce: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-court-dismisses-...

The judge dismissed its lawsuit against Ofcom for lack of jurisdiction, because Ofcom was protected by foreign sovereign immunity.

2. The judge's comments were obiter dicta observations that were not necessary to decide the case, rather than a binding ruling that Ofcom's actions were unconstitutional, making the headline somewhat selective, it's hardly the defeat of a giant regulatory system. Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.

We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here:

Cuba. ABC being hassled over Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk. The White House restricting reporting. Ending support for public broadcasting. Book bans, the CLOUD act, the TIKTOK DIVESTITURE fercrissakes. Sanctions on the ICC.

While Ofcom were barmy to even try this there is a level of understandable annoyance outside the US that the US does get to project what it wants and other countries don't, and somewhere that will have contributed to supporting the effort to do this.

While the US isn't perfect it is also far from the worst conceivable entity to be in that position (and current UK and Australian governments provide easy examples). If they want to use their influence to promote free speech then good, because we need it. Just less of the mass surveillance of absolutely everyone at the same time, then we'd be good.

It's about honor, I remember Saddam Hussein saying that after they held against the US for 40 days they "won" the war, because in their culture when a higher power entity goes against a weaker one, it is without honor and the weaker entity "wins" honor by being able to defend for that long.

>I may be reading too much into the editorialized writeups about Ofcom but even their statements imply they thought they were just going to impose their laws globally and that other countries would line up to help them do it?

Yes this is exactly what they thought, and no it is not surprising. Section 204 of the Online Safety Act of 2023 specifically says the Act covers internet services provided from outside the UK as well.

Of course the rest of us think its stupid. But the UK government doesnt.

Well, my reading of this is Ofcom did not lose overall and 4chan technically lost the lawsuit despite Ofcom having no way to enforce fines. I don't think Ofcom's purpose was ever to collect the fines either. Now keep in mind, 4chan is the first website that had ever been issued a fine by Ofcom under the UK's Online Safety Act. I think that is interesting because it's a noteworthy site which suggests the selection of it was more targeted. Note that is my speculation.

4chan sued Ofcom over the fines. Ofcom has been perhaps waiting for the outcome of this suit and is announcing they can't collect fines but I don't think that was the purpose. They have the power to instruct ISPs to block domains and to me it seems more likely that is what they will do and that was perhaps what they wanted from the beginning.

Maybe they weren't allowed to not try? Like adding Denuvo to your game doesn't stop piracy, but your investors will be angry if you don't make the (wasted) effort at due diligence.

I actually wouldn’t have been shocked if other countries had helped, and the powers that be may regret enforcing their sovereignty here.

Countries used to enforce this at their borders (for foreign information) because it largely worked. They couldn’t stop 100% of the copies of the book, but they could stop there being enough copies for it to be part of the cultural zeitgeist (most of the time).

Not anymore. The companies don’t have a local HQ to harass, and the information doesn’t flow through infrastructure the government owns. They’ve pretty much entirely lost the ability to control the flow of information, and they’ve largely lost the ability to control its direction either with the fall of major news outlets.

I don’t think they have the support for a China-style great firewall, but I’m not British so maybe I’m wrong.

I think it’s a good thing information is set free, but I see why they tried it. It’s the only politically tenable way they had to try to keep that control.

I would expect that they expected to not be able to enforce it. It's a play to get the british public on board with even more draconian surveillance state laws and technologies which will be needed to protect their children from evil american companies.

I am surprised that https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/4102 was not cited.

It's not just that courts generally decline. It's now also against US law for them to enforce the judgment without assessing the Constitutional issues. And the burden of proof is on those trying to enforce the judgment.

> Which raises the scarier question of why they tried this at all?

Didn't the USA kidnap a president from another country from that country, just the other day?

The other option (and this is I admit charitable) is that this was always obviously never going to work and this was all a performative political thing in the first place.

By deliberately going after unwinnable cases, there is perhaps here a deliberate attempt to project a "voice of common sense" - effectively demonstrating that this is uneforceable nonsense, regardless of what the then-current government and media insisted. So they make a big show of it being defeated in the hope that the powers that be seen sense and quietly drop it.

Or they really are delusional. I dunno.

> Indeed. Who could have predicted this?

Not European politicians.

You see, in the EU international treaties supersede individual countries' constitutions in theory. This is the other way the EU is moving power to executive governments away from parliament and judicial branches.

Of course, in practice, you have at least a good chance that courts just ignore it (of course the laws of many European countries are a good match, the big thing you get many conflicts about is if 2 governments act on the same company/crime/...). Then the EU court makes a counter judgement ... and is ignored, despite the law. Which is one of the reasons you keep reading the EU is about to fall apart.

> they thought they were just going to impose their laws globally and that other countries would line up to help them do it?

Why is this surprising? The United States does this all the time, successfully.

Indian citizens living in India, who have never left India and only do business with Indian entities, have to declare compliance with US laws (FATCA) when opening a bank account in India with an Indian bank. This is enforced by the Indian government.

> Was the defeat a planned showing to justify future action to justify more control of the internet, as Preston Byrne speculates

When something can be explained by both incompetence and conspiracy, the correct explanation is usually incompetence.

It’s largely political. Even the rank and file staff there agree that it’s nonsense, being done for appearances.

Here's the link to Parliament's own on-demand video: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/c32e3478-65af-41b2-aa7...

I'm somewhat dubious of a Youtube channel called "Western Liberty" that was created the day of Cummings's testimony, which contains nothing but the session and short clips of it. Using the link above avoids any potential ad revenue going to that clearly political pointed channel.

For anyone that's interested, here are the links to the other sessions of this committee:

- 22nd April 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/e79ae489-4db6-4159-88b...

- 3rd June 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/f27d8b93-b09d-433a-8e6...

- 10th June 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/097aadbd-b58d-4f76-90e...

- 15th July 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/87f1e00f-82b5-432b-af6...

- 2nd September 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/110f81a5-32c4-4577-bab...

- 16th September 2026: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/ecf7a237-54c9-40be-922...

Cummings is an absolute crank. He had the opportunity to try and he ended up failing spectacularly, like Liz Truss or Yannis Varoufakis.

He also talked with Dwarkesh Patel: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dominic-cummings

Utter rubbish. Civil servants can't get anything done because they are chronically underfunded, and yanked around by the whims of the government of the day. Dominic Cummings' is not a reliable source either - he's ideologically at odds with the idea of government _doing_ anything, and because of that has caused a great deal of harm to the UK.

Notice that 4chan is fighting harder to resist these attacks on free speech and association than many of big names in the sector...

Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based? Big American tech companies have employees, assets, or at least a business presence of some sort in countries outside the US, which means that they are exposed to legal systems in those other countries.

The main difference is that most of the big players have physical presence in the UK. You can't argue British law does not apply to you when you have a campus in Kings Cross.

4chan and Kiwi Farms (via Lolcow LLC), to be more specific.

Here's the thing though: nobody has to agree 4chan is the hero of the story. It's also reasonable to look at 4chan and say "Gross and legally correct is still gross" and let them soldier on alone.

You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures. It doesn't say "First they came for the KKK." And, of course, it doesn't say "First they came for the Nazis."

I think it’s an open question whether the British state has the technical chops, money and willingness to implement a Great Firewall type solution.

The state isn’t totally incompetent but doing it properly would be a serious undertaking, the kind of thing where the recent track record of big government tech projects isn’t great

Sorry for copypaste, but I still hope people will see true intentions of govt.

Just a recap how it happened in Russia:

1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8

2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.

3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).

4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).

5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).

6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.

7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc ).

That's already been done, on the ISP level, some time ago. For torrent sites and similar, if I remember correctly.

deep packet inspection is not really necessary, headers contain information about the destination, as long as you don’t encrypt those, there is no need to do any decryption.

Likely yes IMO, especially since the UK is making moves to militarize.

For some reason we keep forgetting to make it illegal school kids to have sex with adults too.

I thought the Russel Brand case might cause someone to ask why it's even legal for a grown man to pick a kid up from the school gates to have sex with them, but apparently not.

Would be nice if foreigners who raped 30+ kids could get more than 14 years in prison before we release them too.

I get the concern about kids on 4chan, but it just feels like such low priority that I'm surprised the government keep forgetting to tackle the more important stuff that's happening in real life.

Your quote references censorship specifically and while there are some creaks in the first amendment here and there, it is nothing compared to the censorship machine running in the UK and Europe.

This isnt unique to the UK. China does the same thing. The UK will have its own firewall in time. They cant actually force foreign companies to comply with these laws so they'll have to blacklist them. It's exactly the same as China.

Maybe you could post your unwanted political opinions somewhere else?

The UK ISPs already did this earlier. What Ofcom really wanted is to flex their muscle and kill 4chan because it represents Satan for them.

What Ofcom wants next is to make VPNs illegal.

Why would they block it if they hope to get money from it.

No, it's called sovereignty.

What else should happen in this case?

Are you saying it is sad that American courts do not enforce foreign laws if they violate the US constitution? If so, then are you in favor of Russian, Chinese, various Muslim countries' laws being enforced in the US?

Didn't Ofcom send multiple threat letters to 4chan, requesting they comply with UK laws? That counts as trying to enforce it

What should the rules and enforcement mechanisms be? It seems your country is unfree and getting worse in terms of digital freedom.

https://eylenburg.github.io/countries.htm