[ben_w]

> How does this ruling affect the company's right to free speech in the US?

As I understand it, not at all.

I don't think the British institutions care at all about their rights to do whatever they want outside the UK; the problem is, 4chan does provide access to people in the UK, so it's a bit like a pirate radio station that the UK would like to not be receiving owing to the station's complete lack of interest in following UK laws.

To put it another way, if 4chan blocked the UK, the UK would consider this development to be appropriate. UK might not cancel the penalty fine, but that's because the offence for which it has been issued has already occurred; after all, nobody gets out of an already-issued littering ticket during a holiday by returning to their home country.

[EarlKing]

> To put it another way, if 4chan blocked the UK, the UK would be fine with this outcome.

They really wouldn't, otherwise they would've done that already since it is well within their power to command ISPs to blackhole any offending website. That they chose to levy fines instead tells me all I need to know about their true intentions.

[ben_w]

I believe the order of escalation here is:

1) Identify non-compliance or risk

2) officially request information from the website

3) wait for reply

4) formal enforcement proceedings: a fine and prep for court action (they are here)

5) convince a court to order the site to be blocked

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...

Note that they themselves say there:

  Where appropriate, in the most serious cases, we can seek a court order for ‘business disruption measures’, such as requiring payment providers or advertisers to withdraw their services from a platform, or requiring Internet Service Providers to block access to a site in the UK.

That sounds to me like they consider curtailing speech by blocking a website to be one of the last things to try, not the first.

[NotPractical]

> 4chan does provide access to people in the UK

That's the default when you host an app on the world wide web, though. Regardless of how big of a burden it is for 4chan (I would think it's as simple as flipping a switch in some control panel blocking UK access?), it still does compel the US-based company with no commercial presence in the UK to consider complex international law and to make changes to their US-based web app in response to a foreign jurisdiction's regulations, which feels wrong to me.

This is tangential to whether it affects "free speech" outside the UK, though, and I'm inclined to agree that it doesn't, but I guess it depends on how you define free speech. If 4chan's web app itself is considered speech, and not just the content that's posted there, maybe. But I think free speech advocates are a lot more concerned with the content.

[mytailorisrich]

It's the same with the GDPR...

But note that merely being accessible in the UK is not enough here. The service must either target the UK or have a significant number of users in the UK, or it provides harmful content. So the online forum for Oregon gardeners is quite safe even if, indeed, accessible from the UK.

But still it is an awkward legislation and it would be simpler to simply block rather than to threaten and fine services from around the world.