Really grateful that a project like this took on the task to ask for legal advice, and extra kudos for actually releasing a statement based on their understanding of the legal advice. Hopefully will be useful to lots of similar organizations.
Libera.chat seems to say that even if Ofcom thinks they have a case, they don't as Libera's user base doesn't have enough UK users:
> The exact fraction of the UK’s online population that must use a given service to be considered “significant” is unknown, but based on our counsel’s observations of Ofcom’s previous regulatory actions, it appears to be much higher than our internal estimates of how large our UK user base is.
You're right in the sense that they can pursue whomever they want based on whatever interpretation of "significant" they may hold. But it is not Ofcom that ultimately decides on the meaning of the term, that is for a court to decide and that court would likely rely on the same authorities and principles that Libera's lawyers did in their advice.
> But it is not Ofcom that ultimately decides on the meaning of the term, that is for a court to decide and that court would likely rely on the same authorities and principles that Libera's lawyers did in their advice.
assuming of course libera don't fold the moment they receive a nastygram ("enforcement notice")
like they did when andrew lee commandeered freenode
They weren't in a strong legal position then: a few mistakes over the course of decades substantially weakened their ability to fight back against Andrew Lee (without significant personal expense). Libera's legal structure is much stronger, and (importantly) the Ofcom has nothing to gain from going after them. (Libera aren't, after all, part of the problem.)
I think you are putting too much faith in the courts. They are independent, but they have shown time and again that they will interpret the law how they like. They don't live in a vacuum and they certainly aren't free from, or blind to political considerations that influence their decisions, like the rest of us. Ofcom are very clearly the sort of people who want to apply the most open ended and widespread use of the powers they can in a misguided effort to save the public from themselves and i have very little confidence that our judges are not cut from the same cloth. I won't go so far as to say they would collude with ofcom, but i do think they are more likely to side with them over the defendants, however weak the case may be.
The problem is the law is worded in the vaguest way possible and ofcom in exceptionally bad faith have refused to give any clear guidance on what they will and won't prosecute. Our politicians in their arrogance have passed this law, so expect no help from them.
Seems like ofcom picked thier targets to create precedent fur using ISP blocks against non compliant companies.
Case law is important in the UK because laws are vaguely written and thier specifics are established in court.
By going after entities that can't comply and don't have a big legal budget like 4chan, they can go through the motions and establish that ISP level blocks against non complying companies are okay.
They can then hit progressively more difficult targets until they get to X and tiktok.
The end goal is obviously directing UK ISPs to block services. This whole game is just performative attempts at enforcement to create a paper trail when they propose the blocks.
libera.chat servers are hosted by volunteers. Most of the libera.chat infra are the the same servers which were switched from freenode in 2021.
Existence of the non-profit in Sweden changes nothing, that entity can be closed without any adverse effect for the IRC.
Not sure why your comment has been received negatively when it seems to be obviously true. Yes, "significant" is ambiguous and I wouldn't be surprised if the intention is to give themselves discretion to go after whoever they choose. The OSA is insidious.
1. Do you think that getting the legal advice was a good defensive measure?
(Something to point to, to establish that they were being responsible, if ever challenged.)
2. And do you think that publicizing it was a good idea?
(Probably they are drawing fire on Monday morning, like you said. But maybe it's a plausibly good tactical move because, just speculating here, someone now takes the time to pay attention to who they are, rather than them later land on some poorly-informed list of non-compliants that gets rubber-stamped for action.)
> Speaking of which, the memo implies that “significance” in this context is interpreted as being relative to the population of the UK, not relative to the user base of the service. We have seen risk assessments that take the other interpretation and consider their UK user base to be “significant” because it makes up a large portion of their overall user base, but the advice we received suggests we should not use this interpretation.
Interesting - this implies that the vast majority of niche communities are not considered to be in scope, so long as they're not on a service like Discord I guess.
Perhaps, but this sort of thing is a part of the problem: the law itself is written vaguely enough that Ofcom could at any time change their interpretation and decide that previously out-of-scope communities are now in-scope, and go after them.
Laws in general tend to leave a bit of room for interpretation, and then those are to be cemented in specific contexts/scenarios by precedents, that's how I understand many systems of law at at least, maybe it works differently where Libera.chat and Ofcom are based.
Some level of flexibility makes sense. That leaves room to enforce the intent instead of the technicalities.
However if its too broad, then you've basically thrown away rule of law. If everyone is arguably in violation but a government official decides who to enforce, esentially you just have justice by decree.
Several comments here are interpreting this as the common "we just don't care about the UK's jurisdiction". That is not what Libera.chat is saying. They have staff in the UK, users in the UK, and are, in their interpretation, abiding by the terms of the OSA. Their interpretation is that the ID verification requirement doesn't apply to their service, for the reasons they outline in the article.
There is an interesting sentence in the post that shows why you want to ask actual lawyers, even if the law actually meant what one would think based on a common-sense reading of the text (it often doesn't) and you could read it (you often can't, because you might not know about a second law that also applies):
> For the time being, services like ours do not appear to be Ofcom’s priority.
Lawyers don't just tell you how the law is interpreted, but also how it's applied in practice. Often, bad law is worked around by the legal system rather than fixing it, and while one could rightfully lament this, if your goal is to get something done rather than fix the country's legal system... ask a lawyer and you might find yourself unblocked, or be told about a way to avoid the issue, or at least have a better understanding how big the risk is in practice, allowing you to make an informed decision.
Yeah, the purpose of regulators applying law differently in practice is so that government administrations can play kingmaker and receive appropriate rewards.
I was expecting/hoping that the legal advice was that an IRC network isn't subject to the law, but it seems like the only advice here was "you're based in Sweden and have only trivial ties to the UK, so the UK/Ofcom can't reasonably go after you".
That feels like a kinda "duh" thing? Even though the UK believes they can enforce this law abroad, if I were running a service outside of UK jurisdiction that would otherwise be subject to the Online Safety Act, I certainly wouldn't comply with it.
The crux of it was not that libera has no ties to the uk - they appearently do, allegedly some of their servers and staff are there - its that they have insufficient market penetration.
In a democracy, the question is "it depends on your pockets, aka how much money you have for a lawyer" - intentional / felony level misconduct can pierce corporate veils.
In what universe is that "not a big deal?" That makes an entire country a no-go zone. Worse if it's an offense they could reasonably extradite for.
I don't intend to ever travel to Russia or North Korea, but that's not some trivial anecdote about modern life, those are regimes so hostile to rule of law and individual safety that it's not reasonable to travel there.
What if there's a conference you want to go to, but it's in the UK? Or you have friends you want to visit? Or family, or whatever.
That's also an egregious degradation of the UK's position with regard to Western-norms around personal liberties, which itself is worthy of remark.
> those are regimes so hostile to rule of law and individual safety that it's not reasonable to travel there
And now the UK joins the ranks as well. I should add that the US is also a member of this club if you’re foreign or you appear to be foreign, we are no paragon of virtue either.
The uk is “so hostile to the rule of law and individual safety that it’s not reasonable to travel there” because … if you break the UK’s laws they might arrest you?
Vietnam has extremely strict laws about drugs, but they have the good sense to limit the applicability of those laws to Vietnamese soil. I have no problem traveling to Vietnam just because I might have once smoked a doobie in the US, because Vietnam also has no problem with that. While on VN soil, respect VN laws. Fine by me.
The UK on the other hand seems to have forgotten this basic, common approach to international relations and criminal jurisdiction, so if you work on any foreign technology or content that could be targeted by the UK government, it’s better to stay away.
(Yes I am aware that the US also doesn’t obey this principle, but that doesn’t make it right.)
Ironically, as a UK citizen who may have once smoked a doobie, I could be prevented from entering the US, even though it is 'more legal' there than here. It hasn't stopped me before, of course; what's stopping me now is the current administration and a fear I may be abused by the US authorities for any manner of reasons (including none).
I find it interesting how the shrinking of the world via the internet may result in more international isolation because of conflicting online laws.
Are you saying that if you sell drugs into Vietnam as the supplier and origin and person who profits, then you go there, they won’t arrest you?
If you forge Vietnamese money but you do it outside their border, they won’t arrest you if you go there because (from your other comment) “No country should have the right to enforce laws globally”?
This seems unlikely, and like you are cherry picking the UK because the example is digital and this is HN.
Running a website that distributes information is not the same as selling drugs. That's why free speech is a right and free drugs are not.
And, yes, there are some types of speech (libel, for instance) that merit special scrutiny. A web forum does not. It is literally just an online conversation—the very definition of protected speech.
For the UK to impose these restrictions within its own borders is already unacceptable. For them to play at imposing them on people in other countries is worse still. If they're serious about this, they should suck it up and proactively block websites from abroad that violate their guidelines. Vague threats of punishments without prior warning are ridiculous.
If I open a store in my home country where I sell goods that are legal (for me) and a citizen of a foreign country travels to me to purchase something that is illegal (for them), I should not be legally liable, no.
Whether that travel happens physically or digitally is of no concern to me.
I suppose you may make the argument that the internet is more like shipping a package than handing something over a counter to a traveler. I don’t think this applies. At most it’s like the customer sends a neutral intermediary to make a purchase/pickup, where that intermediary tells me nothing about the customer except a vague idea of their location (which may be inaccurate). In this case it’s the intermediary, or one of the many intermediaries in the chain, who actually “imports” the item.
If you want to block content, start there with the “importer”. China already understands this well, I don’t know why the UK hasn’t caught on other than a desire to force its own local standards on Americans. We won’t stand for it.
(Your example about forged currency is as absurd as an example about nuclear weapons or attempting to organize revolution. Yes, some things cross the threshold into a critical economic/military issue and all bets are off at that point.)
I (a layman) believe that part of the "global" scope of the law is to enable actions at home (and some pressure).
If they want to order ISPs to block services there needs to be some legal framework to do so. "We contacted them, they didn't respond, now we need to revert to blocking" sounds pretty convincing to me.
For your other argument I'll ask the question I ask anytime this comes up: How would you propose laws/regulations on online services are enforced if not (at least in principle) globally?
Order local ISPs to block the site, forbid companies and/or individuals with local presence from doing business with the site, or I dunno, maybe require everyone in the country to install an MITM cert like some backwater autocracy. Not really my problem how you want to run your own country. No country should have the right to enforce laws globally.
Some people have friends/family/etc in Russia too yet it does not make it less of a shitty country. Here in Lithuania we there’s at least one or two sob stories every year about somebody visiting relatives in (bela)rus and ending up in prison there.
I’m more afraid that anglosphere is showing the way for the rest of west-y world. Looking at chat control stuff and all that jazz, it’s matter of time same stuff becomes a thing in the rest „free“ world.
> but it's in the UK? Or you have friends you want to visit? Or family, or whatever.
Then yes, if on a individual level that affects you, you have to be careful. Like citizens of China or Russia, or Saudi Arabia. Welcome to the club, UK, I guess?
You'd better carefully check the flight path of every longer distance route then, otherwise you may find yourself unexpectedly crossing the airspace of countries like Russia (e.g. IME Newark to Hong Kong flew over the polar region and right through the middle of Siberia).
After what happened to Durov I’m not so eager to travel there either. Frankly, given the escalating hostility of the EU to technological freedom, it’s becoming a no-go zone for me. Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and NZ are still nice to visit, though. It’s a big world.
Honestly though, I’ve done almost all the travel to the UK I need. It would be kind of an outlaw badge if honor to be banned from a first world country for something like sharing memes they don’t like.
> end result is the same: a denial of service to people in the UK solely because of the country they live in.
This would also probably help sway the public opinion in the UL to stop electing representatives that come up with laws like this - so a win either way.
If you consider all we know about the excesses and influences of big tech companies, and then blunt that down to a more lay perspective, it's pretty easy to understand why we've landed up here.
That's a very powerful way to sum up what I've been feeling for a while.
People did lose faith, and to be honest, I can't really blame them.
From a layman's perspective, it's not obvious that there's a distinction between "Big Tech" and other so-called "providers of services" (the term itself feels kind of icky) in the internet. Throw the "Tech Bro" term in there and things get even more difficult.
I'm guessing a lot of people never really knew about forums, chat communities and other things like that existing outside of the big social media companies' mostly-walled gardens. Maybe they heard some scary things about 4chan, well, that'll help.
To many of them, it's the little man vs. the big tech companies that skirted regulations for way too long. That there's a possible third party (or rather, category) involved is not obvious from the outside.
It seems to come up a lot in reference to laws like the UK one, the Australian social media ban for under 16s and all sorts of similar measures around and about.
It’s the end of democracy in country X! The government’s taking away the people’s rights to x, y and z!
I mean, kinda, but it’s also hugely popular. Regular folks want their kids protected from some of this stuff, don’t believe that Silicon Valley and allied tech bros have their best interest at heart (and shouldn’t) and will readily vote for it.
Heck, I don’t have kids and I’m broadly in favour of the principle of keeping kids off social media, it’s just very hard to answer “what exactly do you mean by social media?” or “how are we going to do this without impacting adults’ ability to interact freely?”
Nobody wants this law but it's very common in the UK and Europe to pretend consultations make it a democratic process with good representation when it's just the typical power hungry politicians, security forces and corporate lobbyists getting their way. It's not middle England or "conservatives". It's usually approved by the parliamentary monoparty of the current time and the entire pretense on dissent is usually performance for different set of BS.
Of course it's useful to have people like you make it about fake left v right tribalism so you don't realize how far from a democracy these parliamentary systems are.
You don't need to do this for your blog. Comments on "provider content" are out of scope. [1] This was done mainly to protect legacy press and media comments sections but it applies equally to a blog comments section.
The Internet no longer interprets censorship as damage and routes around it[0]. Instead, it is interpreted it as an opportunity to raise the barrier of entry for competitors, and embraced.
I agree 100% and say that as somebody from Britain. The population needs to feel the pain of restrictions so that they will force the Labour government to rescind this law. Simply doing what this website is doing is simply going along with the problem. A blanket ban from the rest of the world will cause uproar (hopefully).
I don't think that would happen. Most of the large tech platforms will essentially just comply or come to a deal e.g. The IPA Demand for the UK gov to have a global backdoor iCloud was only rescinded when some deal was made between the current US administration and the UK gov.
The smaller companies like 4chan are going to court to have the matter settled. If that is settled in 4chan's favour, legally the UK won't be able to do anything.
There's like 70m of us and most people will just use competitors as opposed to bothering with VPNs. So you're shooting yourself in the foot, financially.
Sucks for people trying to make money then, but that’s hardly a sympathetic case. Sounds like the UK are the ones truly shooting themselves in the foot. Again.
There is a huge amount of UK infra now that is dependant on US companies either directly or indirectly (AWS, Microsoft/Azure). Code, data and infra is locked into US platforms. When US-EAST-1 when down last week, it halted our whole operations at our workplace. Looking at freelancer groups I am part of (whatsapp, slack etc), they had the same experience.
The UK being blocked from the outside won't happen anyway. The large tech giants will just either cut a deal (this already happen with Apple/iCloud), or they will comply with the new acts. The sites that don't comply won't be big enough for anyone to care in normie land and thus there will be no real pressure on the UK gov.
> We have a few servers in the UK, but they can be migrated on short notice.
You should do that as soon as possible. You don't escape past "violations" by dealing with them when they are discovered. Plus the presence of servers in the UK is easily enough for Ofcom to go after you, even if they ultimately lose their case. There's no benefit to keeping those UK servers.
> we can reasonably argue we do not have sufficient links to the UK for the Online Safety Act to be applicable to us.
> keeping internal estimates of our UK user base
The fact that you know you have UK users is also almost certainly enough for Ofcom to go after you. Did 4chan have any stronger links to the UK? I don't think so.
I'm not saying they should give in and follow the OSA but I think they're being pretty naive about how reasonable Ofcom is.
It used to be that a lot of free and open source developers would hang out on Freenode IRC to communicate with users; then things happened, and Libera was forked from Freenode.
I used to run a BBS out of my parents house as a kid. I'm old enough to know what IRC is, but in my experience it was that thing you'd get booted from as soon as you tried to access it, lol.
Not a lawyer but from depths of GDPR meetings and implementation work years ago, my understanding was if you do not have any exposure in a given jurisdiction (typically office or employees etc) then you can tell them to get lost.
UK should not be able to regulate nature of photons being sent from outside of their borders.
If you physically transit through UK jurisdiction then they could arrest you through a Commonwealth wide warrant. Say, you go to the Bahamas then your name might pop up on the computer and you get collared and deported to Britain. If you're an executive then they will happily grab you.
It comes up in every thread about this sort of thing. It is basically true, although keep in mind that the UK is basically a “friendly” country to most of the other countries that are in the sort of… liberal/capitalist/democracy clique, so hypothetically it wouldn’t be that surprising if some of our countries ended up with some reciprocity some day for the fines or whatever.
> TL;DR: the legal firm we’ve engaged has sent us a memo indicating that in their opinion we can reasonably argue we do not have sufficient links to the UK for the Online Safety Act to be applicable to us. They also believe we would be at low risk of attempted enforcement action even if Ofcom does consider us to be in-scope for the OSA. We will continue to ensure that this is the case by keeping internal estimates of our UK user base and by continuing with our current efforts to keep Libera.Chat reasonably safe. We have no plans to institute any ID requirements for the forseeable future.
Is it just me or is this not super confidence inspiring for what happens in the future? This just seems like an arbitrary time in future when they either have enough UK users or if Ofcom suddenly lowers or entirely removes the arbitrary "size" estimate, OSA will become applicable? As far as I can tell, we don't even know what this arbitrary "size" estimate is?
Sure, but if you're forward looking, the rules could change and it's not predictable.
This kind of a memo is a useful CYA. An interpretation of the current situation and likely risk factors, and when the situation changes in the future, an artifact that justifies their current non-compliance. Will Ofcom/courts accept it and not require compliance if the situation changes? No, but it might eliminate or reduce penalties for non-compliance.
What a waste of limited resources. What happened to the libre anti copyright hackers and piraters from the 90s? It's effete, getting a lawyer. Better to draw a picture of Steimer covered in feces and fax 10000 copies to parliament
What happened is that governments successfully figured out how to police the internet. Except for Tor. For some reason though, we're still not layering everything on top of Tor.
I don’t really think libera has or has ever had that kind of ethos or aesthetic. It is used by a lot of serious people and projects that are not directly involved with copyright politics and have no interest in cosplaying as ThePirateBay.
Really grateful that a project like this took on the task to ask for legal advice, and extra kudos for actually releasing a statement based on their understanding of the legal advice. Hopefully will be useful to lots of similar organizations.
Libera.chat seems to say that even if Ofcom thinks they have a case, they don't as Libera's user base doesn't have enough UK users:
> The exact fraction of the UK’s online population that must use a given service to be considered “significant” is unknown, but based on our counsel’s observations of Ofcom’s previous regulatory actions, it appears to be much higher than our internal estimates of how large our UK user base is.
Related submission with 788 comments from ~1 week ago: "4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614148
significant can mean anything ofcom want it to
their entire post is sophistry and wishful thinking, neither of which will work if ofcom decide to go after them
the intention of the OSA is to attempt to regulate user-to-user communications services, of which IRC is one
they're probably right that they're near bottom of the list though
(at least until this blog post ends up on their desk monday morning)
> significant can mean anything ofcom want it to
You're right in the sense that they can pursue whomever they want based on whatever interpretation of "significant" they may hold. But it is not Ofcom that ultimately decides on the meaning of the term, that is for a court to decide and that court would likely rely on the same authorities and principles that Libera's lawyers did in their advice.
> But it is not Ofcom that ultimately decides on the meaning of the term, that is for a court to decide and that court would likely rely on the same authorities and principles that Libera's lawyers did in their advice.
assuming of course libera don't fold the moment they receive a nastygram ("enforcement notice")
like they did when andrew lee commandeered freenode
They weren't in a strong legal position then: a few mistakes over the course of decades substantially weakened their ability to fight back against Andrew Lee (without significant personal expense). Libera's legal structure is much stronger, and (importantly) the Ofcom has nothing to gain from going after them. (Libera aren't, after all, part of the problem.)
I think you are putting too much faith in the courts. They are independent, but they have shown time and again that they will interpret the law how they like. They don't live in a vacuum and they certainly aren't free from, or blind to political considerations that influence their decisions, like the rest of us. Ofcom are very clearly the sort of people who want to apply the most open ended and widespread use of the powers they can in a misguided effort to save the public from themselves and i have very little confidence that our judges are not cut from the same cloth. I won't go so far as to say they would collude with ofcom, but i do think they are more likely to side with them over the defendants, however weak the case may be.
The problem is the law is worded in the vaguest way possible and ofcom in exceptionally bad faith have refused to give any clear guidance on what they will and won't prosecute. Our politicians in their arrogance have passed this law, so expect no help from them.
In these games involving companies with no physical presence in the UK, OfCom has only two realistic enforcement strategies:
1. Arrest the founders or officers at the UK border if they attempt to enter.
2. Direct UK ISPs to block access to their services.
Let's see if they are so PR-insensitive that they will want to actually do that.
Seems like ofcom picked thier targets to create precedent fur using ISP blocks against non compliant companies.
Case law is important in the UK because laws are vaguely written and thier specifics are established in court.
By going after entities that can't comply and don't have a big legal budget like 4chan, they can go through the motions and establish that ISP level blocks against non complying companies are okay.
They can then hit progressively more difficult targets until they get to X and tiktok.
The end goal is obviously directing UK ISPs to block services. This whole game is just performative attempts at enforcement to create a paper trail when they propose the blocks.
3. Ask for extradition.
"No US citizen was extradited for an alleged crime while the person was based in the US"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK%E2%80%93US_extradition_trea...
Many flights connect through London.
Right, but that's option 1 (arrest them if they enter the uk).
According to tfa they're based in sweden
libera.chat servers are hosted by volunteers. Most of the libera.chat infra are the the same servers which were switched from freenode in 2021. Existence of the non-profit in Sweden changes nothing, that entity can be closed without any adverse effect for the IRC.
If they were persued, I assume they'd shut down. At the same time, a new IT service called "freechat" or "librenode" would start up.
Not sure why your comment has been received negatively when it seems to be obviously true. Yes, "significant" is ambiguous and I wouldn't be surprised if the intention is to give themselves discretion to go after whoever they choose. The OSA is insidious.
Good insights.
1. Do you think that getting the legal advice was a good defensive measure?
(Something to point to, to establish that they were being responsible, if ever challenged.)
2. And do you think that publicizing it was a good idea?
(Probably they are drawing fire on Monday morning, like you said. But maybe it's a plausibly good tactical move because, just speculating here, someone now takes the time to pay attention to who they are, rather than them later land on some poorly-informed list of non-compliants that gets rubber-stamped for action.)
> Speaking of which, the memo implies that “significance” in this context is interpreted as being relative to the population of the UK, not relative to the user base of the service. We have seen risk assessments that take the other interpretation and consider their UK user base to be “significant” because it makes up a large portion of their overall user base, but the advice we received suggests we should not use this interpretation.
Interesting - this implies that the vast majority of niche communities are not considered to be in scope, so long as they're not on a service like Discord I guess.
Perhaps, but this sort of thing is a part of the problem: the law itself is written vaguely enough that Ofcom could at any time change their interpretation and decide that previously out-of-scope communities are now in-scope, and go after them.
It's just a variation of selective enforcement.
Laws in general tend to leave a bit of room for interpretation, and then those are to be cemented in specific contexts/scenarios by precedents, that's how I understand many systems of law at at least, maybe it works differently where Libera.chat and Ofcom are based.
I think its more about the degree.
Some level of flexibility makes sense. That leaves room to enforce the intent instead of the technicalities.
However if its too broad, then you've basically thrown away rule of law. If everyone is arguably in violation but a government official decides who to enforce, esentially you just have justice by decree.
Does that mean a significant population of Britbongs are on 4chan?
The frog wants a plan for when they inevitably turn up the heat by reinterpreting significance. The time to hop out may be now.
Several comments here are interpreting this as the common "we just don't care about the UK's jurisdiction". That is not what Libera.chat is saying. They have staff in the UK, users in the UK, and are, in their interpretation, abiding by the terms of the OSA. Their interpretation is that the ID verification requirement doesn't apply to their service, for the reasons they outline in the article.
There is an interesting sentence in the post that shows why you want to ask actual lawyers, even if the law actually meant what one would think based on a common-sense reading of the text (it often doesn't) and you could read it (you often can't, because you might not know about a second law that also applies):
> For the time being, services like ours do not appear to be Ofcom’s priority.
Lawyers don't just tell you how the law is interpreted, but also how it's applied in practice. Often, bad law is worked around by the legal system rather than fixing it, and while one could rightfully lament this, if your goal is to get something done rather than fix the country's legal system... ask a lawyer and you might find yourself unblocked, or be told about a way to avoid the issue, or at least have a better understanding how big the risk is in practice, allowing you to make an informed decision.
Yeah, the purpose of regulators applying law differently in practice is so that government administrations can play kingmaker and receive appropriate rewards.
I was expecting/hoping that the legal advice was that an IRC network isn't subject to the law, but it seems like the only advice here was "you're based in Sweden and have only trivial ties to the UK, so the UK/Ofcom can't reasonably go after you".
That feels like a kinda "duh" thing? Even though the UK believes they can enforce this law abroad, if I were running a service outside of UK jurisdiction that would otherwise be subject to the Online Safety Act, I certainly wouldn't comply with it.
That's not how i read the article.
The crux of it was not that libera has no ties to the uk - they appearently do, allegedly some of their servers and staff are there - its that they have insufficient market penetration.
If you step foot in the UK, you would be arrested on the spot.
IANAL and this is a genuine question: do you have personal liability in this case if your website is owned and operated by a corp?
Yes . Controlling individuals also are liable. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli...
In a democracy, the question is "it depends on your pockets, aka how much money you have for a lawyer" - intentional / felony level misconduct can pierce corporate veils.
In an autocracy, you're at God's mercy.
That seems like not a big deal? I never intend to travel to Russia either, or even go near its airspace.
In what universe is that "not a big deal?" That makes an entire country a no-go zone. Worse if it's an offense they could reasonably extradite for.
I don't intend to ever travel to Russia or North Korea, but that's not some trivial anecdote about modern life, those are regimes so hostile to rule of law and individual safety that it's not reasonable to travel there.
What if there's a conference you want to go to, but it's in the UK? Or you have friends you want to visit? Or family, or whatever.
That's also an egregious degradation of the UK's position with regard to Western-norms around personal liberties, which itself is worthy of remark.
> those are regimes so hostile to rule of law and individual safety that it's not reasonable to travel there
And now the UK joins the ranks as well. I should add that the US is also a member of this club if you’re foreign or you appear to be foreign, we are no paragon of virtue either.
The uk is “so hostile to the rule of law and individual safety that it’s not reasonable to travel there” because … if you break the UK’s laws they might arrest you?
Is this a Poe’s Law comment?
Vietnam has extremely strict laws about drugs, but they have the good sense to limit the applicability of those laws to Vietnamese soil. I have no problem traveling to Vietnam just because I might have once smoked a doobie in the US, because Vietnam also has no problem with that. While on VN soil, respect VN laws. Fine by me.
The UK on the other hand seems to have forgotten this basic, common approach to international relations and criminal jurisdiction, so if you work on any foreign technology or content that could be targeted by the UK government, it’s better to stay away.
(Yes I am aware that the US also doesn’t obey this principle, but that doesn’t make it right.)
Ironically, as a UK citizen who may have once smoked a doobie, I could be prevented from entering the US, even though it is 'more legal' there than here. It hasn't stopped me before, of course; what's stopping me now is the current administration and a fear I may be abused by the US authorities for any manner of reasons (including none).
I find it interesting how the shrinking of the world via the internet may result in more international isolation because of conflicting online laws.
> even though it is 'more legal' there than here.
Using cannabis is 100% illegal in every part of the US. The idea that it’s legal in some states is a common misconception, but not true.
Are you saying that if you sell drugs into Vietnam as the supplier and origin and person who profits, then you go there, they won’t arrest you?
If you forge Vietnamese money but you do it outside their border, they won’t arrest you if you go there because (from your other comment) “No country should have the right to enforce laws globally”?
This seems unlikely, and like you are cherry picking the UK because the example is digital and this is HN.
Running a website that distributes information is not the same as selling drugs. That's why free speech is a right and free drugs are not.
And, yes, there are some types of speech (libel, for instance) that merit special scrutiny. A web forum does not. It is literally just an online conversation—the very definition of protected speech.
For the UK to impose these restrictions within its own borders is already unacceptable. For them to play at imposing them on people in other countries is worse still. If they're serious about this, they should suck it up and proactively block websites from abroad that violate their guidelines. Vague threats of punishments without prior warning are ridiculous.
If I open a store in my home country where I sell goods that are legal (for me) and a citizen of a foreign country travels to me to purchase something that is illegal (for them), I should not be legally liable, no.
Whether that travel happens physically or digitally is of no concern to me.
I suppose you may make the argument that the internet is more like shipping a package than handing something over a counter to a traveler. I don’t think this applies. At most it’s like the customer sends a neutral intermediary to make a purchase/pickup, where that intermediary tells me nothing about the customer except a vague idea of their location (which may be inaccurate). In this case it’s the intermediary, or one of the many intermediaries in the chain, who actually “imports” the item.
If you want to block content, start there with the “importer”. China already understands this well, I don’t know why the UK hasn’t caught on other than a desire to force its own local standards on Americans. We won’t stand for it.
(Your example about forged currency is as absurd as an example about nuclear weapons or attempting to organize revolution. Yes, some things cross the threshold into a critical economic/military issue and all bets are off at that point.)
I (a layman) believe that part of the "global" scope of the law is to enable actions at home (and some pressure).
If they want to order ISPs to block services there needs to be some legal framework to do so. "We contacted them, they didn't respond, now we need to revert to blocking" sounds pretty convincing to me.
For your other argument I'll ask the question I ask anytime this comes up: How would you propose laws/regulations on online services are enforced if not (at least in principle) globally?
Order local ISPs to block the site, forbid companies and/or individuals with local presence from doing business with the site, or I dunno, maybe require everyone in the country to install an MITM cert like some backwater autocracy. Not really my problem how you want to run your own country. No country should have the right to enforce laws globally.
Most UK domestic ISP's are part of the IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) where your net passes through a transparent squid proxy. [0]
As well as "family friendly filters" that block rouge sites via their own DNS.
[0] https://www.blocked.org.uk/about
And if you're a person of interest your connection is routes through GCHQ Cheltenham.
So it wouldn't be to hard for Ofcom to apply a filter. If they did expect domestic ISPs will comply but hopefully independent ISPs won't.
Some people have friends/family/etc in Russia too yet it does not make it less of a shitty country. Here in Lithuania we there’s at least one or two sob stories every year about somebody visiting relatives in (bela)rus and ending up in prison there.
I’m more afraid that anglosphere is showing the way for the rest of west-y world. Looking at chat control stuff and all that jazz, it’s matter of time same stuff becomes a thing in the rest „free“ world.
> That makes an entire country a no-go zone.
There are plenty of countries like that.
> but it's in the UK? Or you have friends you want to visit? Or family, or whatever.
Then yes, if on a individual level that affects you, you have to be careful. Like citizens of China or Russia, or Saudi Arabia. Welcome to the club, UK, I guess?
You'd better carefully check the flight path of every longer distance route then, otherwise you may find yourself unexpectedly crossing the airspace of countries like Russia (e.g. IME Newark to Hong Kong flew over the polar region and right through the middle of Siberia).
This is trivial to check, but yes it’s a good idea to check this for anyone who works on sensitive technology.
What if you're flying to France and your plane has to make an emergency landing in the UK?
Genuine question.
After what happened to Durov I’m not so eager to travel there either. Frankly, given the escalating hostility of the EU to technological freedom, it’s becoming a no-go zone for me. Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and NZ are still nice to visit, though. It’s a big world.
Only a small minority of people use planes in the first place
Honestly though, I’ve done almost all the travel to the UK I need. It would be kind of an outlaw badge if honor to be banned from a first world country for something like sharing memes they don’t like.
There’s a lot of non-UK world to walk around in.
The King of Thailand is an asshole.
There. Now I can't go to Thailand.
Why do people act like breaking British law is a bigger deal than breaking Thai law?
At least nobody's acting like it's obvious British law applies everywhere, like they tend to do with the GDPR.
Turns out, laws end at the limits of the jurisdiction's ability to enforce them! What a concept!
Unless you're from China.
> end result is the same: a denial of service to people in the UK solely because of the country they live in.
This would also probably help sway the public opinion in the UL to stop electing representatives that come up with laws like this - so a win either way.
Are you making a common mistake of assuming laws like this don't represent public opinon?
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
Middle England is conservative and authoritarian.
To steel-man this - the public have become more wary of the internet's influence on society generally: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/technology/trackers/how-optimist...
If you consider all we know about the excesses and influences of big tech companies, and then blunt that down to a more lay perspective, it's pretty easy to understand why we've landed up here.
People have lost faith in us.
> People have lost faith in us.
That's a very powerful way to sum up what I've been feeling for a while.
People did lose faith, and to be honest, I can't really blame them. From a layman's perspective, it's not obvious that there's a distinction between "Big Tech" and other so-called "providers of services" (the term itself feels kind of icky) in the internet. Throw the "Tech Bro" term in there and things get even more difficult.
I'm guessing a lot of people never really knew about forums, chat communities and other things like that existing outside of the big social media companies' mostly-walled gardens. Maybe they heard some scary things about 4chan, well, that'll help.
To many of them, it's the little man vs. the big tech companies that skirted regulations for way too long. That there's a possible third party (or rather, category) involved is not obvious from the outside.
Yeah, sadly the average thought on this law starts and ends with "think of the children" and "it's just like buying alcohol"
It seems to come up a lot in reference to laws like the UK one, the Australian social media ban for under 16s and all sorts of similar measures around and about.
It’s the end of democracy in country X! The government’s taking away the people’s rights to x, y and z!
I mean, kinda, but it’s also hugely popular. Regular folks want their kids protected from some of this stuff, don’t believe that Silicon Valley and allied tech bros have their best interest at heart (and shouldn’t) and will readily vote for it.
Heck, I don’t have kids and I’m broadly in favour of the principle of keeping kids off social media, it’s just very hard to answer “what exactly do you mean by social media?” or “how are we going to do this without impacting adults’ ability to interact freely?”
Nobody wants this law but it's very common in the UK and Europe to pretend consultations make it a democratic process with good representation when it's just the typical power hungry politicians, security forces and corporate lobbyists getting their way. It's not middle England or "conservatives". It's usually approved by the parliamentary monoparty of the current time and the entire pretense on dissent is usually performance for different set of BS.
Of course it's useful to have people like you make it about fake left v right tribalism so you don't realize how far from a democracy these parliamentary systems are.
I really don’t get it. Just blanket block all UK ips. All sites should be doing this—large or small. I’m going to on my small blog even.
You don't need to do this for your blog. Comments on "provider content" are out of scope. [1] This was done mainly to protect legacy press and media comments sections but it applies equally to a blog comments section.
[1] - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/55
The Internet no longer interprets censorship as damage and routes around it[0]. Instead, it is interpreted it as an opportunity to raise the barrier of entry for competitors, and embraced.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)#Activi...
I agree 100% and say that as somebody from Britain. The population needs to feel the pain of restrictions so that they will force the Labour government to rescind this law. Simply doing what this website is doing is simply going along with the problem. A blanket ban from the rest of the world will cause uproar (hopefully).
I don't think that would happen. Most of the large tech platforms will essentially just comply or come to a deal e.g. The IPA Demand for the UK gov to have a global backdoor iCloud was only rescinded when some deal was made between the current US administration and the UK gov.
The smaller companies like 4chan are going to court to have the matter settled. If that is settled in 4chan's favour, legally the UK won't be able to do anything.
That might work if it was an instantaneous global move. Unfortunately, we're far more likely to be boiled like frogs.
Agree (as a Brit). If Wikipedia blocked the UK, it would cause an absolute storm.
There's like 70m of us and most people will just use competitors as opposed to bothering with VPNs. So you're shooting yourself in the foot, financially.
Sucks for people trying to make money then, but that’s hardly a sympathetic case. Sounds like the UK are the ones truly shooting themselves in the foot. Again.
There is a huge amount of UK infra now that is dependant on US companies either directly or indirectly (AWS, Microsoft/Azure). Code, data and infra is locked into US platforms. When US-EAST-1 when down last week, it halted our whole operations at our workplace. Looking at freelancer groups I am part of (whatsapp, slack etc), they had the same experience.
The UK being blocked from the outside won't happen anyway. The large tech giants will just either cut a deal (this already happen with Apple/iCloud), or they will comply with the new acts. The sites that don't comply won't be big enough for anyone to care in normie land and thus there will be no real pressure on the UK gov.
Given that the average adult height in the UK is slightly below 1m70, that means there's almost 42 of you!
Oh no, our websites will only be accessible by 99.15% of the world's population and 97% of its economy. Irreparable financial harm.
We should fight this injustice rather than submit to it.
I'm pretty sure they can't visit the UK right ? As the UK has jurisdiction over them , if they are physically there.
> We have a few servers in the UK, but they can be migrated on short notice.
You should do that as soon as possible. You don't escape past "violations" by dealing with them when they are discovered. Plus the presence of servers in the UK is easily enough for Ofcom to go after you, even if they ultimately lose their case. There's no benefit to keeping those UK servers.
> we can reasonably argue we do not have sufficient links to the UK for the Online Safety Act to be applicable to us.
> keeping internal estimates of our UK user base
The fact that you know you have UK users is also almost certainly enough for Ofcom to go after you. Did 4chan have any stronger links to the UK? I don't think so.
I'm not saying they should give in and follow the OSA but I think they're being pretty naive about how reasonable Ofcom is.
That's great, what about when Europe does the same?
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...
It's a corporate lobbyst push and UK/Australia are just the canaries in the coalmine.
You won't escape it by being "they didn't quite come for me yet".
For anyone who read the post title incorrectly, as I did initially:
Libera.chat: an IRC network
LibreChat: an open-source chat application that supports multiple AI models and provides a UI similar to ChatGPT
I was only familiar with the latter, which is a very cool and useful project. Currently reading up on the prior.
It used to be that a lot of free and open source developers would hang out on Freenode IRC to communicate with users; then things happened, and Libera was forked from Freenode.
I guess you're one of today's 10,000 learning about IRC.
It used to be as well known as HTTP. How times have changed.
I used to run a BBS out of my parents house as a kid. I'm old enough to know what IRC is, but in my experience it was that thing you'd get booted from as soon as you tried to access it, lol.
Not a lawyer but from depths of GDPR meetings and implementation work years ago, my understanding was if you do not have any exposure in a given jurisdiction (typically office or employees etc) then you can tell them to get lost.
UK should not be able to regulate nature of photons being sent from outside of their borders.
What am I missing?
If you physically transit through UK jurisdiction then they could arrest you through a Commonwealth wide warrant. Say, you go to the Bahamas then your name might pop up on the computer and you get collared and deported to Britain. If you're an executive then they will happily grab you.
I’ve wondered why more people don’t talk about this approach. Is it because you might get arrested if you ever do step foot in the UK?
It comes up in every thread about this sort of thing. It is basically true, although keep in mind that the UK is basically a “friendly” country to most of the other countries that are in the sort of… liberal/capitalist/democracy clique, so hypothetically it wouldn’t be that surprising if some of our countries ended up with some reciprocity some day for the fines or whatever.
There’s no reason to assume that a totally different law in a different country works the same way as GDPR does.
> TL;DR: the legal firm we’ve engaged has sent us a memo indicating that in their opinion we can reasonably argue we do not have sufficient links to the UK for the Online Safety Act to be applicable to us. They also believe we would be at low risk of attempted enforcement action even if Ofcom does consider us to be in-scope for the OSA. We will continue to ensure that this is the case by keeping internal estimates of our UK user base and by continuing with our current efforts to keep Libera.Chat reasonably safe. We have no plans to institute any ID requirements for the forseeable future.
Is it just me or is this not super confidence inspiring for what happens in the future? This just seems like an arbitrary time in future when they either have enough UK users or if Ofcom suddenly lowers or entirely removes the arbitrary "size" estimate, OSA will become applicable? As far as I can tell, we don't even know what this arbitrary "size" estimate is?
Sure, but if you're forward looking, the rules could change and it's not predictable.
This kind of a memo is a useful CYA. An interpretation of the current situation and likely risk factors, and when the situation changes in the future, an artifact that justifies their current non-compliance. Will Ofcom/courts accept it and not require compliance if the situation changes? No, but it might eliminate or reduce penalties for non-compliance.
I think the goal is not to provide confidence (at least not artificially so). The situation is just not great. This letter:
* At least reassures their users that they are doing their best, at least, even though that might not be much.
* Emphasizes the difficulty of the situation that the UK created.
* Shares, at least, a description of the advice they got (properly caveated that they or their lawyers weren’t giving anybody actual legal advice).
What a waste of limited resources. What happened to the libre anti copyright hackers and piraters from the 90s? It's effete, getting a lawyer. Better to draw a picture of Steimer covered in feces and fax 10000 copies to parliament
What happened is that governments successfully figured out how to police the internet. Except for Tor. For some reason though, we're still not layering everything on top of Tor.
I don’t really think libera has or has ever had that kind of ethos or aesthetic. It is used by a lot of serious people and projects that are not directly involved with copyright politics and have no interest in cosplaying as ThePirateBay.
the 150,000 or so people who still actively use IRC networks absolutely have a major crossover with these.
Sure, no argument there.