Technology

I’m a bit confused by comments on this topic. Do sovereign countries not have the right anymore to decide their own laws and issue punishment when they’re not followed?

Some laws are bullshit and I commend everyone who decides to ignore them.

but if 4chan ignores them, that opens the door for other measures like delisting the site from search engines or blocking access to it from the UK (these two examples are taken from the article)

This has already happened to a number of sites and services, with some voluntarily blocking access from the UK. 4chan's approach is just a bit different in the way that they are waiting to get blocked instead of doing the blocking themselves. It sucks for citizens from the UK, but they are the ones that put the people in power who created those laws.

Like, to the people saying UK can’t do laws which apply to services which are merely accessible in the UK and have no physical presence there, do you also apply this logic to the GDPR, which works the same way?

This has also been the case already. There are a number of American websites that will just straight up deny you access if you visit them from a EU country. Some even cite GDPR as the reason for being blocked. I don't think it's the best solution, but I accept it because I wouldn't want to visit a site that cannot comply with it anyways.

The UK government is basically testing the waters of what it can get away with and also normalising the notion that they could even bother/dare to ask for this to be done in the first place.

It is about shifting the Overton Window for the normies. Especially, over time. For example, the first people to be cancelled or removed from social media years ago, like almost 10 years ago, it was done with some bad fanfare, and the people who did it, Twitter, etc... I remember said that they did it even despite some internal strife over the notion of censorship. Now, people can get cancelled on a dime and no one really cares all that much.

If you told someone 20 years ago that you should pay ca$h out of your own pocketas to get a corporate microphone that listens to you, your family, your children, constantly so it can play songs for you and tell you the weather and gives some other conveniences, 99% people would say that you would have to be fucking insane to do that. Being such a breach of damn common sense and reasonable privacy. Look at people now. Shifting the Overton Window over timr works for fun, control and profit.

Of course, if the US does not play along, then UK's bill goes nowhere outside the UK, or maybe they will try it with weaker geopolitical countries. But governments do this type of thing all the time, under a, "We will push until someone else finally pushes back," mentality.

If the UK really wanted to go after 4Chan, they could contact the FBI or whoever in the USA that could serve relevant via proper channels. This has always been available to them, but this is not about that, it is about censorship and control. Obviously.

Not so, more's the pity.

The hacker known as 4 Chan is BACK, baby!

Not dead. Just irrelevant.

4chan is a very stubborn website

Look at bigger picture. Ignore that it is 4Chan and imagine it is a site that you actually like or care about. That is the point.

The reason they go after 4Chan is because they want to normalise this general type of censorship and hope people are gullible or biased enough that they will or would let obvious authoritarian censorship slide because they know some people dislike the site. It is manipulation and how you push the Overton Window towards general censorship.

The point is that the UK should never do that and the law is bad. Whenever you see shit like this, switch the "thing" in question to something you like and be honest to yourself and think if you would be okay with that.

If they can do it easily to things you dislike, then they can as easily do it to things you like.

The fact that is Labour, or the equivalent of the USA Democrats trying to hinder public speech in other countries via this insane laws is something worth noting. Any side can do this.

"Taken care of", so how does this kind of perspective differ from the protection law?

The Biden Admin tried and failed in some fronts and got censorship working in others.

If you are not in the UK, this shit UK law doesn't affect you in any way. 4chan will just be blocked by UK ISP's, and people will put up proxy sites that will get regularly blocked blah blah blah like thepiratebay.

Unless the shithead Trump, whose voted-for-twice America actually could do with being isolated from international life (this is not inflammatory, America voted for international non-cooperation), intervenes and our pathetically weak government yet again fails to stand up for itself.

I hope a country like switzerland or something lets companies host servers there for europe without enforcing dumb laws from uk/european union.

Not going to happen with Switzerland and EU laws. Being completely surrounded by the EU, we're really bad with leverage and are already struggling to not have worse and worse deals forced on us. Plus, we have our own Chat Control type law coming up (which is why Proton is leaving). There's no way we'll take a stance against EU law.