Ofcom Wants American Police to Collect Its Speech Fine
By Cam Wakefield
A foreign censor is demanding that US police override the First Amendment to finish its collection job.
Ofcom has landed on a fresh plan for collecting the £520,000 it insists 4chan owes, and here it is in all its glory: get American police to do the British censor’s dirty work.
That, more or less, is what the regulator told The Independent this week. Asked how it intends to squeeze cash out of a company with no staff, no servers, and not so much as a spare fiver anywhere in the United Kingdom, Ofcom said it had “initiated work” to chase the money and would pursue it “regardless of where the firm is based.”
For a company that keeps everything abroad, a spokesperson said, the job “can involve engaging debt recovery and financial investigation specialists in the jurisdiction where companies do have assets, as well as local law enforcement agencies and courts.”
Local law enforcement agencies and courts. A British quango has floated the idea that American cops will be dispatched to collect a British speech fine, on the week of America’s 250th birthday, from a website whose entire legal existence sits under the First Amendment. You could not make it up, and yet here we are.
Preston Byrne, the US lawyer representing 4chan, gave the plan the review it deserved.
“This is legally illiterate,” Byrne wrote on X. “If they really want to sue us in the United States to recover a foreign censorship penalty, we welcome the fight.”
He was only warming up. “we now have a foreign censor claiming not only that their laws work on U.S. soil, but also that they can conscript U.S. police forces to finish the job,” Byrne wrote, adding that “Ofcom’s threats here are, much like their fines regime, toothless and designed to intimidate.”
His conclusion on the whole business: “it’s long past time for the U.S. to put the UK back in its box.”
The police point is not a lawyer’s flourish. Byrne noted that “deprivation of rights under color of law is a literal felony in the United States,” then wondered aloud, “Not sure how much assistance Ofcom is expecting to get under those circumstances.”
Recruiting American officers to enforce a foreign censorship penalty against a protected American publisher is the kind of favor that comes with a harsh sentence attached. Byrne went further still, saying Ofcom “basically says it’s going to engage in espionage against US citizens who, entirely lawfully refuse its orders.”