IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act • Hacker News Board

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#331

Post by exe34 » Sun, Nov 09, 2025, 9:38 AM UTC

verzali wrote: post #300

hunterpayne wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but I feel like the UK government hasn't thought this matter through. Think about what happens if the US decides it can enforce US law on UK soil against UK citizens. The main industry of the UK is questionable international finance using legal fictions on various islands. What happens when the US decides that that shouldn't be happening anymore? Its the same logic OfCom is using here. And unlike the UK governmen…

The US is quite literally killing people outside its borders every day. It even ran a program of kidnapping and torturing people from foreign countries for years, and still maintains a network of prisions outside America. The US very much thinks it can enforce its laws however and in whatever twisted fashion it likes.

> it can enforce its laws however and in whatever twisted fashion it likes.

The whims of its god-emperor/president. A lot of the enforcement is against US law.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#332

Post by Arch-TK » Sun, Nov 09, 2025, 9:43 AM UTC

bbor wrote: post #36

So the story behind the title is that the UK gov claims that the IP block wasn't working? And the author agrees that IP blocks can't really work, even? Separate from the free speech debate, the international law part of this seems pretty cut and dry. Here's the bolded parts: So, it appears, as with 4chan, Ofcom has elected to proceed with a mock execution... Ofcom is trying to set the precedent that... you have to fo…

Let's say hosting a website for cat pictures is illegal in the UK, but I am based in the US (alas, I am not).

I put up my cat picture website but because the UK is a tiny and barely known country, I don't realise that this cat website would be breaching laws there.

My website gets popular and I receive a strongly worded legal letter from an entity in the UK claiming that they want to take me to court and fine me for providing this website to their citizens.

I am like: WTF? Just fucking block it from your perspective if you don't want your citizens to see it? And I seek legal advice from my lawyer who says: Well, they have no jurisdiction here, so you can ignore this letter, but if you want to minimise hassle, you could just geoblock the UK and hopefully they'll stop coming to you.

So I implement basic geoblocking, which works 99.99% of the time (at least when it comes to figuring out which country an IP is in).

The UK entity acknowledges this in a letter and tells me that this is a sufficient solution for now, but they'll keep watching me.

I go about my business, for some reason or another I make a mirror, which I also implement the geoblocking on, now proactively, because I don't want any more annoying letters from the UK.

Some time later, the UK entity sends another letter claiming they're continuing the proceedings because someone in the UK told them that they could still access my cat website and provided evidence. Within 10 minutes myself and my lawyer both use VPNs to verify the geoblock is still working, and we're confused.

We ask the UK entity WTF, and they say: We have evidence, the fact that it's clearly still working from _our_ perspective is irrelevant, I bet you just geoblocked our IP address.

What do you do in this case?

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#333

Post by Arch-TK » Sun, Nov 09, 2025, 9:45 AM UTC

Common misunderstanding in these comments:

Ofcom expects _you_ the foreign entity to implement geoblocking perfectly. And if not, they will try to fine you first before they even consider implementing blocking on their end.

That's the core issue here.

This has nothing to do with foreign entities circumventing UK based blocking and getting Ofcom letters for it.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#334

Post by JoshTriplett » Sun, Nov 09, 2025, 9:45 AM UTC

sunshine-o wrote: post #147

It is getting really hard to follow their logic. A some point, if you do not have any relationship with the UK, go as far as blocking its residents but they still want you to abide by their law, aren't they just declaring war on the entire world? This is something very deranged that have become very common with the world "becoming smaller": somes will go on a rampage for something happening on the other side of the p…

What they seem to be trying to do is declare war on individual sites, on behalf of activist lobbying, in the hopes that they can destroy those sites despite lacking jurisdiction over them.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#335

Post by bad_username » Sun, Nov 09, 2025, 9:45 AM UTC

jmward01 wrote: post #279

Let's start with a bang. Passports and strictly enforced borders are dumb and this is a clear example of exactly why. Increasingly the digital world -is- the world and arbitrary geographical boundaries are causing nothing but problems. We are taking the ideas of physical borders and passports and, badly, applying that broken idea to a virtual space with typical results. It blows me away that the real problem with str…

How would the absence of strictly enforced borders help this particular situation?

Who/what would defend a website in one place from stupidity in another place, were it not an enforced border between these places?

Or do you imply that the stupidity would not arise anywhere, if there were no borders?

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#336

Post by IshKebab » Sun, Nov 09, 2025, 9:57 AM UTC

jsheard wrote: post #45

8note wrote: post #24

the bravado makes for some great irony. worrying and feeling ultra-superior about the UK government, while letting the tiktok ban and forced sale go through unchallenged. altogether, if you dont care about following this UK law, whats the need to carr what the UK government does? just dont go there or do business with people who care about the UK government. same as US sanctions and secondary sanctions. the UK at lea…

> worrying and feeling ultra-superior about the UK government, while letting the tiktok ban and forced sale go through unchallenged. And more to the point, many US states passing or attempting to pass laws which aren't all that different to the UKs OSA. Mississippi's version is in some ways even more onerous to enforce as it requires social networks to age-check all of their users, not just those who want to access a…

I think Bluesky probably went along with the OSA because the population of the UK is like 20x that of Missisipi. Wake me up when they geoblock California.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#337

Post by bad_username » Sun, Nov 09, 2025, 9:57 AM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #296

jmward01 wrote: post #279

Let's start with a bang. Passports and strictly enforced borders are dumb and this is a clear example of exactly why. Increasingly the digital world -is- the world and arbitrary geographical boundaries are causing nothing but problems. We are taking the ideas of physical borders and passports and, badly, applying that broken idea to a virtual space with typical results. It blows me away that the real problem with str…

> Let's start with a bang. Passports and strictly enforced borders are dumb This. It's weird how it's not considered a basic human right to be able travel to where you want, and even live where you want as long as you can support yourself and comply with the local laws and customs. And that's how it was for like 99% of the time that humans have existed. When did keeping people locked inside "borders" even become a th…

> It's weird how it's not considered a basic human right to be able travel to where you want, and even live where you want as long as you can support yourself and comply with the local laws and customs

The "as long as you can" is exactly the reason. There is no way to ensure the travelers or migrants can (and want) to do that, if you don't have a border.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#338

Post by bad_username » Sun, Nov 09, 2025, 10:05 AM UTC

olirex99 wrote: post #46

When content involves self-harm or illegal activity, the discussion isn’t just about geolocation, it’s about platform responsibility, user safety, and effective remediation. Striking the balance between free expression and preventing real harm is why platforms use content policy teams, abuse reporting, and multidisciplinary responses (moderation + outreach + law enforcement where warranted).

Different countries may have different ideas about the balance you've mentioned. One country should not impose its version on another (with threats of jail time). This is what the discussion is about.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#339

Post by port11 » Sun, Nov 09, 2025, 10:30 AM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #296

jmward01 wrote: post #279

Let's start with a bang. Passports and strictly enforced borders are dumb and this is a clear example of exactly why. Increasingly the digital world -is- the world and arbitrary geographical boundaries are causing nothing but problems. We are taking the ideas of physical borders and passports and, badly, applying that broken idea to a virtual space with typical results. It blows me away that the real problem with str…

> Let's start with a bang. Passports and strictly enforced borders are dumb This. It's weird how it's not considered a basic human right to be able travel to where you want, and even live where you want as long as you can support yourself and comply with the local laws and customs. And that's how it was for like 99% of the time that humans have existed. When did keeping people locked inside "borders" even become a th…

> The West literally bombed Japan and China to open their borders for "tRaDe" then pushed for strict borders after the world's worst wars that they started.

Eh, that literally is doing a lot of work. Where's evidence to this claim? And at what point did we bomb… checks notes, China?

Also keep in mind that “for like 99% of the time” people didn't move that much. People were very linked to their source of food, community, and what brought them stability. There isn't a lot of examples of 17-century travel influencers going around the world looking for The Best Places For Foodies.

Countries have tough challenges to contend with. Borders are arbitrary, yes, but we can't hand-wave them away now. What we can do is work together at the supra-national level.

Re: IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act

#340

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Nov 09, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC

exe34 wrote: post #330

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps "Extraterritorial regulation" is bad wording. A country can regulate whether an extraterritorial website is distributed and or viewed within its borders but it has no legal authority force another country to close down a website that's operating legally within its jurisdiction. The issue is they're doing this through might makes right rather than jurisdictional authority. You have a website in one country,…

> You now have a country censoring a post world-wide because they leveraged every company within their jurisdiction to enforce a law against one that isn't. That's extraterritorial regulation. Hopefully this will break up the cartel of websites/distributors back into a decentralised web eventually.

It would have to do the ISPs and that's a tall hill.