What Ofcom claims — and why it reaches Americans.

The statute.

The UK Online Safety Act 2023 is a UK statute passed in late 2023 that regulates “user-to-user services” and search services. It imposes duties on those services to prevent users from encountering illegal content, protect children from a broad category of “harmful” content, and satisfy age-assurance requirements. Ofcom — the UK Office of Communications — is the sole regulator with authority to enforce the Act.

Two aspects of the statute are load-bearing for what happened to 4chan.

First, the Act applies to any service “accessible from the United Kingdom.” That phrase is not modified by any presence, incorporation, or corporate-nexus test. If a website is reachable by someone in the UK, Ofcom asserts jurisdiction over it. In practical terms, that includes every website in the English-speaking internet.

Second, the Act authorizes penalties of up to 10 percent of a service’s global annual revenue, along with criminal penalties against named executives for certain failures to comply. Ofcom’s written guidance describes these as tools available regardless of where the service is headquartered.

The enforcement.

On March 19, 2026, Ofcom announced a £520,000 fine against 4chan — £450,000 for failing to implement effective age-assurance systems under Section 12 of the Online Safety Act, and £70,000 for failure to respond to a statutory information notice. 4chan Community Support LLC is incorporated in the United States. Its servers, its employees, and its operations are in the United States. It has no UK entity, no UK bank account, no UK assets. Ofcom’s claim is that the Online Safety Act reaches 4chan anyway, because British users can access its site.

4chan’s U.S. counsel, Byrne & Storm, publicly took the position that Ofcom’s fine is void in the United States, that no U.S. court will enforce it against 4chan or its principals, and that Ofcom has no lawful means to compel compliance on U.S. soil. On August 27, 2025, 4chan (joined by Lolcow LLC, operator of Kiwi Farms) filed a declaratory-judgment action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asking the court to say so on the record and to hold that Ofcom’s enforcement action, as applied to U.S. persons on U.S. soil, violates the First Amendment.

The ruling.

On September 14, 2026, the D.C. District Court dismissed the case on foreign sovereign immunity grounds. The court’s reasoning: Ofcom is an arm of a foreign state; the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act shields foreign states and their instrumentalities from suit in U.S. courts unless one of a narrow set of statutory exceptions applies; none of the enumerated exceptions applies here.

The court did not decide whether Ofcom’s enforcement action against a U.S. platform on U.S. soil violates the First Amendment. It expressly declined to reach that question. As Byrne & Storm put it in their statement the next day, the court held that a foreign regulator may transmit threats of ruinous fines and imprisonment to Americans, on American soil, targeting speech the First Amendment protects, and that no American court has the power to hear a challenge to that conduct, no matter how unconstitutional or illegal it may be.

The court identified Congress as the only body that can change that result — because sovereign immunity is, as the court put it, “a creation of Congress.” The GRANITE Act and the HOMEFRONT Act are the answer to that invitation.

Why this reaches every American, not just 4chan.

4chan is the plaintiff. It is not a coalition partner, and its content is not what this section is defending. The constitutional question the court left open is upstream of any particular platform.

Under the rule the D.C. District Court articulated yesterday, any foreign regulator may fine any American user, publisher, or platform for constitutionally protected speech that a UK user, or a French user, or a German user can access — and there is no U.S. court where that American can challenge the conduct on the merits. That is not a rule about 4chan. That is a rule about whether the First Amendment protects an American from foreign censorship on American soil.

Every American who publishes online is, functionally, a “service accessible from the United Kingdom.” Every Substack writer, every YouTube creator, every X account, every blog. Ofcom’s enforcement doctrine reaches all of them in principle. The question the coalition is putting to Congress is whether Americans should have a courtroom to walk into when it reaches them in practice.

See the bill matrix →   Take action →