After the United Kingdom began enforcing its sweeping Online Safety Act in April, British regulator Ofcom served violation notices to three notorious sites: 4chan, Gab, and Kiwi Farms, each of which risked multimillion-dollar fines. Late last week, Preston Byrne, a First Amendment lawyer representing them, struck back. Byrne announced he would sue Ofcom in US federal court and added an unusual request. He called on the Trump administration “to invoke all diplomatic and legal levers available to the United States” to protect his clients from the OSA’s reach.
Byrne’s request could put a trio of sites known as hotbeds of violence, harassment, and extremism at the vanguard of the Trump administration’s sweeping new diplomatic mandate: stop foreign countries from using their laws to stifle American speech — especially hate speech — on the internet.
In an interview with The Verge, Byrne said that he’d already been in communications with Congressional offices and administration officials who were following not just this case, but other enforcement incidents he’d flagged in Europe. While the Biden administration didn’t visibly intervene in European investigations into American websites, Byrne claimed that current members of the “U.S. Federal Government” were “very hungry for information, for solid, actionable information, about this… as a free speech activist, I’ve been impressed, I’ve been humbled, I’m immensely grateful to our government, and how they’re responding. I have nothing bad to say about how the government has handled this.”
International internet regulation has expanded as the US political right has gained force online, fueling a backlash against, in particular, the European Union’s Digital Services Act and the UK’s OSA.
