American Platforms To No Longer Service Brits and Europeans Due To Their Despotic Governments
Online forums based in the United States that rely on First Amendment protections are getting caught up in internet regulations in the UK and Europe, where they now risk being blocked under recent legislation.
Hailed by the British government as the world’s first online "safety" law, the Online Safety Act (OSA) requires online platforms to implement measures to "protect" (censor) people with far-reaching implications for internet services.
Gab, an American social media network, positions itself as a champion of free speech. Gab CEO Andrew Torba said in a March 26 social media post that the UK government has demanded that it submit to “their new censorship regime under the UK Online Safety Act.”
Gab --- which has no legal presence in the UK — was informed in a letter from UK regulator Ofcom on March 16 that it falls specifically within the scope of the law and must comply. Gab has refused to comply with the OSA. “We will not comply. We will not pay one cent,” Torba said. Gab’s lawyers said that their client is a US company with no presence outside of the United States. “The most fundamental of America’s laws — the First Amendment to our Constitution — ensures Gab’s right to provide a service that allows anyone, anywhere, to receive and impart political opinions of any kind, free from state interference, on its US-based servers,” they said in a statement last month. Gab also refused to comply with legislation in other countries.
Web forum Kiwifarms said it also received a letter from Ofcom. The platform is now blocking users in the UK because of the legislation. “You are accessing this website from the United Kingdom. This is not a good idea. The letter states the UK asserts authority over any website that has a ’significant number of United Kingdom users’. This ambiguous metric could include any site on the Internet and specifically takes aim at the people using a website instead of the website itself.”
In November 2022, Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski turned “off France entirely” after the company refused to comply with the country’s demand for the removal of Russian state-media accounts.
The law has already affected dozens of smaller UK websites, from forums for cyclists, hobbyists, and hamster owners, to those supporting divorced fathers. The regulatory pressure and the many rules have caused many of them to shut down, despite some operating for decades.
US lawyer Preston Byrne said he believes that enforcement of the law could set it on a political collision course with the United States. “London should brace for significant political blowback” he told The Epoch Times by email.
Tidmarsh mulled that the UK could also face threats of tariffs. This year, US President Donald Trump issued a memorandum seeking to protect American companies and innovators from what he called “overseas extortion.” The chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, appointed to the FCC helm by Trump in January, said that DSA’s approach was “something that is incompatible with both our free speech tradition in America and the commitments that these technology companies have made to a diversity of opinions.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-uk-internet-policing-law-targets-us-online-forums