Britain’s bid to police the world’s internet

The UK long ago handed the dubious job of ‘global policeman’ to the US. But when it comes to the internet, it seems Britain retains its imperial delusions of grandeur. Ofcom, and for that matter a good deal of the UK political establishment, apparently think that the world wide web is Britain’s to police, and are happy to weaponise the Online Safety Act to do so. The latest episode in this saga is a dispiriting case in point.

There is an infinitely depressing online forum, based in the US, that discusses, and instructs in detail, methods of suicide. I won’t name the site, but anyone moderately tech-savvy can easily locate it in a minute or so. A fair number have used the information on it, including some in the UK. In 2023, according to the BBC, the forum was linked to 50 deaths in Britain. Last year, the suicide website caught the eye of Ofcom, which ordered it to comply with the requirements of the Online Safety Act. In July, the website voluntarily geoblocked UK users in response to this pressure.

Did that put an end to the matter? Far from it. Last week, Ofcom, guns blazing, told the American forum that it faced fines of up to £18million. This followed reports that the forum had reappeared in the UK under a different domain name.

Ofcom wasn’t alone in trying to dictate the business of an American company, over which it has no authority. Just before Christmas, several MPs wrote to Ofcom demanding it take further steps to close down the forum. Jonathan Hall, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, cheered Ofcom’s aggression. ‘Ofcom shows its teeth’, he said in a post on X.

But before you cheer Ofcom’s crusade, here’s an uncomfortable fact. There is nothing – zip, zilch, nada – that Ofcom, the UK parliament or indeed anyone in Britain can actually do about this website. As the US lawyer for the forum pointed out in November, its owners and servers are in the US, and its content is therefore protected by the First Amendment. It has no UK assets. Demanding it pay fines under the Online Safety Act is utterly futile: Ofcom’s apparatchiks might as well content themselves with hurling rocks at the hull of a Zumwalt-class destroyer. Nor is there much point in UK courts barking orders to block a site that is already geoblocked in the UK anyway. Add to that another disconcerting truth: at the end of the day, the forum remains accessible to anyone with a half-decent VPN.

Here’s another point to consider. While everyone can agree that websites promoting suicide are reprehensible, the consequences of trying to dictate what people can read not only in Britain, but also abroad, are infinitely worse. Britain may have a close relationship with the US, yet it has no more moral claim to moderate what is said there than it does in, say, Burkina Faso. Would Britain accept such censorious diktats from Washington or Ouagadougou? I would hope not.

Even putting the principle of national sovereignty aside, Ofcom’s censoriousness is seriously poisoning relations with the US. Americans take their free speech seriously, and this isn’t the first time Ofcom has targeted US platforms. Think of 4chan and Kiwi Farms, two other dodgy websites that are legal in the US but fall foul of British law. These attacks are increasingly seen for what they are: an effort by Ofcom and the great and the good in the UK to prove their moral worth in an exhibition of self-righteous anti-Americanism, purely for the consumption of soi-disant progressives at home. The optics aren’t good.

Ofcom’s actions are, unsurprisingly, catching the attention of American lawmakers. The GRANITE Act (Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion) – under serious consideration in Washington – would fine foreign organisations, including Ofcom, for any attempts to penalise American citizens for what they say in the US.

The Americans are fed up with the self-righteous priggery of Britain’s would-be global censors. They have every right to tell Ofcom where to go.

Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of commercial law and a former Cambridge admissions officer.