Ofcom appears to believe that a website is a kind of television channel. This would explain a lot about what happened on Wednesday, when Britain’s speech regulator fined an American mental health and suicide discussion forum £950,000 ($1.3 million) for hosting speech that is legal in America, on servers in America, operated by Americans.
The site had already blocked British visitors from accessing it, voluntarily, as a gesture of goodwill, despite having no legal obligation to do so and despite Ofcom having no jurisdiction to demand it. Ofcom fined it anyway. The fine is unenforceable.
The site owes Ofcom nothing under American law. And even if the site had never blocked a single British visitor, Ofcom’s case would still make no sense, because a British regulator cannot fine an American citizen for legal American speech on an American server any more than the French postal service can fine you for what you write in your own diary.
Ofcom is the Office of Communications, the British government’s speech regulator. Americans don’t really have an equivalent because most Americans would never stand for one. The closest thing is the FCC, except imagine the FCC could also decide what you’re allowed to say on the internet and fine you if it disapproves.
Under the notorious Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, Ofcom gained the power to decide what speech is permissible online and to fine platforms that host speech the UK government doesn’t like.
That includes speech that is perfectly legal everywhere else on earth. It is, when you think about it for more than four seconds, absolutely mad.
Ofcom launched on December 29, 2003, stitched together from five separate regulators: the Broadcasting Standards Commission, the Independent Television Commission, the Office of Telecommunications, the Radio Authority, and the Radiocommunications Agency.
They all dealt with broadcasting, telecoms, or spectrum. They regulated transmitters, phone lines, and radio frequencies, all of which used publicly owned spectrum and publicly funded infrastructure to push content into British living rooms.
The airwaves belonged to the public. The transmitters were built with public money. If you were using national resources to broadcast to a national audience, it made sense that a national regulator got to set some terms. None of these five organizations were designed to have opinions about what a foreigner writes on a computer in Virginia.
The confusion starts with Ofcom not understanding what a website actually is.
A website does not push anything. Content sits on a server. A visitor actively goes to it and requests it. The data crosses borders only because someone on the other end typed in the URL. Website users are called “visitors” and not “viewers” for exactly this reason. They go to the site. The site does not come to them.
This is not a complicated distinction. A reasonably bright nine-year-old could grasp it over breakfast. Ofcom, apparently, cannot.
The regulator is treating a website in Virginia as though it were a transmitter on a hill in Surrey and claiming jurisdiction over the server rather than the person visiting it. It’s like fining an American for not stopping British citizens from mailing letters to them.
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