Ofcom were grilled by Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 20th October 2026. The committee is investigated the effectiveness of Ofcom in enforcing internet censorship laws contained in the Online Safety Act. The act has been in force
for about 15 months and in that time Ofcom have issued 11 fines mostly to porn websites for failing to implement ID/age verification. Other websites targeted were the US based free speech forum 4Chan, and also the widely reviled Sanctioned Suicide forum.
Ofcom boss Melanie Dawes admitted that tech firms have paid just the two smallest of the eleven fines handed out under the Online Safety Act since March last year. She conceded nine remain unpaid, albeit one of these has not yet passed its due date
and another is being appealed. She did point out that two of the nine have now implemented the required ID/age verification and four have self geo-blocked all users with a UK IP address. Three are totally defying Ofcom by continuing on unchanged.
Dawes added that enforcement measures have run against a brick wall for foreign companies without a presence in the UK. She said:
We won't be able to recover every single fine on online safety. If foreign courts
decide try and get in our way, there will be a point at which we have to accept that we won't be able to recover that money.
The US lawyer representing some of the US victims of the censorship law Preston Byrne had been particularly
vocal about Ofcom's censorship attempts by shredding Ofcom's censorship letters and using them at hamster litter. He continually challenged Ofcom to fight him in the US courts where the famous First Amendment to the US Constitutions guarantees free
speech for all Americans. Byrne colourfully explains:
Unless Ofcom is prepared to sail a British invasion fleet here and land ground troops, enforcement would indeed have to proceed through American courts. Which presents the following problem for Ofcom:
American courts generally
decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution.
It would be a gift to 4chan if Ofcom decided to show up in an American court after all this, waiving sovereign immunity and thus facing the prospect
of an adverse merits ruling in the process. Filing that lawsuit would be suicidal, leading to virtually certain defeat and total loss of enforcement credibility in the United States. It will almost certainly never happen, not for 4chan, and likely not
for any other American target, either.
What will happen next is that Ofcom is going to go back to Parliament to ask for the authority to obtain interim business disruption measures -- i.e., more or less unilateral censorship
powers to block foreign websites in the UK before starting an enforcement process, rather than after. These powers were explicitly rejected by Parliament the last time around and have even now been repudiated by Nadine Dorries, the former MP who
introduced the Bill, having seen what a mess Ofcom has made of it. These powers will also be easily defeated through the use of a VPN.
The UK thus continues its authoritarian backsliding. Sorting out their own country is,
ultimately, a matter for the British, and opposing the grant of new powers for Ofcom -- an agency which was held off by a pair of American solo lawyers working for free -- on domestic policy grounds is a task for the growing UK free speech movement to
take up, with urgency.
Ofcom bosses also explained to the parliamentary committee that geo-blocking UK users from access to website is as far as censorship actions can go. If a website self-geo-blocks there is little point pursing an
ISP block as that effectively adds nothing further to the censorship. UK VPN users will still be able to access the website either way.
