Why not? It's their responsibility to comply with UK laws if they want to keep serving British customers and making money off of them. Just because the service is provided online doesn't mean it can go on unregulated. You're acting like this is something new that websites haven't had to do for decades.
> Why not?
Because laws vary from location to location, and it's an unreasonable for a [UK] agency to make demands from an exclusively [US] group under the assumption that they are aware of every possible law in existence. Someone in the [US] can't expect to have reasonable influence over the laws in the [UK] that they're now required to follow? That's a blatantly unfair system. That's why not.
But actually why? You confidently assert that because it has happened before, that's the way it should always be!
You're still trying to apply rules for jurisdiction, that don't map well to the Internet. If I was sending someone to the UK to buy and sell, I think your arguments would make sense. But that's not the analogy that applies here. The better analogy is, people from the UK are traveling across jurisdictional lines, and buying from my shop, based exclusively in my country. My country feels privacy and anonymity are important fundamental rights, and my business exists to that end. Here, instead of trying to control UK citizens, and making it illegal for them to travel to the US to do something they want to prevent, they instead are trying to force the US group to attempt to doxx every user and exclude some of them.
That feels insane to me, what's your take on that examplev
Also, I feel it's important to note, part of the reason they're using this specific tactic, is because they're aware how impossible and intractable their demands actually are. To call internet geolocation complex or error prone would be an understatement. So based exclusively that they're demanding someone other than them should tackle a near impossible task, should be enough of a reason to reject the demand. Legal or not, unreasonable demands deserve rejection.
That's why Ofcom started the correspondence, to inform 4chan of laws it may not have been aware of.
> Someone in the [US] can't expect to have reasonable influence over the laws in the [UK] that they're now required to follow
UK companies comply with US laws all the time if they want to continue serving US audiences. I wish this wasn't the case, but this isn't new. Similarly, lots of US news websites aren't available in the EU/UK because they don't comply with GDPR. None of this is new, there's lots of precedent for it.
> You're still trying to apply rules for jurisdiction, that don't map well to the Internet
Sure they do. When I go to boards.4chan.org, the server recognises my request, including where it's coming from, and returns some content. Similarly, when I buy lemonade from a company, they see my shipping address and ships the lemonade. Seems to me like it maps pretty well.
> To call internet geolocation complex or error prone would be an understatement
All other service providers have imposed IP-based limits and that has satisfied Ofcom, so no need to make it more complex than necessary.
> Legal or not, unreasonable demands deserve rejection.
Of course, 4chan is free to reject the demands, just like The Pirate Bay (based in Sweden) have rejected demands from the US government, that was always an option. Ofcom is making the demands to then be able to enforce the OSA, for example by blocking 4chan, without 4chan saying they were not aware of the demands.
How do you suspect a given IP address maps to a geographical location?
Does ofcom supply a list of IP addresses based in the UK? What if it's a US resident using a VPN or other anonymizing tool such as Tor?