It is a massive global undertaking involving untold collective man hours developing, implementing, and updating. They may as well be adding an invisible 1/2 pent tax on every man woman and child like some sort of hidden global sovereign.
This is a war they lost long ago and they keep trying to take power to which they are not entitled. The correct answer is like the Boston tea party dumping their imperial assumptions into the ocean.
If they want to block content they should take the responsibility to do so themselves. Even just blocking advertisers who fund problem sites would probably take care of whatever problem they are trying to solve.
Now, for a relatively high-profile website such as 4chan, who deliberately dodges responsibility for the content it knowingly hosts, I'd say it is not a huge effort. They have the staff for that kind of thing. If they decide they aren't complying, then the UK government might order UK-based ISPs to block access and they will comply - as they did many times before. The people in charge of the company might face charges if they ever set foot in the UK, but that's a risk they need to balance.
And, in the light of legislation that sanctions whoever does business with sanctioned companies, sanctioning advertisers can go a long way to force compliance.
No, but it's a relatively trivial setting to block IP ranges, especially for a service the size of 4chan.
> You can try to geolocate the IP for every individual visitor, but that's a ridiculous burden for website operators and it also doesn't even work.
It's not a ridiculous burden (the ranges are easy to obtain - I did it before) and it's not expected to be 100% effective against a dedicated user because proxies exist.