SUMMARY
- Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes told British lawmakers on Monday that the regulator may never collect fines against foreign websites if foreign courts stand in the way.
- Only two of the eleven fines Ofcom has issued under the Online Safety Act since March have actually been paid.
- The admission comes weeks after a U.S. federal court signaled that a British speech penalty against the American message board 4chan would be unenforceable in American courts.
Britain’s online regulator has admitted to Parliament that it cannot make foreign websites pay the fines it issues under the Online Safety Act. Appearing before the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee on October 20, Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes said that where foreign courts intervene, there comes a point at which Ofcom must accept that “we won’t be able to recover that money.”
The statement effectively ends Ofcom’s eighteen-month effort to bring the American message board 4chan under British law. It also confirms what the Foundation for Freedom Online has argued since the Act came into force in July 2025: a British regulator has no practical means of compelling an American publisher that operates entirely on American soil.
A regulator that cannot collect
Ofcom has issued eleven penalties under the Act since enforcement began in March, and nine of them remain unpaid. The best-known is the £520,000 fine against 4chan Community Support LLC, a company with no offices, staff, servers or bank accounts in the United Kingdom.
As recently as July, Ofcom told British newspapers that it expected to recover the 4chan penalty through the courts of the country where the company is based. FFO reported at the time that this amounted to a plan to enlist American police and judges to enforce a British speech fine. Dawes’s testimony indicates that the regulator has since concluded the plan is not workable.
When Ofcom expanded its investigation in December 2025 to demand that 4chan install “highly effective age assurance,” it was asserting jurisdiction over any website in the world with British visitors. The practical value of that claim always depended on whether anyone outside Britain could be made to comply with it.
What the American court said
The foreign court Dawes has in mind has already spoken. In September, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed 4chan’s lawsuit against Ofcom on sovereign immunity grounds, but the opinion went well beyond the question of immunity.
Because 4chan has no presence outside the United States, the court observed, any attempt to enforce a British judgment would have to go through American courts, where 4chan could rely on the First Amendment. American courts generally refuse to enforce foreign judgments that conflict with the Constitution, the judge noted, citing a 1995 decision in which a D.C. court declined to honor a British libel award on public policy grounds. The court added, although neither side had raised the point, that a foreign penal judgment may be unenforceable in the United States whatever its constitutional merits.
4chan lost the motion, but the opinion gave it most of what it had sued for. Ofcom now knows that bringing a collection action in America would require it to waive sovereign immunity and risk a ruling on the merits that it would be unlikely to survive. As 4chan’s attorney Preston Byrne wrote on Monday, the court was telling Ofcom that its writ does not run in the United States.
Hurdles for the Transatlantic Censorship Attack
FFO has covered this dispute from the beginning. When the Act took effect, we described it as a transatlantic censorship attack, noting that it is backed by fines of up to £18 million or ten percent of global revenue and, as a last resort, by ISP blocking orders. We then set out how the law reaches Americans through fines, criminal charges and business disruption orders, naming 4chan and Gab among the first platforms targeted.
We later documented how U.S.-funded NGOs and former American officials helped shape the Act, including the “small but high-harm platforms” provision Ofcom now uses against American forums, and we published an overview of British online censorship covering age verification, forced newsfeed changes and proposals for device-level scanning. In our review of the top free-speech wins of 2025, we listed 4chan’s refusal to engage with Ofcom at number six.
What comes next
Ofcom is expected to return to Parliament to seek “interim business disruption measures,” which would allow it to block foreign websites in Britain before an enforcement process is complete rather than after. Parliament rejected those powers when the Act was drafted, and Nadine Dorries, the minister who introduced the Bill, has since said they should not be granted. Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s new National Centre for Information Defence suggests the government is nonetheless moving toward more domestic control of online content rather than less.
A block on 4chan in the UK would restrict British users and British ISPs. It would not affect 4chan itself, and British users with a VPN would be able to get around it.
For Americans, the question is whether Congress will act. The GRANITE Act and the HOMEFRONT Act, both pending, would remove sovereign immunity from foreign censorship agencies and allow Americans who receive their orders to sue in federal court. Ofcom’s testimony supports the case for either bill. A regulator that will not litigate where it expects to lose can be deterred by a law that makes losing certain.
Ofcom’s enforcement against 4chan was resisted for eighteen months by two American lawyers working without pay, and the regulator has now conceded it cannot collect. That is a reasonable indication of how far its authority over foreign publishers actually extends.
Sources: Preston Byrne, “Ofcom Concedes Defeat in the 4chan Case”; Guido Fawkes; Commons CMS Committee oral evidence, October 20, 2026.
