If 4chan continues to ignore Ofcom, the forum could be blocked in the UK. And 4chan could face even bigger fines totaling about $23 million or 10 percent of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, whichever is higher. 4chan also faces potential arrest and/or “imprisonment for a term of up to two years,” the lawsuit said.
No it’s the packets being sent from the 4chan server.
Stopping every single packet (or in the real world truck) to check it isn’t feasible, do that and you get 20 mile queues up the m20 (and the digital version of that). Plus any government trying to so it like that would get accused of tax payers money due to the insane amount of resources that would be needed.
Placing the responsibility on the company makes sense, so does issuing penalties for non compliance. The company that has a fine issued against them can of course ignore it if they’re set up outside the country that issues the fine. But they should then expect the country issuing the fine to escalate. If they don’t pay and don’t comply they can expect to have any assets in the uk seized and eventually get blocked from operating entirely. And probably have any executives arrested of they enter the country. Ofcom can’t just jump to getting a court order though because they need to be fair and give 4chan a chance to comply if they want to.
The problem with the online safety act is that it exists at all, and that they expect people to use third party authentication services many of which are operating from countries with poor data protection regulations. That said, as iit does exist the logic of saying that companies are the ones responsible for what people access from their servers does make sense.