Undue Process

To the best of my knowledge, Imgur is the first mainstream company to quit the UK in response to the Online Safety Act (though many US news sites remain unavailable due to 2018’s General Data Protection Regulation. Widely used to host pictures for reuse on web forums and social media, Imgur shut off UK connections on Tuesday. In a statement on Wednesday, the company said UK users can still exercise their data protection rights. That is, Imgur will reply within the statutory timeframe to requests for copies of our data or for the account to be deleted.

In this case, the push came from the Information Commissioner’s Office. In a statement, the ICO explains that on September 10 it notified Imgur’s owner, MediaLab AI of its provisional findings from its previously announced investigation into “how the company uses children’s information and its approach to age assurance”. The ICO proposed to fine Imgur. Imgur promptly shut down UK access. The ICO’s statement says departure changes nothing: “We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing.”

The ICO calls Imgur’s departure “a commercial decision taken by the company”. While that’s true, EU and UK residents have dealt for years with unwanted cookie consent banners because companies subject to data protection laws have engaged in malicious compliance intended to spark a rebellion against the law. So: wash.

Many individual users stick to Imgur’s free tier, but it profits from subscriptions and advertising. MediaLab AI bought it in 2021, and uses it as a platform to mount advertising campaigns at scale for companies like Kraft-Heinz and Alienware.

Meanwhile, UK users’ Imgur accounts are effectively hostages. We don’t want lawless companies. We also don’t want bad laws – or laws that are badly drafted and worse implemented. Children’s data should be protected – but so should everyone’s. There remains something fundamentally wrong with having a service many depend upon yanked with no notice.

Companies’ threats to leave the market rather than comply with the law are often laughable – see for example Apple’s threat to leave the EU if it doesn’t repeal the Digital Markets Act. This is the rare occasion when a company has actually done it (although presumably they can turn access back on at any time). If there’s a lesson here, it may be that without EU membership Britain is now too small for foreign companies to bother complying with its laws.

Boundary disputes and due process are also the subject of a lawsuit launched in the US against Ofcom. At the end of August, 4chan and Kiwi Farms filed a complaint in a Washington, DC federal court against Ofcom, claiming the regulator is attempting to censor them and using the OSA to “target the free speech rights of Americans”.

We hear less about 4chan these days, but in his book The Other Pandemic, journalist James Ball traces much of the spread of QAnon and other conspiracy theories to the site. In his account, these memes start there, percolate through other social media, and become mainstream and monetized on YouTube. Kiwi Farms is equally notorious for targeted online and offline harassment.

The argument mooted by the plaintiffs’ lawyer Preston Byrne is that their conduct is lawful within the jurisdictions where they’re based and that UK and EU countries seeking to enforce their laws should do so through international treaties and courts. There’s some precedent to the first bit, albeit in a different context. In 2010. the New York State legislature and then the US Congress passed the Libel Tourism Protection Act. Under it, US courts are prevented from enforcing British libel judgments if the rulings would not stand in a US court. The UK went on to modify its libel laws in 2013.

Any country has the sovereignty to demand that companies active within its borders comply with its laws, even laws that are widely opposed, and to punish them if they don’t, which is another thing 4chan’s lawyers are complaining about. The question the Internet has raised since the beginning (see also the Apple case and, before it the 1996 case United States v. Thomas) is where the boundary is and how it can be enforced. 4chan is trying to argue that the penalties Ofcom provisionally intends to apply are part of a campaign of targeted harassment of US technology companies. Odd to see *4chan* adopting the technique long ago advocated by staid, old IBM: when under attack, wrap yourself in the American flag.

Finally, in the consigned-to-history category, AOL shut down dialup on September 30. I recall traveling with a file of all of the dialup numbers the even earlier service, CompuServe maintained around the world. It was, in its time, a godsend. (Then AOL bought up the service, its biggest competitor before the web, and shut it down, seemingly out of spite.) For this reason, my sympathies are with the 124,000 US users the US Census Bureau says still rely on dial-up – only a few thousand of them were paying for AOL, per CNBC – and the uncounted others elsewhere. It’s easy to forget when you’re surrounded by wifi and mobile connections that Internet access remains hard for many people.

Elsewhere this week: Childproofing the Internet, at Skeptical Inquirer.

Illustrations: Imgur’s new UK home page.

Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.