No it’s not. Ofcom has no jurisdiction to make a US company do anything. The Internet is a global marketplace. If the UK wants to remove itself from this marketplace, like it did from the EU, it will need to do the blocking itself. But Ofcom knows what the government blocking access to information looks like and they don’t have the balls to do it.
It was done before. Brazil did that to WhatsApp and Twitter and both companies voluntarily complied with the court requests. Rumble remains blocked because it decided it wouldn't comply with the Brazilian court orders.
Those companies were operating in Brazil. They had income booked in Brazil that could be impounded. They had employees there and offices and had to comply with local laws.
4chan isn’t in the UK. 4chan doesn’t have UK employees or offices. 4chan doesn’t book income on the UK. 4chan didn’t have any thing to do with the UK at all.
If this isn’t convincing, consider this: legally what is the difference from Afghanistan requesting anything not legally in compliance with Taliban’s laws be restricted? Would you support that? Legally that is what is going on here.
At one point Elon Musk fired every employee in Brazil in order to prevent that. It didn’t work - the were blocked. After that, Elon caved and named a local legal representative. X has been, since then, very cooperative.
Afghanistan can block anything they want within their borders and hold anyone in contempt if they refuse to comply. Whether I support that or not is immaterial - I would have to comply in order to continue making other content or services available to Afghanistan residents. Being entirely blocked would be worse.
If they want to run that sort of banana republic nonsense in violation of international laws and norms, they can choose to do so (and make an international incident).
What international law or norms are being violated here? Near as I can tell, this is the UK trying to avoid using the mechanisms of international law or norms to impose domestic law on international firms?
