this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
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IIRC moving the instance won't be helpful - the issue is the servicing of minors, not where the service is. And while the server being in a different country might be a bit of a roadblock for legalities, the general consensus is, like with GDPR - if you make your service available in Australia you must comply with Australian laws, therefore need to make your instance unavailable to children.
So how is Australia going to make other sites with no footprint in Australia do it then?
National level site blocking, suspension on any future operations, international courts... Corporations are much easier to persecute over borders than private persons.
Why do you think American companies, even ones with no legal presence in Europe, still went along with GDPR? Same principle applies here.
Australia blocking 4chan in Australia doesn't compel 4chan to do anything.
They didn't want to lose custom in Europe.
Yeah sure that's why major news sites "complied" with GDPR by blocking European visitors...
Some didn't mind the loss of service in Europe and just cut Europe off. Some did. Bottom line is that the EU wouldn't have been able to sue them because they had no assets in Europe.
What is it you imagine Australia could do to 4chan, other than blocking 4chan in Australia?
My point is that the threat of legal action was enough that major sites decided not to risk it, and blocked Europe et al.
4chan is hardly a financial/corporate entity (though they do seem to profit off traffic with ads), therefore much harder to go against, but blocking the service is still effective. It will be up to 4chan to see if they want to comply with the law and get unblocked or if they can live without Australian traffic.
And has 4chan done the same to UK after Ofcom sent them any messages? No, they haven't. There's no meaningful difference between being blocked by a country and blocking them yourself. If we eventually block 4chan, then we do that - but no way would the current US administration accept any attempted fines against them.
Right, but that's all I mean. They can't do anything to 4chan otherwise.
(And this law, comically enough - doesn't really apply to them in the first place because they don't have account signups).
Easily circumvented by changing your DNS settings or using TOR or other VPN services
Not when the specific IP addresses of services are blocked on IPS level - which would be mandated by the state.
VPN/Tor, sure, but at that point the service itself can't confirm where the visitor is from, therefore Australian laws wouldn't apply.
The second half of your comment is redundant. Not knowing where the user is from is THE WHOLE POINT of TOR and VPNs in general. It just proves that this whole internet censorship thing is doomed to fail. It just forces people to find a work-around that the government doesn't control.
But hey, if the government wants to waste time and money pissing into the wind they can go for it, let's see where that gets them.
Except they're wasting tax payer money, which is shitty.
I hope at least it helps reduce pressure on kids that they need social media from their peers, it can be a pretty bad place to be (regardless of age really).
Thats about all the good from it, my fear is everything else that comes after. Mainly that they'll force devices to be linked to a person, which means you'll need a way to have approved devices that can access sites etc, which means you can only use a browser that has device attestation, which means no more free and open ecosystems of applications or operating systems (LineageOS, GrapheneOS, etc)...
Fuck all this.
That's what I'm worried about, too. It's a slippery sloop, one that I think we should all stay well away from.
How does this even work? This is among the stupidest arguments I've ever heard on the internet, at about the same level of flat-earthism.
Are you saying if I am in Italy, selling Italian good on an Italian shop set in an Italian street, and an Australian tourist sends an agent to walk the Italian street and buy a thing for them from my Italian stand, I am somehow beholden to Australian law? This but "oN tHE iNtErNeT"?
This is a complex issue and both of the comments above are way oversimplifying it...
Lots of governments around the world are nowadays claiming that their laws apply to all or many websites that can be accessed in their borders. Whether they can enforce this if the website has no physical assets in the country is a very different question. They could arrest their operators when they enter their countries (as happened to Pavel Durov), or they could geoblock websites, or... here are some starting points for further research: