There is nothing like a good law to keep the internet “safe” – unless, of course, that law happens to be the UK’s Online Safety Act, and the entities that are supposed to be kept censored are based abroad.
In that case, the country’s media regulator Ofcom, which is in charge of enforcing the Act, is pretty much (thankfully) powerless abroad, as its chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes admitted to MPs on October 20.
In the same hearing, she said that the UK’s coming ban on under-16s using social media will be “much more draconian” (yes, those were her words) for Meta than the settlement the company recently agreed in the US.
“We won’t be able to recover every single fine on online safety,” she said during a hearing organized by the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, dedicated to Ofcom’s work.
The reason is this: “If foreign courts decide to...try and get in our way, there will be a point at which we have to accept that we won’t be able to recover that money.”
Ofcom will not give up easily, Dawes promised: “But we will always seek to go as far as we can.”
Since March 2025, Ofcom has issued 11 fines, two of which have been paid, one is being appealed, and one is not yet overdue. That leaves nine fines unpaid.
Ofcom is not particularly concerned, since “what encourages me about the companies we fined is that they’ve actually done the things that we want to protect the public, and that is the real test of our implementation of the Act,” Dawes said.
Of the nine unpaid fines, two are “porn companies that have now implemented highly effective age assurance,” she continued.
Another four “have geo-blocked the UK. And so that’s three that are still available without the risks being mitigated out of the 11 services,” Dawes said, adding that of 41 investigations launched, “more than half have now been closed.”
One of the two that have paid is Itai Tech, which runs a “nudification” website. In March, LBC reported that the company paid £50,000, plus £5,000 for missing an information request.
At the time, Ofcom’s director of enforcement, Suzanne Cater, said, “We don’t measure success through fines and the amount we recover.”
But those who have not paid are not exactly being brought to heel either.
4chan was fined £520,000 in March 2026, and £800 a day thereafter. But 4chan has no staff, servers or money in the UK, and has not paid the fine.
In fact, the site’s lawyer, Preston Byrne, has been trolling Ofcom, first by responding to the fine with an email containing a picture of an AI-generated hamster, and when Ofcom wrote again, “We replied with a hamster. Again.”
In July, Ofcom closed its case against an American online forum it had fined £950,000, admitting “all possible legal routes under the Act have now been exhausted.” Not one to give up, Ofcom then asked the government for more powers.
In September, a US federal court ruled that Ofcom has sovereign immunity from 4chan’s lawsuit, but also noted that American courts “are not necessarily required to enforce foreign penal judgments.”
Byrne wrote after the hearing, “Insofar as a political organization like Ofcom is even capable of admitting defeat, it did so in the 4chan enforcement today.”
“Unless Ofcom is prepared to sail a British invasion fleet here and land ground troops, enforcement would indeed have to proceed through American courts,” he continued. “Ofcom can’t enforce the Online Safety Act in America. Ofcom knows it, Ofcom has known it for a long time, and now, Ofcom has, finally, admitted it.”
Byrne also told the Guido Fawkes blog, “Come to an American court and get some. If you dare.”
But the part of the law that will work as intended is the one that will be “much more draconian” for Meta than its US settlement, according to Dawes.
She was responding to a question from Labour MP Chi Onwurah, who wanted to know if Meta would apply in the UK the changes it agreed to in a settlement in the US.
Dawes told Onwurah that “of course the social media ban for under 16s will be much more draconian...for Meta than anything that’s going to come out of the US settlement.”
The US settlement will see Meta age-check every Facebook and Instagram user in the states that signed it, cap teen accounts at two hours a day and cut them off from midnight to 6am.
The only way to keep under-16s off social media is to check the age of every single user.
But the one thing that will work is the part of the law that will introduce even more stringent age verification requirements than those in the US. And the only people who can actually be forced to comply are British internet users.
