If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Ofcom appears to believe that a website is a kind of television channel. This would explain a lot about what happened on Wednesday, when Britain’s speech regulator fined an American mental health and suicide discussion forum £950,000 ($1.3 million) for hosting speech that is legal in America, on servers in America, operated by Americans. The site had already blocked British visitors from accessing it, voluntarily, as a gesture of goodwill, despite having no legal obligation to do so and despite Ofcom having no jurisdiction to demand it. Ofcom fined it anyway. The fine is unenforceable. The site owes Ofcom nothing under American law. And even if the site had never blocked a single British visitor, Ofcom’s case would still make no sense, because a British regulator cannot fine an American citizen for legal American speech on an American server any more than the French postal service can fine you for what you write in your own diary. Ofcom is the Office of Communications, the British government’s speech regulator. Americans don’t really have an equivalent because most Americans would never stand for one. The closest thing is the FCC, except imagine the FCC could also decide what you’re allowed to say on the internet and fine you if it disapproves. Under the notorious Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, Ofcom gained the power to decide what speech is permissible online and to fine platforms that host speech the UK government doesn’t like. That includes speech that is perfectly legal everywhere else on earth. It is, when you think about it for more than four seconds, absolutely mad. Ofcom launched on December 29, 2003, stitched together from five separate regulators: the Broadcasting Standards Commission, the Independent Television Commission, the Office of Telecommunications, the Radio Authority, and the Radiocommunications Agency. They all dealt with broadcasting, telecoms, or spectrum. They regulated transmitters, phone lines, and radio frequencies, all of which used publicly owned spectrum and publicly funded infrastructure to push content into British living rooms. The airwaves belonged to the public. The transmitters were built with public money. If you were using national resources to broadcast to a national audience, it made sense that a national regulator got to set some terms. None of these five organizations were designed to have opinions about what a foreigner writes on a computer in Virginia. The confusion starts with Ofcom not understanding what a website actually is. A website does not push anything. Content sits on a server. A visitor actively goes to it and requests it. The data crosses borders only because someone on the other end typed in the URL. Website users are called “visitors” and not “viewers” for exactly this reason. They go to the site. The site does not come to them. This is not a complicated distinction. A reasonably bright nine-year-old could grasp it over breakfast. Ofcom, apparently, cannot. The regulator is treating a website in Virginia as though it were a transmitter on a hill in Surrey and claiming jurisdiction over the server rather than the person visiting it. It’s like fining an American for not stopping British citizens from mailing letters to them. Preston Byrne, the American attorney representing the forum, identified the forum as SuSu and called Ofcom’s claim that the site remains accessible to UK users without a VPN “untrue.” “In the investigative documents I have seen, neither Ofcom nor its NGO partners were able to access the site without first using a VPN,” Byrne posted on X after the fine was confirmed. The fine is the largest issued under the Online Safety Act. It is also, by any practical measure, just a piece of paper with a large number written on it. Ofcom might as well have fined the moon. Ofcom sent all 197 of its Section 100 enforcement notices to American companies by email, ignoring official channels and bypassing the UK-US Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty entirely. Byrne says the orders “carry no force in the United States.” Collecting the fine would require cooperation from American courts, where the First Amendment would apply. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales called the UK’s position “ludicrous and untenable.” Ofcom doubled down on its jurisdictional claim on X, posting that “the fact that the provider is based outside the UK does not mean the forum is outside the scope of the Online Safety Act.” That is Ofcom’s position. By the same logic, any country on earth could fine any website on earth, since someone within its borders might type in the address. Saudi Arabia could fine a British publication focused on same-sex relationships. China could fine the BBC for its Tiananmen coverage. Russia could fine any Western outlet that calls the invasion of Ukraine an invasion. The UK cannot claim this power for itself and then act surprised when states use identical reasoning against British publishers. They don’t even need to develop new legal theories. Ofcom has written one for them, free of charge, and posted it on social media. The timeline of the SaSu case is where Ofcom’s position goes from questionable to genuinely absurd. What happened, according to Byrne, is worse than it first appears. SaSu voluntarily geoblocked the UK in July 2025. Ofcom publicly accepted the geoblock in October 2025. Then, weeks later, following pressure from the Molly Rose Foundation and allied NGOs, Ofcom reversed course and opened an investigation in November 2025. The facts hadn’t changed but the pressure had. In December 2025, according to Byrne, one of Ofcom’s NGO allies, the Mental Health Foundation, used a VPN to bypass the geoblock that Ofcom had approved two months earlier, and created account credentials on the site. This is stated explicitly in paragraph 5.26(c) of Ofcom’s own Provisional Decision. A UK user had never, at any point since the geoblock went live in July, been able to see the registration page without first deliberately circumventing the block. Ofcom communicated its Provisional Decision to SaSu on February 27, 2026. SaSu’s legal team, which Byrne describes as tiny, ingested the 150-odd page document in full over 72 hours. On March 1st, a Sunday night, SaSu modified an anti-spam feature to ensure that even VPN users could not create new UK accounts. On March 2nd, SaSu wrote to Ofcom explaining what it had done and offering to make further changes. Ofcom did not respond. Then, in May 2026, according to Byrne, Ofcom used the Mental Health Foundation’s credentials, the same account that had been created by bypassing the geoblock in December, to log into the site. It used the output of the Mental Health Foundation’s circumvention to get around the additional security measures SaSu had put in place in March, the ones SaSu had told Ofcom about in writing, the ones Ofcom never responded to. Ofcom concealed the identity of the account it used, giving SaSu no opportunity to identify the problem and fix it. Byrne’s letter to Ofcom, which was, under the circumstances, admirably restrained, laid out the sequence. “The evidence supporting the Provisional Decision was gathered not by observing what UK users can access, but by circumventing the very measure Ofcom asked our client to implement and which our client implemented under Ofcom’s supervision.” If Ofcom’s definition of accessible means reachable by someone willing to use circumvention tools, then no website on earth can ever be compliant. Every site is accessible from every country if you use a VPN. That is how VPNs work. The entire point of a VPN is to make you appear to be somewhere you are not. Declaring that a geoblocked site is still accessible because someone used a VPN is like declaring that a locked house is still open because someone could theoretically pick the lock. The selective enforcement makes the whole thing worse. Ofcom closed investigations into five other sites after they geoblocked UK users, describing those cases as no longer an “administrative priority.” SaSu geoblocked the UK months before any of those five and implemented additional measures beyond what any of them did. Same action, different outcome. The only visible difference is that campaign groups wanted SaSu punished specifically and nobody was lobbying about the others. Byrne’s assessment is pretty blunt. He calls SaSu the site “the Online Safety Act was designed to destroy.” His conclusion applies to every American company Ofcom has tried to contact by email. “For SaSu, compliance had the same consequences as refusal.” If compliance and defiance produce identical outcomes, no rational actor will ever comply again. Every future American target now knows that cooperating with Ofcom gets you the same fine as ignoring it, which makes ignoring it the obvious choice. That is the enforcement model Ofcom just built, presumably without thinking it through, which is becoming something of a pattern. The subject matter here is genuinely difficult. Suicide is serious and reasonable people disagree about what kind of speech around it should be permitted to exist. That question deserves an honest debate. But it is a separate question from whether a British regulator has the legal authority or practical power to resolve that debate by fining foreigners for speech that is legal where it was published. You can believe the content is harmful and still recognize that Ofcom has no jurisdiction over it. Those two thoughts can exist in the same head at the same time. What the UK government actually wants is to prevent its own citizens from accessing certain foreign websites. The mechanism for doing that exists. Parliament can order British ISPs to block sites at the network level. That power falls within UK jurisdiction and it would work. Ofcom said Wednesday it is “preparing an application to the court for business disruption measures” if SaSu does not comply within 10 working days, which means ISP-level blocking. That is the honest version of what they’re doing. But admitting it would mean acknowledging what the policy actually is, which is state-level internet censorship of the kind the UK has spent years criticizing China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea for practicing. The Online Safety Act lets the government pretend it is regulating foreign companies rather than censoring its own citizens’ access to the internet. The fiction requires Ofcom to maintain that it has authority over American websites. It doesn’t, and the SaSu case has just demonstrated that to everyone with a functioning internet connection and the ability to read. The mission creep tells the longer story. Ofcom and its predecessors started with broadcast television and radio, expanded into telecoms, then broadband, then video-on-demand, and now claims authority over the entire global internet. The expansion seemed incremental at the time but the cumulative result is an organization that believes it regulates human speech worldwide, operating from an office in London with no enforceable power outside the United Kingdom and, based on recent evidence, no particular understanding of how the internet works. The $1.3 million fine will never be collected. The geoblock is still up. The large platforms with legal teams will ignore Ofcom or fight it. The small forums and independent sites, the ones without corporate money, will see a near-million-dollar fine and consider whether existing is worth the hassle. That is who this enforcement model actually threatens and it is the opposite of what a regulator should be doing. Ofcom has no coherent theory for regulating the global internet and no practical power to do so. What it does have is the ability to generate headlines, which is what Wednesday’s announcement was. A press release dressed up as law enforcement, directed at a website that already did what the regulator asked, fined for the crime of cooperating with Ofcom’s absurdity. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Ofcom and the Fantasy of Global Speech Control appeared first on Reclaim The Net.