The EU wants to go after encryption. By introducing means to be able to see messages in services before they are encrypted and sent. Law is currently being discussed.
Basically:
“Trust us bro, we will have the means to read your stuff but we promise to never read them or abuse it. Trust us.”
Look at bigger picture. Ignore that it is 4Chan and imagine it is a site that you actually like or care about. That is the point.
The reason they go after 4Chan is because they want to normalise this general type of censorship and hope people are gullible or biased enough that they will or would let obvious authoritarian censorship slide because they know some people dislike the site. It is manipulation and how you push the Overton Window towards general censorship.
The point is that the UK should never do that and the law is bad. Whenever you see shit like this, switch the “thing” in question to something you like and be honest to yourself and think if you would be okay with that.
If they can do it easily to things you dislike, then they can as easily do it to things you like.
The fact that is Labour, or the equivalent of the USA Democrats trying to hinder public speech in other countries via this insane laws is something worth noting. Any side can do this.
The Biden Admin tried and failed in some fronts and got censorship working in others.
The UK government is basically testing the waters of what it can get away with and also normalising the notion that they could even bother/dare to ask for this to be done in the first place.
It is about shifting the Overton Window for the normies. Especially, over time. For example, the first people to be cancelled or removed from social media years ago, like almost 10 years ago, it was done with some bad fanfare, and the people who did it, Twitter, etc… I remember said that they did it even despite some internal strife over the notion of censorship. Now, people can get cancelled on a dime and no one really cares all that much.
If you told someone 20 years ago that you should pay ca$h out of your own pocketas to get a corporate microphone that listens to you, your family, your children, constantly so it can play songs for you and tell you the weather and gives some other conveniences, 99% people would say that you would have to be fucking insane to do that. Being such a breach of damn common sense and reasonable privacy. Look at people now. Shifting the Overton Window over timr works for fun, control and profit.
Of course, if the US does not play along, then UK’s bill goes nowhere outside the UK, or maybe they will try it with weaker geopolitical countries. But governments do this type of thing all the time, under a, “We will push until someone else finally pushes back,” mentality.
If the UK really wanted to go after 4Chan, they could contact the FBI or whoever in the USA that could serve relevant via proper channels. This has always been available to them, but this is not about that, it is about censorship and control. Obviously.
The internet is open. It is not up to a site to block a country just because. Which is what happened here, and this why their law is dumb and over reaching.
The argument is more like:
“UK citizens, via the open internet could see your site, and we have now decided that we do not like it. We are not going to complain via diplomacy or via your country’s existing Laws or policing agencies, as such, you must pay us £20,000 in fines, per day, for existing because we say so. Despite you having no interests, employees or infrastructure, at all, in our country.”