Today, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced a sweeping social media ban, one of the most repressive Internet censorship regimes in the Western world.

It thus seems like a good time to tell the story of how my clients and I have been fighting the UK’s censorship regime, and provide my recommendation to Congress as to what America needs to do to stop that regime from taking hold in the United States.

As many of my regular readers will know, on behalf of my clients, I have been fighting foreign censors – from the UK, Australia, and Europe – for the last 18 months. That fight has become increasingly visible as countries like Australia, EU member states, and the UK ramp up their extraterritorial enforcement of their domestic laws.

I have been doing this work for nearly a decade, mostly out of public view.

Wider awareness of this issue, and of my work in this field, only really started to develop when the United Kingdom’s censorship agency, the Office of Communications or Ofcom, started targeting highly controversial American companies in 2025, and those companies found few lawyers willing to represent them. On behalf of two of those targets, 4chan and Kiwi Farms, we even sued Ofcom in D.C. federal court.

The UK, apparently undeterred, has continued to ramp up its enforcement efforts, culminating in its announcement of a social media ban on June 15^th that was expressed to target mostly American companies with intrusive, censorial regulations.

There is, however, one really big problem, and it’s not with the UK:

The United States has made a great deal of noise about foreign censorship, but to date has almost completely failed to use hard, sovereign power to make that censorship stop.

What America needs to respond to these foreign intrusions is a law: a shield law that makes censorship of American citizens and companies so disastrous to attempt that the UK will never try it again. 

This essay tells the story of four small companies’ fight against the UK, and calls upon Congress to send backup, posthaste, in the form of a shield law. I can tell this story because I took the cases and did the work, free of charge, that only a handful of lawyers in the United States were willing to do.

What follows is the story about how we got here, and some thoughts about what comes next.

Part 1: How American Companies – Left, Right, and Center – Are Fighting Foreign Censors

For those just joining the conversation, my law firm, Byrne & Storm, P.C., represents, pro bono, the first four American social media targets of the UK’s internet censor, the Office of Communications (“Ofcom”). I also represent these clients against active censorship investigations by Australia, Brazil, and several member states of the European Union. I have done this work since 2018.

Some of these clients are controversial. All of Ofcom’s first enforcement targets, Gab, Kiwi Farms, 4chan, and Sanctioned-Suicide, certainly were. The controversial character of these websites does not change the essential fact that the First Amendment is designed to protect the least popular speech; a free speech right that protects only respectable or widely acceptable views, such as that the UK purports to have, is in fact no right at all.

I am not the only American lawyer fighting foreign censors. But my clients are, as far as I can tell, the only ones who, in the lawful exercise of their constitutional rights, categorically refused to comply with Europe’s vast state censorship bureaus, and were among only a handful – the others being Rumble and Truth Social – willing to actively fight back by asserting American rights in American courts. Every single one of my clients refused Ofcom’s Section 100 orders and did so publicly.

Most of Ofcom’s targets attempted quiet resolution with the regulator. Each has its own counsel, its own posture, its own survival to attend to; each fights its own matter to its own settlement and treats the next company’s letter as the next company’s problem. This was the wrong approach: the foreign attack on American companies’ rights, and that of their users, was anything but a one-off, and is highly coordinated by allied regulators with identical objectives.

For the most part, the American resistance to these foreign censorship efforts to date has been piecemeal and not centrally coordinated. Consider what American companies have already done, across the political map:

• Rumble and Truth Social, served with censorship orders by Brazilian Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes, sued him personally in Florida, challenging the orders’ enforceability in the United States. De Moraes had, previously, seized Starlink assets in order to pressure then-independent social media company X, prior to those companies being merged into a single entity.
• X is challenging a European Commission fine under the Digital Services Act in the European General Court.
• Wikipedia sued Ofcom in England over its regulatory categorization in 2025, under the English rulebook, and lost.
• Meta sued Ofcom, also in England, over its methodology for calculating Online Safety Act fees. The case continues.
• Reddit sued Australia’s eSafety Commissioner in December 2025, in Australia, seeking judicial review of its designation as a platform banned for minors. The case continues.

As these individual skirmishes play out, the U.S. political apparatus has been doing its own diligence on the foreign censorship threat, reaching its own conclusions. The House Judiciary Committee spent the better part of three years investigating and documenting European and Brazilian efforts to pressure American companies into complying with foreign censorship regimes, as well as examining the involvement of U.S.-based actors collaborating with foreign censors to accomplish through the back door what the First Amendment forbids through the front. The Committee found that the European Commission alone hauled U.S. firms into over 100 meetings to push compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act.

Separately, free speech activist Daniel Lu established, through a UK Freedom of Information request, that Ofcom had bypassed the US-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty to send 197 separate “Section 100” demands into the United States as of April 9, 2026.

I have seen about a dozen of these letters. Each Section 100 demand I have seen in the course of my practice contained written threats of fines, arrest, and potential imprisonment for non-compliance. I was so offended by these letters that, in my first interview revealing these letters to the world in July of 2025, I was visibly angry. In each case, the correspondence I reviewed was sent to American citizens in the United States whose speech and conduct was entirely lawful here and protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

As our counter-offensive started to become visible to the wider legal market, some of my colleagues in London expressed incredulity that any law firm would dare refuse Ofcom’s orders and drag the agency into an American forum. Many of them believed, and likely still do believe, that the proper place to fight a British regulator is a British proceeding, on the British regulator’s home turf, under rules the British wrote.

We took a different view; the objective was to fight the UK regulator to a draw, and in so doing buy time for the cavalry, a/k/a the United States, to arrive, while maximizing the chances that this would occur. Our tactics reflected this: we published Ofcom’s “confidential” enforcement letters; we filed suit; we helped draft model legislation to both shield our clients and abolish the Online Safety Act; and, yes, on more than one occasion we even answered an uncollectible fine with references to hamsters.

Each of these choices was a lawful, proper, and prudent exercise of my clients’ First Amendment rights to speak and to petition their government and draw wider attention to this problem.

Free-speech advocates across the political spectrum have long recognized that foreign censorship is a systemic threat requiring a systemic response. I believe, as my clients do, that the only forum with jurisdiction to rule on the legality of American speech is an American court. We do not concede – ever, under any circumstances – that Ofcom or any other foreign agency has the legal authority to interfere with my clients’ constitutional rights or their users’ rights.

Foreign censors, like the UK’s Ofcom, disagree. Over the past 18 months they have tried to enforce their rules on American soil and to override the constitutional rights of American companies and their users, who have a right both to speak and to receive information freely.

This targeting has been politically indiscriminate. From Wikipedia and Reddit on the center-left, to 4chan and X on the right, to Cloudflare, Meta, and Alphabet in the politically neutral middle, no American company should consider itself safe. Foreign censorship does not select its targets by party. The American response should be bipartisan.

The problem every American now shares, regardless of politics, is that foreign governments want to control America’s Internet and render the First Amendment a dead letter online. That threatens us all, and is a problem only Congress has the power to fix.

This is the fact pattern we invite Congress to examine:

• Through the first half of 2025, Ofcom demanded that 4chan write a “risk assessment” and furnish that “risk assessment” to Ofcom. The “risk assessment” is a document in which 4chan would have been expected to confess the manner of its noncompliance with the Online Safety Act to assist Ofcom with making recommendations as to how Ofcom should then seek to censor the site to bring it into compliance.
  
• In the United States, this would be unconstitutional compelled speech and self-incrimination.
  
• 4chan, lawfully exercising its rights, refused to respond.
  
• In response to that non-engagement, which 4chan was perfectly entitled to do in the lawful exercise of its First and Fifth Amendment rights, Ofcom threatened 4chan with fines and imprisonment.
  
• 4chan retained me, and First Amendment litigator Ron Coleman volunteered to join the team. We stayed silent.
  
• On August 15, Ofcom “provisionally” fined 4chan £20,000 for failure to write the self-incriminating “risk assessment report.” That same day, we announced that 4chan would sue Ofcom in U.S. federal court.
  
• On August 27, two weeks later, Ron and I filed that lawsuit on behalf of 4chan and another website Ofcom had threatened, Kiwi Farms, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
  
• On October 13, Ofcom confirmed its “provisional” fine, determining to fine 4chan £20,000. Ofcom argued, in enforcement correspondence, that British censorship law overrides the First Amendment and that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) shields Ofcom from any accountability in an American court.
  
• On October 16, we published Ofcom’s letters and sent them to Congress and federal officials, arguing that shield legislation was needed to patch the legal vuln that Ofcom sought to utilize.
  
• On October 18, I published the first draft of a foreign censorship shield law, the GRANITE Act, on my personal website.
  
• In November, Wyoming Deputy Secretary of State Colin Crossman sent me v1 of the Wyoming GRANITE Act. The bill was filed for numbering in November, formally introduced by Rep. Daniel Singh on February 5, 2026, and passed by the Wyoming House of Representatives on February 23. It stalled in the Senate due to time constraints in the short budget session.
  
• On March 19, Ofcom fined 4chan again, this time for £500,000, again for speech and conduct which is constitutionally protected in the United States. As all parties to that correspondence knew, by that point, the fine was uncollectible due to the fact that Ofcom refused to domesticate its fine in the United States, my client, correctly, declined to cooperate.
  
• On March 31 I, together with co-authors Michael Reiners and Elijah Granet, published a UK Freedom of Speech Bill (full bill text) proposing, among other things, repealing the Online Safety Act in its entirety.

People with far more influence than I have in the UK appear to be reaching the same conclusions about whether the Online Safety Act deserves to continue to exist:

• On May 18, with no coordination from us, after the Online Safety Act’s compliance machinery led TikTok to suppress a Reform UK political video, Reform UK announced it would repeal the Online Safety Act immediately upon entering government.
  
• The next day, Nadine Dorries, who introduced the Online Safety Act in the House of Commons, called for the OSA’s repeal “in its entirety.” When a law’s own author disowns it, the argument is effectively over.

Even so, Reform is not in power, and the UK’s current government has apparently decided, after failing to bring my clients to heel, to double down:

• Today, June 15^th, the United Kingdom announced a sweeping social media ban that targets American companies with its wider censorship scheme.
  
• What does that mean? Well, you know all that outrageous conduct directed towards my clients you just read about above? Now they’re going to do that and more to everyone, all our tech champions and, possibly, anyone else providing a user-to-user service which is accessible in the UK – including, in all likelihood, a lot of American companies that have no physical presence in the UK.
• The specific provisions of the “ban” are TBD and there was conflicting information on the topic reported today; we will need to see the statutory instrument that eventually gets published before we know exactly what it says.

Americans shouldn’t have to put up with this from the British.

The Executive Branch has talked about this, and done some things like visa bans. The UK is not intimidated by these measures and has continued to escalate despite them.

The only federal body that has not done anything about this, due to the way in which it works, is Congress. But Congress is whence one of the critical and lasting hard-power solutions to the problem of UK censorship of American websites must come. There can be no solution to this problem unless Congress acts.

Part 2: The GRANITE Act: Our “Feature Request” to Congress

Beginning around 2019, a group of foreign governments, then-members of the European Union and several of their former colonies, decided the American internet was too free for their liking and set out to bring it under foreign control.

The United Kingdom is one of them. Its Online Safety Act 2023, operational from January 2025, was sold to British voters as a measure to protect children online. In practice, it purported to give Ofcom jurisdiction over essentially any online service in the world, whether based in the UK or not.

My first professional encounter with the Online Safety Act came in 2023, on behalf of an American free speech platform, in a prearranged telephone “getting to know you” call with the UK Home Office. After a cordial discussion of our respective legal traditions, the UK’s officials cut to the chase, and asked how my client intended to comply with their new rule. I replied that my client had no intention of surrendering its rights and would comply just as soon as the United Kingdom landed ground troops on American soil and seized its servers by force.

By the end of 2025, Ofcom had served 197 purportedly binding demands on American companies – nearly one every other day. None of these notices complied with the US-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty or any other process valid under U.S. or international law.

Most American platforms, presumably on the advice of major American and British firms, completed Ofcom’s little questionnaires and treated Ofcom as a counterparty to negotiate with. My clients, all tiny companies with almost no resources, decided that the constitutional principles were too important to surrender. They chose to stand their ground and fight.

The objective of that fight was not to win conventionally, because conventional victory as most British lawyers would understand it – in a British proceeding, before a British tribunal, under British law, seeking absolution for violating a stupid extraterritorial application of a British rule, for conduct which occurred wholly and exclusively in the U.S., and which is constitutionally protected in the U.S., as Wikipedia has done and Meta now does – is unwinnable. We sought to vindicate our client’s rights in an American court, which in our view is the only venue with the jurisdiction to rule on the applicability of the First Amendment to American speech taking place on American soil. And we sought to redraw the map and make the case for Congress to act.

The FSIA/IOIA Problem

Summing up this problem in a line: the UK says that the First Amendment doesn’t protect Americans from the UK’s censorship laws, at the same time as the UK claims American law protects the UK from accountability in American courts. Although we disagree that this is what FSIA should do and how it should work in these cases, American speakers would benefit considerably if Congress cleared up any ambiguity.

It is within Congress’ power to make it abundantly clear that…

• a foreign government,
• threatening American citizens on American soil with fines and arrest,
• for speech and conduct protected by the United States Constitution,

…is not something that the United States will ever tolerate.

This is not, presently, the case. There is an argument that the United States currently immunizes foreign censors for this conduct under our own laws. The FSIA, and for international organizations like the European Commission the International Organizations Immunities Act (IOIA), grant foreign sovereigns broad immunity from suit in American courts, subject to certain exceptions. These statutes were built for the physical world (warships, expropriation, commercial contracts), not for foreign states reaching into the American digital economy from offices in London or Brussels because they disapprove of the content of packets that originate on American servers. This is, however, the argument that Ofcom chose to make in its enforcement correspondence to my client.

There were two ways for my clients to show Congress the problem is real. One was to write papers and hope legislators read them. We did not do that. The other was to do what no other U.S. tech company was willing to do with the Europeans: fight, and do so publicly.

The model of the broader campaign, across all clients, against foreign censors from all over the world was the SPEECH Act. After a U.S. author, Rachel Ehrenfeld, was sued in England for defamation with respect to protected speech in Mahfouz v. Ehrenfeld, and (following a default judgment) the English plaintiffs sought to domesticate that judgment in the United States, New York enacted a shield against foreign libel judgments that did not comport with the requirements of the First Amendment –  “Rachel’s Law,” formally the Libel Terrorism Protection Act –  which Congress swiftly adopted federally as the SPEECH Act, 28 U.S.C. § 4101 et seq.

The SPEECH Act is the most important precedent as America seeks to fortify itself from foreign censorship orders. As a precedent, it is a profoundly bipartisan one. The bill was introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), led through the Senate by Patrick Leahy (D-VT), passed both chambers without objection from either party, and was promptly signed into law by President Obama.

Foreign censorship orders are far more offensive to the First Amendment than foreign libel judgments. Extending the same logic to cover them is both natural and achievable. It should command the same cross-party consensus the SPEECH Act did.

The Case: 4chan Community Support LLC and Lolcow LLC d/b/a Kiwi Farms v. UK Office of Communications

Ehrenfeld was, first and foremost, a judicial controversy. The case of 4chan v. Ofcom is live in the D.D.C. so I am limited what I can say about it, but it is a real fight. It raises questions of first impression for a U.S. court on the FSIA. It also illustrates a problem with American law, in that Ofcom is, as it stated in its correspondence, claiming that it has power over my American clients at the same time as it is claiming the FSIA renders it completely immune from the supervision of an American court respecting the exercise of its purported power.

Foreign censors should not be able to have their cake, and eat it. The weight of existing FSIA/IOIA precedent presents a daunting obstacle for most American targets of foreign censors. Foreign censors, it seems, know this. In many (but certainly not all) possible configurations of foreign government-driven-censorship, American precedent will stack the deck in favor of the foreign censor-attacker over the American speaker-defender.

If Congress wants to stop what happened to my clients from happening to any other American, ever again, Congress needs to change the risk calculus for Americans seeking to counter foreign censorship attempts in our courts.

In my opinion, the FSIA and IOIA are no longer fit for purpose against this threat. FSIA/IOIA are an uphill battle for American plaintiffs seeking to defend themselves from foreign censorship agencies, the UK included. The fact that most American companies feel they do not have a remedy in American courts in the face of extraterritorial overreach from countries like the UK – if they did, more of them would fight in our courts instead of, as Wikipedia did and Reddit/Meta now do, taking their chances in foreign tribunals – only confirms that these statutes need to be amended. Americans seeking to vindicate their constitutional rights should be able to do so right here at home.

The State Vehicle: The GRANITE Act

The second part of the Ehrenfeld equation was demonstrating political viability in a state lab. In October, 4chan’s legal team drafted the answer: a model statute we called the GRANITE Act – Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion – a nod also to New Hampshire, the “Live Free or Die” state where the idea was first conceived with Reps. Calvin Beaulier and Keith Ammon.

GRANITE is designed to invert the economics of foreign censorship. Today, foreign censorship is nearly free to attempt and ruinously expensive to resist: it costs Ofcom nothing to send an email, fear drives high voluntary compliance, and a real defense costs millions of dollars in legal time with little prospect of recovery under current doctrine. American law should benefit the American in this equation: making foreign censorship expensive to attempt and trivially cheap to defeat.

The GRANITE shield has four components, three “shields” and one “sword” –

• A civil liability shield, codifying the existing but scattered case law so that no American court will recognize or enforce a foreign judgment, order, fine, or penalty imposed on an American for First Amendment-protected conduct.
  
• A bar on government cooperation, prohibiting federal and state officials from helping any foreign government enforce censorship orders against protected American speech, closing the treaty-service channel through which foreign censorship demands aimed at censoring lawful American speech have entered the country in a handful of instances, chiefly against X Corp. (in 2026) and from the German BfJ for Gab (continuously since 2017).
  
• An extradition bar, preventing any American from being extradited for conduct that would be protected by the First Amendment if done in the United States. Recall that many of Ofcom’s 197 notices threatened Americans with arrest; this risk is not theoretical.
  
• A private right of action, letting any American targeted by a First-Amendment-violating foreign censorship action sue the responsible foreign state, organization, or regulator, including the European Union, in a Wyoming court for statutory damages with a substantial floor: the greater of $1 million or the amount of the threatened fine. This is the sword that accompanies the shield, enforceable against foreign sovereign assets moving through the U.S. financial system.

Critically, the sword is a defensive, not offensive, weapon. The sword does not activate unless and until a foreign censor threatens an American in the free exercise of his or her First Amendment rights. No threats, no problem, no lawsuit.

The First Amendment protects source code and encryption (Bernstein v. United States) and website design (NetChoice v. Bonta). GRANITE was drafted to protect the full range of expression and design decisions made by social-media, AI, and infrastructure companies, not merely user posts. These choices were informed by years of close, adversarial observation of how real-world foreign censorship crosses America’s borders.

Under many fact patterns, there is unlikely to be a credible way for the American legal profession to, as a routine matter, effectively deter a foreign state from trampling an American’s online rights unless Congress moves the FSIA and IOIA out of the way.

Wyoming: Proof of Concept

In November 2025, Wyoming Deputy Secretary of State Colin Crossman and Representative Daniel Singh turned the October blog post into legislation. The Wyoming GRANITE Act, HB 70, passed the Wyoming House 46-12 on February 23, 2026. It ran out of time in the Senate during the short budget session but returns as a committee bill in 2027. West Virginia introduced a parallel version, SB-923; teams in New Hampshire and Delaware are working on their own efforts.

Every state shield has one inherent limit: federal preemption over foreign relations and sovereign immunity. The only serious objections raised in the Wyoming House concerned exactly that, particularly as to the private right of action, which the drafters hedged with extensive savings provisions so it would not conflict with federal law. The assumption was always that federal action would later widen what these claims can do. Closing that preemption gap is Congress’ job.

Part 3: The Developing Federal Response

Through the spring of 2026, the federal response, in which I have had no involvement, advanced along several independent tracks:

• The House Appropriations Committee released H.R. 8595, whose Section 7069 (the “Ofcom Clause”) bars State Department support for any foreign law or enforcement mechanism that penalizes American technology companies for hosting First-Amendment-protected speech.
  
• H.R. 1071, the No Censors On Our Shores Act, makes foreign nationals complicit in censoring Americans inadmissible to the United States.
  
• Under Executive Order 14149, executive agencies were directed to stop censoring Americans. The Justice Department, presumably carrying out that order, declined MLAT requests from France seeking to investigate Linda Yaccarino and Elon Musk, and appears to have spiked German requests to enforce its NetzDG censorship law.
  
• In December 2025, the State Department imposed visa restrictions on several European officials and NGO employees associated with cross-border censorship efforts.
  
• Also in December, Under Secretary of State Sarah Rogers confirmed on GB News that federal shield legislation was under consideration; in January she confirmed shield bills were in the works in both chambers.

The aim of the GRANITE proposal was always to give federal legislators a proof-of-concept, at state level and for state law, that would be easy to replicate at federal level. In publishing the GRANITE proposal and advancing it through the Wyoming state house, we sought to (a) share our view with Congress as to the provisions the federal shield needed, (b) allow other practitioners at other companies to review our proposal and provide their input through their lobbying channels, (c) accelerate drafting by publishing something others could test, tear apart, and improve, and (d) prove political viability by getting our proposal over a few political hurdles, as we did.

A ready-to-introduce bill does that job far better than papers or tweet threads. We published GRANITE, rather than shopping it privately, for a further reason: model legislation in the public domain belongs to everyone. Committee staff, platform counsel, and state legislators could take from it whatever was useful – or nothing at all – without ever needing to ask us.

Anyone who wants to know what we proposed, and when, can consult the record of the UK’s actions and our responses over the last 18 months. The UK’s side of that ledger grew considerably longer today, as the UK seeks to expand its vast censorship scheme into something even vaster than it was already.

What Changes Immediately If We Get a Federal GRANITE Act

The default advice to American platforms, presumably from their London and Europe-based outside counsel, has long been to engage foreign regulators diplomatically: fill in the forms, negotiate, modify the service, politely object, but, ultimately, comply.

As my clients’ examples show, that posture was always a choice – but, given the present configuration of American law, it is an exceedingly difficult one. For years, compliance was the smart, safe course and fighting was the risky one. If the Feds enact a shield bill, that will change.

If a federal GRANITE Act is enacted, the selection of which legal regime governs a company’s speech on a global basis will be a board-level strategic decision in relation to which American companies serving a web application from the United States will, for the first time, have a choice to elect to be governed by American law.

That choice, if we get a robust “shield and sword” architecture, would be backed by the sovereign might of the United States, and the intimidating prospect, from a foreign censor’s point of view, of being haled into court to answer for their conduct before an American federal judge while facing significant financial penalties, recoverable from sovereign assets custodied in American banks.

Once a federal shield exists, the company that quietly complied with a foreign censorship demand will have to explain why it surrendered rights its competitors asserted and kept.

Americans should be free to exercise their First Amendment rights without interference, online and off. A federal GRANITE Act, or a law by a different name but with similar mechanics, would guarantee that.

For that reason, I urge every Member of Congress, in both parties, to introduce and enact a federal foreign censorship shield law, without delay.