A UK cabinet minister, Rt. Hon. Liz Kendall MP, Secretary of State for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (“DSIT”), discussed the infamous “hamster e-mail” I sent on behalf of my client 4chan to the UK’s Internet censor, on national radio today in the UK.
My father always told me, when I was growing up, “when a cabinet minister holding the technology policy brief for a G7 Member State is talking about your e-mailed jokes to an audience of millions on national broadcast media, that is the right time to explain the joke, especially if the cabinet minister didn’t get the joke.”
That explanation follows.
The backstory – Hamster #1
The hamster joke has a bit of a history to it. Ofcom, the UK’s Internet censor, first made contact with my American client 4chan in June of 2025 in its attempt to impose British censorship law on that website. I was subsequently retained as defense counsel, pro bono.
Ofcom then “provisionally fined” 4chan on August 16th, 2025 for refusing to obey the UK’s censorship regime. We were invited to make representations to the regulator following that provisional fine decision.
We did two things in response to that. The most newsworthy response was to file a lawsuit against the regulator in the DDC. Before that, however, we explained our position to Ofcom in writing and gave them an opportunity to walk away:
To wit, Ofcom’s fine notices were not properly served and were not enforceable in the United States. Note that we also gave Ofcom fair notice that while this might have been their first attempt to enforce their censorship orders in America, this was not our first rodeo when it came to successfully refusing such orders.
No quantity of officious and haughty foreign demand letters will change our stance. The UK could even pass a bill of attainder – historically Parliament’s most extreme and powerful legislative weapon – against my client, for all I care. My client’s right to operate its service lawfully in the United States is protected by the First Amendment. There is no law Parliament could enact that would change that fact.
I am very familiar with how this movie ends, and it does not end with 4chan paying Ofcom’s fine.
It may end with the UK’s censors getting a blocking order that it serves on its own ISPs; that would be the UK visibly censoring its own people, rather than censoring my client, and doing so ineffectively, at that, as ISP blocks can be circumvented with a VPN. That is a consequence my client is prepared to accept.
England might have the Online Safety Act, but the United States has the U.S. Constitution. These rulesets do not override each other; they are, rather, mutually exclusive. In America’s domain, the Online Safety Act essentially doesn’t exist. It has about as much legal force as a pile of shredded paper one might use to line a hamster’s cage.
Peace was always an option here, but that would have required the UK to abandon the fiction that its rules override the U.S. Constitution on U.S. soil, which we are not prepared to accept.
My clients did not start this fight, but by golly we do intend to finish it.
My client sued Ofcom two weeks later.
Then, in mid-October, we got Ofcom’s “confirmation decision” by e-mail.
OK, fine. Ofcom wasn’t in a listening kind of mood. By this point, neither were we.
I replied:
I could have written to Ofcom and said, “I am shredding your letters” or “I am going to throw your letters out” or something similarly salty. That would not have been fun.
I could also have written a huge memo citing relevant caselaw and telling Ofcom how wrong they were to ignore international service conventions. There would have been no point to that, because Ofcom would not have listened. The one-pager from August was legally correct and they ignored that.
Note from the timestamps that it took me a day to figure out how to respond. This was the first enforcement action under the Online Safety Act, ever, and also the first American refusal to comply with a formal enforcement determination under Online Safety Act, ever. This was one for the history books. It would not be a precedent; it would be the precedent.
It had to be good. A boring letter would not do. America was counting on me.
Where I got to after wandering the streets of midtown Manhattan for a day is that it was far better, in my view, to take Ofcom’s letters and imagine shredding them for the purpose of ensuring that a cute, harmless rodent had a warm and comfortable place to sleep at night. I knew then that this was going to be a very long and potentially very difficult fight which required levity from time to time. It also got the point across.
Thus, shortly after midnight, alone, in a quiet room on Vanderbilt Avenue, it was decided that hamsters would be a continuing theme for the duration of this enforcement process. I hit “send.”
Hamster #1 Goes to Washington
The hamster came up again in the lawsuit – the original “hamster email” being mentioned on Page 1 of Ofcom’s Motion to Dismiss.
I wound up having to explain the joke to a federal judge: “the hamster e-mail was a humorous way to convey a serious point: [Ofcom’s orders] have no legal effect in the United States.”
Hamster #2
Fast forward to February 27th, 2026. Ofcom, having not enforced its first fine, threatened to fine 4chan again, this time threatening to fine 4chan £500,000 instead of £20,000.
We replied, “fine, send it, we’ll shred that one too.”
*That* Hamster – Hamster #3
Fast forward to March 12th, 2026. Guido Fawkes contacted me for comment on the looming, larger, threatened fine.
Suffice it to say we felt the situation was getting a little silly by this point. I replied:
In the meantime, we await Ofcom’s fine with relish. Last time Ofcom fined 4chan, we replied with a hamster joke. Ofcom has advised us that it provisionally intends to issue a giant fine to 4chan. Accordingly, this time, we are planning to send Ofcom a joke about a giant hamster.
The fine came in on March 19th, and the giant hamster issued as promised:
The Labour government has had three months to chew on this correspondence, and arrive at an understanding of its significance. The government presumably has access to some of the finest international law practitioners in the world, many of whom are based in London, and the financial wherewithal to retain them in order to assist the government in wrapping their heads around what the hamster e-mails could possibly mean.
One can imagine the scene: a huddle of GLD lawyers and DSIT officials conferring with a couple of eminent public law barristers, each sitting in front of a copy of the enforcement correspondence, brows furrowed, trying to work out how to respond to an enforcement target who, in response to the first-ever enforcement of their flagship technology policy initiative, sent them a giant cartoon hamster, towering over the Tokyo skyline, dressed in a Godzilla onesie, and holding an equally giant peanut.
The DSIT crew might have been told, at some point, that despite Parliament’s theoretically unlimited power, as a practical matter, the Online Safety Act cannot be enforced in the United States, and that demanding that Ofcom somehow “enforce harder” was asking the agency to do the impossible against any well-advised American target.
The hamsters are not mocking British power, or some kind of cheap joke. These hamster e-mails are, in many respects, the most serious and consequential legal communications I have ever sent, in nearly two decades of law practice.
It was information, packaged in a form we hoped the British government would be able to understand – America certainly did – which was designed to communicate, to the entire world, my client’s position. My client, after being harangued by the British government for nearly a year, felt it was important to plant a signpost on the great Information Superhighway marking exactly where British power ends.
The UK’s censorship power ends where the First Amendment’s power begins.
In response to that, the British government has vowed to respond with… *checks notes* more power.
This makes me think that they either (a) truly still don’t get it or (b) it would be too politically costly to admit that the OSA is unenforceable against 4chan. I understand that the Online Safety Act, though a Conservative-introduced law, is one that the Labour Party has embraced wholesale during its time in government and sought to expand. However, the longer that the UK’s government fails to be honest with itself about the practical, territorial limits to its power, the more friction it will generate with America, the more hamsters it will generate from my Grok subscription, and the less effective UK government policymaking will be.
These United States and our First Amendment are facts of life on the Internet, and, at least in the case of my clients, my clients are still not prepared to surrender those rights, no matter how much power the United Kingdom threatens to throw at them.
Update, 17 June 2026
Was on LBC this morning discussing this issue.
.