Speaker: [00:00:00] You’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and today we’re welcoming back returning guest, Preston Burn Preston’s, a senior fellow of the Adam Smith Institute of London, and a technology lawyer with Burn and Storm pc, where he specializes in providing outside general counsel to companies at the frontier of technology, social media, crypto, and.

Preston was appointed to the Legal Advisory Council of the UK’s free Speech Union in 2025, and is the architect of the Granite Act and the Adam Smith Institution’s Freedom of Speech Bill. Since his last appearance on the show, Preston has found himself at the center of some of the biggest debates shaping the future of free speech and the internet.

In this episode, we discuss. Preston’s work in the Ofcom case against four Chan. How the UK is trying to enforce UK law against companies established and operating outside of the uk. The scale of enforcement presently taking place in the UK and other areas where free speech protections do not exist. How the Ofcom case is informing US businesses and lawmakers into action with the SHIELD Act to make us businesses [00:01:00] more resilient from future incidents and what people can do to help support.

Efforts to protect free speech. This is a super interesting episode. It was a great conversation. Really appreciate Preston making the time to make a return visit, and I hope you all enjoy it. And now for this week’s episode of The Brave Technologist

Preston, welcome back to the Brave Technologist. How you doing, man?

Speaker 2: Awesome man. Great to be here again. Good to see you.

Speaker: It’s been a while. Uh, I think we’ve probably done a hundred episodes between your last visit and, and this one. And a lot’s been going on I really kind of want to dig into some of this ‘cause I feel like it’s pretty important stuff for our audience to know about.

just to kind of jump in, I mean, I think since we last spoke, you know, you’ve been deeply involved with some, legal battles with the uk, can you kinda catch us up? I, I know the ocom, these things get thrown around, but I feel like people don’t really understand, you know, all who all these parties are and kind of a little bit of context around the case.

Speaker 2: I mean, so our story really [00:02:00] begins, if you wanna, you wanna crack the typical big Bitcoin joke being like, our story begins in the aisle of Yap. The story begins with this a couple years ago, right? That’s, that’s seven to eight years ago and seven or eight years ago in all the countries that weren’t the United States, and to a significant extent in the us.

A movement began, and that movement looked at the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, and a lot of people around the world saw that that election was driven by social media communications. Right. So in 2011, if we go even further back, if we looked at the Arab Spring, you know, there were arguments about how Twitter fueled the Arab Spring and the overthrow of, the Mubarak regime and all that jazz.

But then right fast forward to 2016 and you, the social media dynamics in the 2016 election frightened a lot of people in power. So what started to develop outta that was an academic and intellectual movement, which later became a legal movement and later became legislation. To control the internet. And in the United States, that movement didn’t get as much traction because the internet is protected by the [00:03:00] First Amendment.

But in places like, uh, Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, it got much more traction because they don’t have those kinds of legal, legal guardrails around speech. And also, generally speaking, those countries were headed in a more sensorial direction, uh, and have been headed that way for about 30 years.

So. Essentially they started working on these laws, internet censorship laws that sought to control what people could say online. And so, and they, the way that those were executed was that they created these vague duties that they expected platform providers to abide by. And the way that they would abide by these vague duties is they would police their own user speech to remove speech.

Which those countries disapproved of, much of which was constitutionally protected in the United States. So,

Speaker: so, so, so really, really quick like that, that’s even, so like, let’s just say company is based in the US the UK is expecting them to comply with UK laws on this thing. Is that fair?

Speaker 2: That’s the other thing. So, so [00:04:00] normally, right? if you live in a place, right, and you do business in a place, and you hang out in a place, I live in America, right? I have a little law firm in America. I represent American clients, right? Everything’s American. I’m subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, right?

I can’t break the law here. So, you know, and similarly, when I, you know, I can’t, the French government can’t come over here and tell me I can’t have an air conditioner in my house so that I can only mow my lawn, you know, once every three weeks because of their environmental regulations. The US is the sovereign now on the internet.

That used to be the case, right? It was that your, your particular company operated and was governed by the laws of the jurisdiction in which those servers were located. Even though it’s accessible anywhere in the world, the United Kingdom has a different view now, right? And so does Europe. And so does Australia, and the theory is that if your server is accessible in those countries, they should be able to control what’s on your server.

So essentially these laws. Uh, have penetrated the United States and these countries are seeking to exercise what we call extraterritorial control, right beyond the, their own borders [00:05:00] of American tech on American servers and American speech, which is protected by the first amendment of the American Constitution.

the, the story is, you know, I, I represented some of the first targets and indeed the first enforcement target of the United Kingdom’s regime. and we have basically fought them like hell, and so far their enforcement regime has not succeeded, uh, in achieving its objectives of censoring my clients.

So that’s the, that’s the story.

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Get started today at brave.com/api. Client is four Chan, right?

Speaker 2: Four Chan’s, the most publicly known client I represent. several companies I’ve had contact with about a dozen, but four Chan was the first company that they, that [00:06:00] the UK’s, law, the Online Safety Act, was used to impose a fine on. That was back in August of 2025.

So basically they, the Online Safety Act imposes a series of increasingly aggressive requirements, starting with the little ones, right? So they went out and said, everyone who’s subject to the act, you all need to produce this report. A risk assessment, where you basically write down how you don’t comply with the Online Safety Act and what you intend to.

You comply with the online Safety Act, right? So you have to fess up. Now, in four Chan’s, case four Chan doesn’t have user accounts and all its users are anonymous, right? So there’s, there’s a problem there because one of the requirements of the Online Safety Act is that you, include age verification, right?

In other words, you dock your users, which is not something that four chan does. so the complying with the Online Safety Act in four Chan’s case would’ve destroyed the website effectively. It would’ve, would’ve completely destroyed them. They would’ve ceased to exist, uh, as they were before. And so they weren’t minded to comply with it.

Uh, and because the site and its operators are based in the United States, you know, they said, listen, the US. Again, doesn’t require us to [00:07:00] do this. What’s the deal? So the UK decided to find them. Uh, I had just, come on as the company’s counsel. Uh, they didn’t know I was involved. And as soon as the UK did that, we broke cover and we said, listen UK thanks for that.

We’re gonna be suing you in US Federal Court. Uh, see you in court. And since then, we’ve launched a, a pretty significant and aggressive law reform campaign here in the United States. Uh, we’ve also got live litigation, which I’m not gonna talk about too much because it’s still live. Uh, and also we’ve been trying to explain the position in the media and to the broader public what’s trying to happen, what the UK is trying to do and what’s happening.

With their attempted control of American Speech on American servers in order that people really understand the extent and the nature of what the United Kingdom is attempting, which is to control American speech on American soil,

Speaker: when they kind of, try to levy these fines, like how severe are they?

How do they, how do they factor that in? Is it, is it per count or there like a lot of count? Is it something that can put you out of business?

Speaker 2: I mean, it is something that conceivably could put my client out of business given the size of the [00:08:00] fines. Uh, you know, I’m not gonna talk about, you know, their finances or anything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the, the maximum fine theoretically is $25 million, you know, or 10% of your global revenue. So they could impose, you know, whichever is greater. So they could impose a really Titanic fine on, on four chan, which is this tiny website that essentially is no more than a bunch of Mac minis running in a closet with volunteer moderators.

So, I mean, it’s, it’s this tiny little website, however, right. That assumes right that that fine can be enforced, and the problem that the United Kingdom has is that the Online Safety Act purports to make it illegal to be American on the internet, essentially. Mm-hmm. It says, listen. Mm-hmm. It’s illegal in the UK for Americans to exercise their first amendment rights on the web.

And that, of course, isn’t gonna fly in the United States, which has a, a consequence, right? That fine is never gonna be enforceable in the United States. And at least so long as the United States is a free and independent country, that means that that fine effectively isn’t inapplicable here and is, you know, there’s no prospect that it will ever be paid.

Through, through compulsion. [00:09:00] So the UK has basically sent, you know, they send you some letters. They, it’s, this was the first enforcement process against four chan. Right. So they’re just making this up as they go along. Mm-hmm. Parliament made up the law, they pulled it out of thin air, nothing like it had ever existed before.

They tried to enforce it. They assume they could enforce it. Extra territorially. They picked this target four chan, which is this silly little website. Right. It’s an image board on the internet. It operates fully in compliance with American law. then they turned around and they started bullying it and saying, you must obey this new rule that we just made up in accordance with these codes of practice, which we also just made up.

this fine calculation methodology, which we’ve also just made up and we told ’em to go to hell, like, co you want, yeah, you really think you’re gonna enforce that over here? Okay. Come over here, sue us in an American court and see how it works out for you. And so far they haven’t really been, they haven’t been minded to do that, uh, because they know they would lose Right.

If they did that. Yeah. So, yeah. And four Chan’s such an interesting choice too, because it’s one of those places where, I don’t know, like good, bad, or ugly. The fact that four Chan [00:10:00] exists is it’s kind of on the barometer of like, okay, cool, things are, are, are still, I can still say, you know, things out there,

what what happened was they went after Gab Kiwi Farms and four chan. Can we follow the discussion board? Gab is a free speech social media site, which is known for, having a First Amendment, moderation policy, warts and all.

And four chan doesn’t, it doesn’t really have a First Amendment moderation policy, but it is quite anarchic in how it’s run, right? But they’re all run lawfully. That’s the key thing. Mm-hmm. If, if you’re a law enforcement agency and you need to get ahold of one of these companies, you can do it. and they’re running the United States, which is not some lawless, post-apocalyptic wasteland, you know, like something outta Mad Max.

Right. We have the FBI. It’s right. It’s not, it’s not like you can run a criminal operation in the United States on the internet and get away with it. You, that would, that won’t last very long. So. These are companies which are law abiding in the US and they do things, and they have done things which are unpopular both in the US and outside of the us.

And if you look at that as a, as a target set, basically these three companies are [00:11:00] the, the bet noirs of the online safety and di, you know, anti disinformation movement from the last 10 years, right? These are the websites they wanted squished out back in 2018. They didn’t succeed in getting them, getting them eradicated.

Then they got this new regime and they said, okay, cool. We’re gonna go pick on these three companies, uh, and we’re gonna try to destroy them essentially because we think that this is criminal or whatever else. From my perspective, it’s like, okay, like you just made up a rule, right? In another country, law is a local phenomenon.

It doesn’t exist outside of the borders of the country where it operates and you’re purporting that it has global effect, I’m sorry, but that’s just not how the world works, and it’s not how the world has ever worked, not in thousands of years. And certainly not for the entire duration of the Westphalian system.

And moreover, right, the the funny thing is, the principle that tells the English that this isn’t going to work in the United States is something called the Revenue Rule. The revenue rule was first recorded as English case law in 1729. It’s an English rule, which made it across to the United States. So they have a rule [00:12:00] themselves.

Which says that the courts of a foreign state don’t sit in judgment of a of another sovereigns rule set. They don’t collect taxes for foreign states. They don’t collect regulatory penalties. They don’t collect fines. And particularly when those regulatory penalties and fines would violate the rules of the state in question.

In the United States case, the First Amendment, there’s no way an American Court is ever gonna find for ocom if they show up in the United States and try to enforce that judgment. One of our courts. So if they want to do it, like I’m okay with that. If they decide to come over here and sue my clients, and try to collect that judgment over here, that’s fantastic because it will be the beginning of my Supreme Court career.

Uh, and it’ll get me a precedent, which is recorded in law school textbooks for all time, which is precisely why they aren’t going to do it. Um, and if they do great, like that’s, I I would really enjoy that. There’s, you know, that’s, that. I think that’s a great precedent that needs to be set. But ultimately it’s just, I, I very strongly suspect that it’s not gonna happen because, because I think they look at the situation and they know they’re gonna live.

Speaker: Yeah. And it’s really interesting too because I feel like people are just [00:13:00] now starting to see like people getting arrested in the UK for, or, or brought in, I mean, to over tweets, right? Like in things that they’re posting and we’ve got this age verification, uh, issues that are coming up in, in the UK and in Europe and even in the United States, in certain states. we’re seeing implementations of that. I mean, what do you think the biggest misconception people have about. The UK’s new age verification requirements are, are, are around the issue in general.

Speaker 2: I think most Americans don’t understand how pervasive the UK state censorship, uh, system is.

I think they look at, and particularly on one side of the aisle, I’m not gonna say which one. Mm-hmm. But I think there’s, there’s almost disbelief that the United Kingdom is, is not a free, free country where free speech is concerned, because ultimately the way they, you know, all of these countries have free speech and their constitutional laws in one form or another.

In Europe, it’s Article 10 of the European convention. But if you look at, at how the European Convention is applied at like in a, a practical way, like an everyday sort of way, you see lots of violations of, of [00:14:00] free speech as we understand it in the United States. The state discriminates on the basis of opinion.

It takes opinions which are offensive or grossly offensive. That’s enough to get arrested if someone’s offended by your speech, and that’s just not something we have in the us. So. I think there’s not a full appreciation. We see the things in the tweets, right? Mm-hmm. It’s everybody sees someone getting arrested on video because they’re standing outside of with a sign or something like that.

Now that’s a source of information, certainly, right? It, you can look at it, it looks one way. Obviously, when you see a videotape or something like that of someone getting arrested, maybe it’s not the whole story, right? So you can’t take,

Speaker: right, right. Sure.

Speaker 2: But if you, if you look at the aggregate collection of cases over the last 30 years, and you then read court decisions, right, which give a full recitation of the facts in these, in the precedents that are on the UK’s books, you can see very clearly that the United Kingdom does in fact discriminate and make, you know, make value judgments, which are backed by the power of arrest in relation to certain political ideas, but not in relation to other, other political ideas.

Now, they try to dress it up. [00:15:00] Law and procedure, but ultimately, when you boil it down, what gets captured and what doesn’t. The stuff that gets you arrested is the speech, which is unpopular, and the stuff that doesn’t get you arrested is the speech, which is held, uh, by, by the ruling class. Essentially the, you know, mainstream pol, you know, political parties and things like that.

So, and sometimes even, there, for example, the. Group Palestine action, right? Mm-hmm. Is a protest group in the uk. It’s been, prescribed as a terrorist organization. That prescription is subject to challenge at the moment, but you would have, there’s a law in their books which says that expressing support for an organization which has been prescribed as a terrorist organization is itself a crime, punishable by a multi-year prison term.

And so you see little old grandmothers in vicars. Holding signs on Parliament Square, right? Just outside of Parliament itself saying, I support Palestine action, right? They’re holding these signs up and then they’ll get arrested for it because in the UK’s view, they violated that statute. And in the United States, it doesn’t matter what message, right?

What idea your sign expresses, unless it’s a threat or it’s a direct [00:16:00] incitement to cause imminent lawless action. Simply expressing an idea which is controversial, uh, is not enough, right. To get you arrested. And over there, thousands of people this year alone right, have been arrested for,

Speaker: the numbers.

I mean, that’s the part that really jumps out, is that the numbers are so large to where you can break them down into daily averages,

Speaker 2: like double digit daily averages, 20, 30

Speaker: people. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, and, and it’s something that seems so foreign, but, but it’s also one of those things where, you know, these things matter.

Like, seems like, you know, it’s why it’s great to see. Kind of the work you guys are doing because you know that those first 10 amendments in particular are like, you know, you once they get eroded, uh, it’s a slippery slope it seems like. And even in Canada where you’ve seen like the trucker protests, right?

Like where things that are, are dis civil disobedience get shaped as, under other cover. They know that emergency laws, powers and things like that, it’s just like, yeah, it, it is really interesting to see, a lot of this playing out right now. Do, how has the response been? I mean, like, I, I see it from my echo chamber, [00:17:00] but like, is it something where, you know, you feel like a lot of people are watching what you’re posting in, in, in this case in particular?

I

Speaker 2: mean, lemme put it this way, I’ll, I’ll talk to lawyers over in the UK on completely unrelated matters, via just business matters. And they’ll be like, oh yeah, I’ve seen your stuff. I mean, I think over in England there’s kind of a morbid, not a morbid fascination, that there’s a fascination that people, they’re seeing things that we’re doing right.

So Ofcom will send us a very official piece of correspondence, 150 pages in demand. Payment of a fine of over $700,000, and we’ll respond to them with a picture of an AI generated hamster wearing a thug life hat and smoking a blunt. Right. Or as I say, it’s, it’s medicinal. Herbs don’t do drugs. Kids, you know, stay in.

Speaker: I, I’m glad you, you described that because it’s one of those things where it’s like. What am I looking like? Uh, and if folks have not seen this, go check out Preston’s tweets because they are like, it, it is, it is next level. Like I would love to be a fly on the wall. You know, when [00:18:00] they get that

Speaker 2: it serves, but it serves a purpose.

Right? So the right is that if I had sent Ocom a long letter, you know, we, we did that actually. We sent them long letters and nobody gave a shit. They said, oh, well great. It’s a long letter, nobody noticed. But when a regulator sends you an officious and haughty demand and you respond with a hamster, that’s a story.

Right. And that’s strategic, right? Strategic communications, it communicates the ver the same idea, right? But in a manner where it can be widely understood and it can have political impact and that’s the key, right? So I think a lot of lawyers, particularly in London initially tu tutted it, they were like, how dare you, you know, respond to a statutory regulator with this correspondence.

But like at the same time we had, we had explained to the regulator. You know, ad naum, we’d said to them, listen, like if you want this to be effective, come over here. Serve us with a lawsuit. We’ll see you in court. Like, let’s do this properly. If you really think we’re obligated to pay this, fine, then do the serious thing and act like a serious counterparty and obey the law in the United States, which is what would be required to do this.[00:19:00]

They refuse to do that. They weren’t taking it seriously, and so at some point we decided we weren’t gonna take it seriously either. And that’s, you know, we’re gonna give as good as we get. So if they wanna show up over here and they wanna sue us over this, um, in a court, fine. Like, we’ll, we’ll go have that conversation in front of a judge and we’ll accord, you know, those proceedings with the dignity they deserve.

But this business of their sending letters by email. Across an international boundary. I mean, this is private international law 1 0 1. If you did this as a junior associate at a law firm in London, you sent an email to somebody across a border and and expected it to count as service. You know, you’d lose your job.

You get fired. So it it, there’s some really elementary mistakes that they’ve made on their side. I think part of that was informed. By the fact that the academics, so this, this regime was designed by academics in the novel field of disinformation and you know, censorship studies or whatever they call it, they have all kinds of terms.

They used to describe it, but it’s basically, oh

Speaker: yeah,

Speaker 2: state censorship for the good of democracy, whatever. It’s these, these people are not lawyers first and foremost, right. there [00:20:00] are political actors who happen to be working in universities. They designed this censorship scheme and nobody asked the question like, okay, well what about cross border enforceability?

They just assumed that the prestige of a European country trying to boss around Americans was gonna be enough for Americans to fall into line, and 98% of the time they’d be right. Right? But the two of the time that they’re wrong is where the entire, you know, edifice collapses. Because if you have a single defector from that scheme, what happens is you reveal that the entire thing.

Is is fake. Right? It’s essentially theater, which people are falling into line because out of convenience rather than because they’re being compelled. And because four chan was and is the first, such case, it was the first enforcement action cross border that had been attempted by the Europeans, by the Brits, or really by the Australians.

The Australians did have a little tussle with Elon Musk a few years ago. And XI

Speaker: saw, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Platform. But what X did is they actually challenged it in Australia. And for very broadly similar reasons, Australia said, well, there’s a post, right? There are posts we don’t like, so we [00:21:00] want you to take down those posts on a global basis.

X then challenged them in Australia saying, hold on a second, you, your authority doesn’t extend beyond Australia. We’ll take it down in Australia, but we won’t take it down in the United States. And an Australian court agreed and said, listen, our online safety act is not designed. To project our power outside of Australia, this Comey argument as it’s called, is a good one.

And they wound up restraining the Australian, the eSafety commissioner’s power. This is very similar, right? Except what you have is you have a website that has no presence whatsoever, no business in the uk. Uh, it has people who visit it from the uk right? But it’s not really present in the UK in any, any meaningful sense.

And the UK said, we’re gonna come into the United States and we’re gonna tell you website, with majority American traffic and 100% American infrastructure that you’ve gotta obey UK law. And if you, if that’s the position they’re gonna take, okay. We’re just, you’re, you need to get into the US to make this work.

We’re gonna raise the constitution in our defense. and we welcome you to come over here and, and try it on, on our soil under our rules, [00:22:00] which is what you’d need to do in order to get this to succeed. And they, they so far haven’t done that. So. From our point of view, the UK walked into a fight, which, um, they walked into a fight which they were destined to lose.

I’m not sure why they thought that this was going to have a different outcome. There was an article on this, um, a big fine deadline elapsed yesterday on July 9th, where Ocom sent demand and said, you gotta pay us $800,000. And we turned around and we sent them another hamster, and then a journalist said, well, what A journalist posted a tweet.

Saying, you know, oh, well, does it the fine deadline’s elapsing tomorrow? What are we gonna do? Does anyone, you know, know experts on this? And I posted another tweet, which has since got a million views on it, which said, you know, okay, well it’ll be a cold day in hell before we pay it. And, uh, if the uk, if Ocom really wants to enforce this fine.

They’re welcome to assemble, an invasion fleet, land, ground troops in the United States, and seek to overthrow our government and rescind our constitutional settlement by force, if that’s really what they wanna do, because that is what would be required for that fine to be enforced on American soil.

[00:23:00] And so I’ve been looking, you know, the beach is just over there. I’ve been looking all day. For fleet. I’ve been looking for it all day. I’ve had my binocular out. I thought I saw a scout aircraft, but it turned out it was a, so, so far the fleet, the fleet has not been deployed. and so we’re, we’re, I guess it’s not coming.

I don’t know. I, I haven’t seen it, but like the, it was a ridiculous demand and it demanded a ridiculous response. because So ridiculous. And so, and like. I’m sorry, to the academics in the UK who thought that they were gonna just be able to legislate global legislation that made it illegal to be American online, and that the Americans would just kind of shrug our shoulders and say, okay, I guess that one’s over that.

That was never gonna happen.

Speaker: this kind of brings me to another, another question too of like, we see these, these, uh, age verification things happening in, in the uk, but also we’re seeing stuff happening outta Brussels. So with the, the European Union, what you’re dealing with in the uk, do you see that as more of an [00:24:00] exception?

Or do you see a good likelihood of other countries in Europe or elsewhere kind of following suit with similar things based on how this plays out?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so I’ve, I’ve had contact with those countries. am adverse at the moment. I’m adverse to, uh, several countries in the European Union, Brazil, Australia, and the United Kingdom, in various, you know, little enforcement proceedings.

I think they were waiting to see how successful the UK’s, uh, rollout was before they tried to do their own. And because they haven’t been as aggressive as the uk they’ve tried to kind of like knock on the door and we’ve been like, listen. Sorry, sorry to disappoint you, but we’re not gonna be playing ball with you.

you know, the UK is at least 3000 miles away, but Australia is a lot farther away. So when Australia shows up and says, we expect you to comply with our Australian Online Safety Act, it’s like, listen, sorry, we’re on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean from you. I don’t know where you’re getting this.

If you, if you have a problem with the website, block it. But like, we’re not, we’re not gonna start censoring ourselves just because you in Australia. [00:25:00] Uh, have decided that you don’t like this website. Like, I’m sorry, but there are 24 million of you and you’re on the other side of the planet. There are 300 million of us and we have nuclear weapons.

Like it’s not, that’s not gonna fly. So, they have tried to, there have been probes come that have come from those countries against my clients, uh, including four chan. We’ve kind of slapped them back and so far it’s a holding pattern. I think that the future here is gonna be determined by what the United States does as a policy response to these intrusions, which are escalating and broadening, right?

I think a lot of these regulators possibly have decided that my clients are not rich veins of compliance, that they’re going to be able to tap. And so we’ve noticed the volume of those drop off. Over the course of the year. so over the course of the last 12 months. but we’ll see. I mean, they’re, they’re definitely, they’re making headway where they can, these foreign countries, it’s always threat based.

They always turn around and say, listen, you’ve gotta obey with, you’ve gotta obey these rules. We’re threatening you with these rules. Most companies. We’ll put in place a compliance program. That’s particularly the case where those companies [00:26:00] have a physical presence in those places. If you’ve got a physical presence in the United Kingdom, you’re not judgment proof.

Right. So, right. It’s very, it’s a very different analysis from my clients, which make my life easier because they don’t have that foreign presence, that we, you know, that other companies have. Because ultimately, if the UK can get a judgment against you and they can go, you know, get it in a British court, they can go get instruct bailiffs, they can go seize assets, right?

They have the monopoly on the legitimate use of force within their borders and they can, you know, they can do what they want. That’s their sovereign decision to do that. But we are really focused on a very narrow slice of the front, right, which is the attempt to enter the United States from abroad where there is no connection whatsoever to the foreign state.

And a, a lot of countries have tried, and so far in eight years of my doing this, particular type of work, not a single attempt has ever succeeded. So, and I, I don’t think that’s due to my own brilliance as a lawyer. It’s because of the structure of American law, uh, and the fact that my clients are actually willing to use it, right?

And, and, and use that [00:27:00] structure and insist on, uh, insist on their rights in the face of foreign aggression. So. that’s where we are. we’re still mid-flight. I think the US policy response, I think it’s coming. Uh, and I think it’s gonna be serious and I think these countries are not gonna like it when it lands, but it hasn’t landed yet.

So we’re tb, TBD.

Speaker: at the same time that this is all happening, you know, started seeing you tweet about like this granite act in the us. can we go into that a little bit and, and what comes to mind when I think about it is like, you know, we mentioned First Amendment and a lot of the, the US laws here.

Over and over again in this, the beginning of the discussion. what’s the need to, to kind of make further steps, like with something like Grant, what is it? And then, why is it important or, a good to have thing?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So the problem, the problem we have is that these foreign states insist that their rules are applicable here.

And American companies, if you, if you’re not familiar with, you know, the arcane ins and outs. Of American free speech law and private international law pertaining to the very strange subject of cross-border enforcements of, of speech [00:28:00] related judgements where the speech is constitutionally protected in the United States and not constitutionally protected somewhere else.

generally speaking, your in-house counsel, you get this demand. It says, do this. And it’s a threat. It’s a threat of imprisonment. It’s a threat of fines. It’s a threat of, you know, various other things, pains and penalties. And so what you do is you, your instinct is to comply. Even if you don’t have to.

And so what a statute would do, we want to create a shield law, much like the speech act for foreign defamation judgments back in 2010. granite is a shield law, which makes it abundantly clear to Americans and to foreigners. Two things. First, that if they attempt to enforce their judgments on American soil, American courts won’t enforce them.

So it’s a shield which says courts are barred from enforcing them. The US government executive branch agencies are barred from cooperating with them, and extradition under those orders is also barred. So it’s not a, it’s a, it’s a mandatory bar on American government and, and judicial cooperation with those orders.

The second piece of it, which makes it a little different from the Speech Act, is a sword, right? So Granite stands for guaranteeing rights against Novel International [00:29:00] Tyranny and Extortion. So in addition to the,

Speaker: she the hell of an acronym, by the way.

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. I came up, yeah. Came up with an on reigny night after driving back from New Hampshire one night at a concert on Bitcoin event.

so Granite, the sword piece is designed to deter the threats. Right. So, because on the one hand you can tell people, yes, listen, the threat arrives and they are, it’s intimidating and we know already, right? If you do your due diligence, that it’s not gonna be enforceable here. But the next piece is you’re still being threatened, right?

And a threat to intimidate someone in the free exercise of their constitutional rights has a chilling effect on the exercise of those rights. So what we wanna do is make it unlawful in the United States for those threats to be transmitted into the United States. Now, in order to do that, you have to do some changes to existing federal law around sovereign immunity, probably, uh, and you have to make some changes to the US code.

Now, the, we proposed a state version of this for Wyoming. It passed the Wyoming House of Representatives 46 to 12. The, uh, the no votes on that. Uh, we’re [00:30:00] basically around issues around federal preemption of the state law, specifically federal sovereign immunity issues. And we’ve ran that through the state process for two reasons.

One, to show that it could in fact get through a state, uh, chamber of a State House, uh, and we’re gonna get it through the Senate next year. So, and two. Also to illustrate to the federal government why a federal fix was necessary. So when we, there are two pieces to this. One of them, of course, is that we sued Ocom in federal court on behalf of four chan and Ocom said, well, our laws apply on American soil.

But they then responded to us in correspondence and later in their, responsive pleadings, they said, listen. In addition to that, we’re entitled to sovereign immunity. So they basically said, we are, we have the power to tell Americans what to do on American soil, but the minute an American goes to an American court and asks for us to be held to account for the exercise of that power, we are immune from that court’s jurisdiction.

So that create, that’s a structural problem in American law. It’s that something that has never happened before, which is the projection of foreign power directly into the United States seeking outcomes in the [00:31:00] United States is also protected by, apparently, according to them, by the laws of the United States.

So we said to Congress, listen, we need this cause of action, and we also need you to get federal sovereign immunity out of the way so that we can deter the threats from entering the United States. Now, if you’ve got an establishment outside of the United States, you’ve got offices in London, whatever else it is.

Different matter, right? That’s a different story. It’s not in the United States. It’s not affecting the United States, but what they’re doing is sending things into the United States. And Ocom has done that as, uh, a guy named Daniel Li sent a, uh, FOIA request to them. An FOI request free of information. he got an answer from them that they have sent 197 since 20, the beginning of 2025, orders into the United States, you know, with an American addressee.

So that’s 197 different recipients who have received section 100 orders from Ocom, telling them that they have to obey British law on American soil. At the same time as Ofcom is insisting that they are not obliged to, or they’re not [00:32:00] subject to the jurisdiction of American courts. So I, I think it’s a totally unacceptable situation where we have foreign governments trying to impose their will on American soil, but there’s apparently no remedy whatsoever.

We have to go to a foreign court to go seek to, uh, vindicate our constitutional rights. That doesn’t make sense. And so granite is by fixing that it’s a remedy, right? It’s a remedial thing which fixes a structural vulnerability. In American law, which has allowed this conduct to take place and will prevent that conduct from taking place in the future.

So, you know, there are, there are some members of, uh, you know, I’m advised that Shield Bills of a type are in the works in the house in the Senate. Mm-hmm. They haven’t been introduced yet. I know a thing or two, but I’m not gonna say what I know or suspect I don’t know much. but hopefully in this Congress we will get some legislation.

Which will be the federal equivalent of the state granted act, uh, and will shield Americans from this conduct going forward.

Speaker: I mean, it makes sense. The chilling effects are real, and that’s a lot of requests to get sent out. you know that a, a lot of folks will just capitulate to this stuff.

So

Speaker 2: [00:33:00] 98.

Speaker: 98, that’s awesome.

Speaker 2: 98% capitulating. So,

Speaker: yeah, it’s crazy. thanks for breaking that down too. I think it’s, it’s useful for people to hear about. cause I, I have a feeling most people don’t realize that this stuff is actually happening. two things I want kind of people to take away from this one.

a as, as hopeless as people get sometimes, pretty awesome that we have these protections in the us for cases just like these. And two, I think like a lot of this stuff gets politicized. but I think there’s a pretty clear history of like, it doesn’t matter like, uh, the political either side.

Quiet, if these things don’t get taken head on, it’s a pretty slippery slope on the political side too.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I, I don’t, I don’t care who you are, what side of the aisle you’re on. This is not a culture war issue. Reddit right. Orders, censorship orders from Australia, Wikipedia got censorship.

We got threatened with censorship orders from England. You know, gab and four chan got censorship orders from England, X has got censorship orders from England, uh, meta and Snapchat, and you know, Instagram and all those, they’ve all gotten censorship orders from various places the European Union included.

So like this is, this is happening [00:34:00] across the board. I think for the larger companies, you know, some of them are not as willing to fight because they view. The additional regulation is a regulatory mode. So I think some of them say, listen, we’ll just invest in the compliance processes, pay the fine. And that’s the cost of doing business.

But particularly in the case of the UK and Australia and the eu, they’re starting to go after some of the smaller entities. those entities don’t have the resources to fight. Right. And if we allow this to become normal. Where ordinary American companies, ordinary American app developers, every single American who provides a web service in the United States, you know, hundreds of thou, I think that they estimated the Online Safety Act in the uk.

They estimated that something like 200,000 services were in scope. The overwhelming majority of those would be American. you know, are we really gonna say that 200,000 American businesses have to comply with any foreign country that turns around and says you need to comply with our laws? I don’t think so.

Um, and I think the US applying a, a very modest amount of sovereign power, uh, in this area would fix that problem for good.

Speaker: Yeah. Well, no, that’s a great, that’s a great point I, I think to leave on [00:35:00] and, and well, one more, I mean, I think, uh, it sounds like you’re, you’re pretty optimistic. Are, are you optimistic?

Like, w how, I know there’s a lot of dark clouds and, and, and I think this chat control stuff, all the things are happening, right? Like, it seems like we’re, we’re kind of in the thick of a lot of pretty aggressive maneuvering. Like, are, are you optimistic about, uh, uh, where things are headed, uh, on these fronts what’s your general kind of sentiment around it?

Speaker 2: we’re winning it. It might not look like we’re winning to the outside because the, the other side doesn’t wanna admit that we’re winning. but we are, we are winning. And I think, I think ultimately the American approach to freedom of speech, particularly if we can get some action done, this congress, you know, I’m optimistic will happen, is gonna redraw the boundaries.

pretty, pretty stoutly in, in a way that’s gonna be difficult to perform in states to overcome. You know, we obviously have similar fights in the United States, at least when we’re fighting here. We have the first Amendment on our side, which I think is a very powerful weapon, uh, for American litigators and American companies to protect themselves from overreach from our own government.

but no, I, I mean, I’m very confident, The other side is never going to admit that we’ve won when we win.

Speaker: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: They’re gonna [00:36:00] keep doing whatever censorship they’re going to do. You know, ideally. At some point, Europe and the UK will realize that beating up on tech is not a way to, uh, is not a way to become successful in a technology driven future.

but they’re gonna have to get there on their own. But in the meantime, in terms of the, you know, defending the United States from these things, I think there’s a very real prospect that, uh, it becomes clear to the world. Even if not, we’ll never, we’ll never get Parliament to admit that the online Safety Act can’t be extra territorially enforced.

They will never do it. What they will do is they will quietly pivot, adjust their focus onto domestic targets or companies with the UK establishments and focus on that. And then all of the extraterritorial stuff will quietly be shelved without anybody noticing. but it, but it will happen. I predict. I don’t, they can’t afford another four chan, right?

They can’t afford. Another visible defeat where the full might of the British state went up against a, a tiny company with web servers in a closet with pro bono counsel. Uh, you know, so a pro bono solo lawyer acting as their counsel in the United States, uh, and losing, I, I don’t, [00:37:00] I don’t think that’s something that politically they’re gonna be able to handle.

So, and we’ve seen basically that the volume of outbound requests, you know, the, the, the volume of aggression that we’ve seen directed at small American social media companies, they’ve shelved a lot of files. They’ve kind of let another bunch of files go quiet. And so, you know, they’re, they’re not, they’re not going after Americans like they used to.

And Yeah, that’s true. And that’s, and that’s the win, right? The win is to make it, yeah. Make the behavior stop The old, the, the real win is when we have a statutory shield that ensures that no one else is gonna try it on either, because I’m sure the Europeans and the Australians, you know, they haven’t been beat up yet, but too bad.

So they, they, they may, they may think that, uh, at some future date. That it might be wise to try it on. And a statutory shield would protect large American companies that don’t have physical presences in those places. but also smaller American companies that will never have physical presence in those places.

So I, I think we’re winning. that’s where it looks, at least from my perspective on the, on the, you know, on the front [00:38:00] lines. Uh, it, we appear to be winning, but, uh, you know, they’ll never give us the satisfaction of admitting them.

Speaker: What’s something practical that, that people, I mean, these things like kind of fire up people, right?

is there stuff that people can do to, to help or, or where can people go and follow along with what’s, what’s going on? There are a couple of organizations in the United States who are pretty good on this stuff, so you can follow Fire Net choice if you’re a lawyer. Obviously, you know, if you’re a lawyer, your skills, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a free speech lawyer or not.

Speaker 2: Your skill sets are useful anywhere in the world to protect and fight for free speech. And you know this, what we have done here would not have been possible without many hundreds, if not thousands of hours of pro bono work from a handful of lawyers who were dedicating our our time. And resources to this.

So, you know, huge amounts. I mean, the four chan thing, it looks like a bunch of fun on Twitter, right? And X. But in reality, you’re looking at hundreds of hours of legislative drafting time, coordin, you know, talking to legislators, offices in the States and in the federal level. You [00:39:00] know, writing long form content, networking with free speech advocates, actually litigating cases.

So, so there’s a huge amount of work that has gone into this and lawyers are, you know, uniquely situated, right? And that they, that’s the work that they do. So I think if you’re a lawyer in particular, go represent a client pro bono, find a, find a free speech problem somewhere, and go pick it up pro bono and get upskilled and get ready to fight, because that’s, that’s, that’s who we need, right?

We need lawyers who are actually willing to fight. Because if we don’t have that then, then we, if no one’s willing to fight for free speech and no one can get to counsel, I mean, my clients couldn’t get counsel a year ago. I don’t think they’d have a problem getting counsel now, but a year ago they had trouble getting lawyers willing to take the case.

And so if no one’s willing to step up for free speech and they can’t find attorneys, then the right doesn’t exist. So lawyers in particular get involved, be direct. You have all of the tooling you need to go out and take on clients and engage in these representations. And everybody else, you know, follow the advocacy organizations.

Fire Net, choice the uh, EFF. and, you know, make sure that you, you keep track of it and if you have an idea about something, you can do an [00:40:00] op-ed, you can write anything, helps. Um, it’s a mass movement and we need every, every single one of us in order for it to succeed.

Speaker: Right. On Preston, where, where can people follow you on X or, or, or wherever else?

Speaker 2: Yeah, just Preston j Byrne, um, B-Y-R-N-E on X. And, uh, yeah, start, start from there and you can find everything else that I do.

Speaker: Excellent. Right on. Preston, I, you know, you really, uh, got a lot going on. I really appreciate you making the time, especially for a return visit. Um, I love to check back in, you know, the future and, and I wish you really the best of luck and, and in all of your work and, and appreciate what you’re doing.

Speaker 2: Awesome man. Always a pleasure and never a chore.

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