In February 2025 Vice President JD Vance told an audience of world leaders at the AI Summit in Paris that the administration was “growing tired” of foreign countries attempting to regulate its tech businesses.
4chan is known to be an anarchic messaging space, and has often been at the heart of online controversies since it launched 22 years ago.
Ofcom has issued nearly £3m in fines to tech companies around the world for breaches of the UK’s online safety laws.
However most of this money has not yet been received.
Ofcom says one company called Itai Tech, which runs a nudification site, paid its fines of £50,000 and £5,000, and blocked UK users from its service, while two other firms added age verification.
It added that other fines were still within their timeframe to be paid, and it was “considering next steps” for those who had missed payment deadlines.
In December the regulator told the BBC it had never heard from a company running 18 porn sites, which it had fined £1m, although the company did later add age verification to its platforms.
Last month Pornhub restricted access to its website in the UK, blaming the introduction of stricter age checks, and said its traffic had fallen by 77%.