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4chan Lawyer: How America Is Pushing Back Against UK & EU Censorship | Preston Byrne
01:43:07
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- [00:00]
Preston Byrne
I've been doing this work for 10 years. My clients were frightened. With fines of up to $25 million, or 10% of your global revenue. Each client decided that they were going to fight back. And I said, okay, I'm going to help you do that. They got the fight of a lifetime. You attempt this behavior, you attempt to touch an American. Consequences. Big consequences. Immediate consequences. Expensive consequences. The UK speech regime has not been favorable to free speech ever. They have not backed down. They continue to insist that their rules override the First Amendment. They, they will never attempt to enforce it here because they would lose immediately in a federal court.
- [00:34]
Walker
I feel like the term Orwellian is thrown out too much these days talking about the uk, but that's just because it's so incredibly fitting.
- [00:39]
Preston Byrne
They said, well, it's age verification and it's content moderation. Okay, fine, guess what? Everyone circumvents it with a VPN next up. Now they've said, oh, well, now VPNs are going to have to do age verification. So there's an escalation ladder. And that's why we're fighting so hard to not let them get that first ratchet here in the United States, because the optics are horrific.
- [00:56]
Walker
Foreign. Plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin Podcast. Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes. The value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. And if you're listening to this right now, remember you are still early. If you're not already, go ahead and subscribe to this show wherever you're watching or listening and and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. If you want to follow me in the show on Nostr and X, just head to the Show Notes to grab the links. If you're enjoying the Bitcoin podcast and want to support it by becoming a paid subscriber, you can download the Fountain app, search for the Bitcoin podcast, and subscribe by paying with Bitcoin via Lightning or Fiat via Card. Head to the Show Notes for product discount links. Go to walkeramerica.substack.com to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk. Preston Byrne, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here, man. How you doing?
- [02:10]
Preston Byrne
Yeah, great. Thanks for having me on. Just, you know, another winter evening in New England, as you can see. Yeah, sun's going down outside, it's four o' Clock typical December behavior, so.
- [02:20]
Walker
Oh, I'm in the Midwest, so I feel your pain. So close to that solstice, though, Looking forward to the days lengthening again. It's like. Yeah, it's. It's probably a good thing, though, that the win or the night comes early because then you don't have to look at the gray of the. The winter time as much. We're losing all our snow up here, so it's a. It's about to be gray season for a while. But, you know, it's the price we pay every time it gets to be spring. It's like you kind of have this Stockholm syndrome where you're like, well, the winter wasn't that bad. Right. Like, it's. We still like it here, right? We don't. I wouldn't. I would never want to live somewhere without the seasons. I love the seasons. They're great. They're perfect. What are the lies we tell ourselves? You know?
- [02:55]
Preston Byrne
Exactly. It's reliving the trauma. Well, anyway, whether, whether. Whether to one side. Nice to be here.
- [03:01]
Walker
Yeah. Good to have you. And, and, you know, so I've been. I've been following the work you've been doing for a decent amount of time, more so recently, because I feel like you've. Maybe it's just been the me engaging with a lot of UK and EU people talking about free speech stuff, but you started getting really thrown to me in the old X algo a lot, which was I was happy about, and I started tracking a little bit closer. And all of the work that you're doing, one of the things you're doing right now, you're representing 4chan basically against the UK government, which is just kind of a. A crazy, like a crazy series of words to put together in a sentence. Can you start us off with just a little bit of a background, like, who are you and how did you get here today to be representing 4chan and others against these. These foreign regimes? How. How did this come to be?
- [03:49]
Preston Byrne
Yeah, so it started because I've been active in crypto since about 2013. And accordingly, any story that starts with, well, I was involved in crypto, naturally, the beginning point of that story is. Our story begins on the Isle of Yap. Moving slightly forward, I got involved in crypto in 2013. I was working as a lawyer in London and did one of the early enterprise blockchain startups. And what we did is we forked Ethereum PAK2 and we turned it into a permission chain which everybody in crypto hated and thought was A bad idea. But the reason we did it was really, it was almost like a kind of a proto version of Farcaster. And what we did is we built a version of Reddit on a blockchain back end, using IPFS to store data. And we thought that we could turn that into an interesting logic engine and productize it for financial services and things like that. That didn't work out right. So that was. That was a bummer. But. But it led me into tech. And before, you know, before that point, I had been a banking lawyer, and I pivoted into tech and became a technology lawyer. And as I started my own practice, I moved back to the United States in 2017, started my own practice in 2018. And there were a couple of companies in the US at that time that really had difficulty obtaining legal representation because they were focused on free speech. In particular, they were focused on supplying a tech platform to American users that wouldn't censor or moderate their speech like a Twitter or a Facebook would. Because during the sort of 2014-2020 period, most of the censorship that was happening on the global Internet was happening on platforms like Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or Reddit as those platforms. You know, in 2015, it was anarchy on most of these platforms. But what happened was then that became a political concern in the United States. And so those platforms were responsive to political demands, primarily from the US Government, to be blunt, to censor their platforms and to reduce the scope of acceptable speech on those platforms. Now, after President Trump was elected, there was some liberalization, not a lot, but really in 2022, there was a considerable amount of liberalization in the US markets when Elon Musk purchased X. And then after President Trump was inaugurated again in 2025, we saw other platforms like Facebook starting to liberalize their content moderation policies and as well. But one thing that had been running in parallel to that whole process was that the United States learned during the 2014 to sort of 2022, 23 period that it was unable to censor the Internet in the manner it liked, particularly when the Democrats were in power, they were unable to censor the Internet as they liked because the First Amendment prevented them from doing so. So what happened is that outside of the United States, political fellow travelers of the American left in places like the uk, the European Union or Australia developed their own Internet regulatory frameworks, which were designed to carry out through the back door what the US Government couldn't carry out through the front, chiefly the censorship of American platforms in order to comply with regulations in Countries where censorship was permissible because the First Amendment doesn't exist. So during that period, I was representing targets of censorship in the United States, you know, against the American government in some cases, you know, with respect to their content moderation policies or congressional investigations and inquiries and things like that. So I've been doing this for a very long time, and it's been a side interest about. I'd say 80% of my practice has traditionally always been crypto, and about 20% of my practice has been social media, free speech content, moderation, trust and safety, law enforcement requests and everything bundled, you know, bundled up there for this handful of American platforms that tended to operate on the fringes in terms of what type of speech they permitted. Everything was lawful, Right. But they allowed a wider range of lawful speech than traditionally allowed on a platform like a Facebook or a Twitter or Reddit or Bluesky or something like that. So in 2025. Well, actually 2023, I had a phone call with the UK's Home Office because they were on the verge of enacting something called the Online Safety Act, 2023, which is the UK censorship law. And we had a very pleasant conversation with a guy who's a very senior guy in the Home Office. They've since given him a medal for being a good civil servant. He got an obe, which is a member or an MBE or. No, I think. No, he's an obe. So he's an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. And so we had a nice conversation. And at the end of that conversation, the guy said, listen, let's get down to brass tacks here. Your clients operate these websites in the United States with free speech moderation rules. How are you planning to comply with our Online Safety Act? Right, so presumably your client's users will demand that they be censored by the British government. Of course, no user of any of these websites, to my knowledge, of tens of millions of monthly users, not a single one has ever written to my client and requested that the British government be allowed to censor that user or the information that that user can see. I said to the guy, I was like, listen, you know, that's a really interesting question, and we'll be happy to have that conversation with you just as soon as the United Kingdom can land ground troops in the United States and seize nuclear servers by force. Because we fought a war over this and you lost. So to be blunt, it's nice that you guys have this law, but you shouldn't really expect any compliance or obedience. Fast forward to 2025. The operative provisions of the law begin entering into force. Most of the larger, you know, Internet majors have begun by this point implementing those rules, policies and procedures, technical measures that are required by the laws. But of course, all the smaller American companies haven't. And what the UK decided to do is it decided to go after all of the smallest American firms that were non compliant with the Online Safety act and demand that they comply. And they went after four they went after. The first one they went after was a mental health web forum called Sassu. Second one was Gabriel. Third one was Kiwi Farms, and the fourth one was 4chan, in that order. And one by one, each platform refused to comply. And so one by one, they wound up finding me. And they came on board, joined the roster as clients I'm representing, every single one of them pro bono. And a strategy had to be developed to fight the United Kingdom on this issue. And there are a couple things you can do as a lawyer. One of them is you can have a litigation strategy. Another one is you can go and lobby the government. You can petition for redress of grievances. Another one is you can try publicity and media and various other things. And we decided to do all three at once. And so what happened was there was this very strange, unique convergence where circumstances plus the things that I happened to do met in the middle. And because no one else was willing to represent companies like this for the previous 10 years, I was the only person who knew how to do it and knew what the rules of the road were and what the landscape looked like. And so we developed a strategy to fight the uk and that strategy was to refuse the orders, publicize the refusal, communicate with the US Government in order to push for executive action and law reform in the legislatures and also to engage in strategic litigation against the UK to both impose real and actual costs for trying to get into the United States and also to make them pay a political price for trying to get into the United States, which they have now done because Ofcom obviously was sued by my clients, 4chan and kiwi farms in the district of Columbia. That lawsuit's ongoing and we can talk about that in a moment. But yeah, so what we did is we started refusing the demands. 4chan came along and 4chan was non responsive. They simply didn't respond to the UK when the UK reached out. And so the UK kept going through their procedure where they would escalate and escalate and the threats escalated. And they said, we're going to fine you and we're going to jail you and we're going to do this to you and you must respond and you must do this. There were some demands for. They were demanding internal records of the company and demanding that they produce this risk audit for explaining why or how they were going to comply with the UK's content censorship mandates when they were under no such obligation to do so. It's entirely an American operation. And we waited and then the UK issued this thing called a provisional fine decision. So they said, because you haven't responded to us, we've decided that we're going to fine you £20,000 and you have an opportunity to make representations. At that point, we broke coverage. We released a public statement which was very widely viewed on this was in August. And we said, okay, uk, thanks for your letters. We don't think your notices were validly served in the United States in accordance with international service conventions. They just sent us emails and we'll be seeing you in court in the District of Columbia. We'll be suing you in Washington D.C. on August 28th. That's exactly what we did. We filed the complaint, they filed a motion to dismiss. We may or may not probably will file a motion, an opposition to that motion to dismiss. And then in four to six months, a judge will probably rule on the papers, that's my guess. And then the case will either be dismissed or it'll move on to its next stage. But in parallel to that, we've also been pushing, we've been talking, not pushing. You don't really push the US government to do anything. You talk to them, and if they move, they move. We've been talking to the Congress and we've drafted legislation which is apparently reportedly under consideration by the US Congress. And we've been making sure that the Executive branch is also alert to what's going on with these censorship notices. And we learned just yesterday that the Trump administration has in fact put the UK US Technology Prosperity Partnership, a trade agreement, on hold because of their concerns over the Online Safety Act. They said it was specific to artificial intelligence development and how the UK wants to expand the scope of the OSA to cover AI and chatbots and things like that. But I think, you know, and I don't know what their internal thought process was, but we have supplied the American government with every bit of correspondence on this issue that the United Kingdom has sent that we've gotten our hands on or learned of in the last six months, or actually in the last 11 months, to be blunt. So, long story short, there's been a multi front Resistance being mounted against the UK's Online Safety act from myself. My colleague Ron Coleman is another. He's another lawyer, a solo practitioner. He was counseled at the plaintiffs in the supreme court case Mattel vs Tam, which went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and he won. And also a fellow named Colin Grossman, who's part of our universe. He's a bitcoiner. He's the Deputy Secretary of State in Wyoming. And he took a law reform proposal called the Granite act, which is a censorship shield law, and he actually turned it into a real bill, which has since been filed in Wyoming and is going to be published on the Wyoming Legislature's website anyway, day now. So where we are is this fight has been going on all year. A lot of people have noticed it's going on because you've now seen both, not just the uk, also, the EU has gotten involved. They issued x with a $40 million fine. Australia has gotten involved. They have banned any under 16 user from using a range of predominantly American platforms. And then those users now have gone to Chinese platforms because humans want to be free and they want to communicate and they want to exchange ideas with one another. We'll see what happens there. But essentially, all of these countries have been developing these censorship regimes for the last five years. All of them were scheduled to go live this year. They were expecting that the aggregate impact of all of these regimes going live is that the United States would, like it did with regimes like the EU GDPR for data protection, simply roll over and would permit these foreign countries to dictate what they can and can't do on American servers.
- [15:18]
Walker
And.
- [15:19]
Preston Byrne
And what they got instead was they got the fight of a lifetime, right? Because the American targets, and these are tiny, tiny, tiny companies that really have no business fighting nation states under ordinary circumstances. But every single one of them looked at what was going on and they said the principle that American speech and American servers on American soil should not be violated by a foreign government is so important that we're willing to risk our own personal safety, we're willing to take enormous corporate risks, we're willing to be blocked by these countries in order to hold the line and defend the principle. And the principle is that Americans don't take orders from anybody when it comes to protected speech. Not from the president, not from Congress, not from a governor, not from a cop on the streets, and not from a foreign unelected bureaucrat. And that's where we are essentially. We're now in the mid, sort of mid to early endgame I think of that, of phase one of that fight, which is that Europe made its opening moves, the United States has responded. Most of the large companies have grudgingly cooperated and complied with the foreign regimes. And a lot of them are watching to see what happens with the smaller companies and with the political response out of Washington to see if Washington's going to be able to get them out of this jam while they comply. Right. So they're complying and we're fighting and there are a lot of people rooting for us for sure. But I think they're quite content for the little guys to take the hits and while they wait for the eventual outcome, that's where we are.
- [16:42]
Walker
Okay, first of all, a lot to, A lot to unpack there. Maybe, maybe a good place to start with this is just to kind of set the stage for what, what some of these laws in the uk, in Australia, in the eu, what their in, let's say, stated purpose is like. We, without getting into. Well, we can, we can get into what kind of the reality of them is because a lot of them basically, and correct me here if I'm wrong, but a lot of them are basically all given under the guise of protecting children. Right? Or you know, we need to make sure that harmful content does not find its way in, you know, in front of children, which. Okay, well, you know, it's like, how would you like this rap? Do you want to protect the children or, or you know, anti terrorism? The classic. But I mean is, is that basically the common thread with all of these different laws from the EU to the UK to Australia? It's basically like age verification requirements is a lot of it. And also like removing quote, hand hate speech and things like that. Wish you could access cash without selling your Bitcoin. Leden makes that possible. The global leader in Bitcoin backed lending, LEDN has issued over $10 billion in loans since 2018 and has a perfect record of protecting client assets. Why is a Leaden loan different? Well, with custody loans, collateral is not lent out to generate interest, no credit checks, no monthly payments, apply in minutes and repay whenever you want with zero penalties and proof of reserves. Reports verified by a top accounting firm are published every six months. Leadn gives Bitcoin holders a secure, transparent way to unlock liquidity without selling. Learn more at ledn IO Walker. That's ledn IowaWalker blockstream Jade delivers robust security with fully open source hardware and software. Its unique Genuine Check feature ensures your device is authentic, giving you ultimate peace of mind with versatile connectivity options. Including Bluetooth, usb, C built in camera and SD card, Jade offers unparalleled flexibility in managing your Bitcoin. Whether you prefer wireless convenience or air gap security, Jade has you covered. Its innovative design features, a durable metal case, a bright 1.9-inch color screen, and intuitive navigation buttons that make managing your Bitcoin straightforward and enjoyable. Jade plus also supports secure air gapped transactions via QR code signing using the Jade Link storage device, keeping your Bitcoin safe without compromising convenience. Visit store.blockstream.com and use my coupon code WALKER for an exclusive 10% discount on your Blockstream Jade. Protect your Bitcoin Sleep better. Stack harder if you're hodling Bitcoin personally or for a business, here's the uncomfortable probably don't have insurance. Most policies exclude Bitcoin, and the ones that don't, they only pay you back in fiat. What's the point of that? If you need to claim a loss when number go up, that's not insurance, that's liquidation. Now there's another option. Bdic. They're building an insurance marketplace on the Bitcoin standard. One Bitcoin lost equals one Bitcoin paid. They've integrated with Liana Business for enterprise self custody, with personal wallet coverage options coming later this year. If you care about protecting your Bitcoin as Bitcoin, sign up for the waitlist at BDIC I.O. walker. That's BDIC I.O. walker Insurance on the Bitcoin standard.
- [20:43]
Preston Byrne
Yeah, so I think that's that's how it's usually sold, right? But if you actually dust it off and you look at the underlying philosophical justification for what they're doing, it is that they believe that online providers or providers of online services should be able to be coerced. Right? Or compelled or recruited or, you know, whatever language you want to use conscripted to to comply with certain duties which make the Internet a better experience for their users. And they also believe that the government has the right Excuse me, sorry, I'm just going to turn that off. So something's buzzing. They also think that the government has the right to My phone is I'm going to turn that on silent. They think the government should have the right to dictate what that is. And in the United States, that's not how we do things. Right? The government does not have the power to rejigger the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure that the right ideas are heard and the wrong ideas are not. So essentially, the Europeans don't subscribe to this view. And in their Opinion. You know, they say, listen, we have the right, we have the power to change the shape of the Internet and change the shape of the marketplace of ideas. And if you don't do that, if you don't change that marketplace of ideas or don't change the access controls to the Internet in such a way that we deem is required, then what we will do is we will issue you with massive fines. We will issue you with threats of arrest and even threats of imprisonment. And they've done that in writing. Right. To all of my American clients, which you can imagine. Right. In the UK they do this all the time. Right. So if you, they have a thing called the television license that you have to buy every year if you want to have a TV in your house. Because that fee, the license fee, funds the British Broadcasting Corporation. And so the TV license, if you read one of those letters, it says failure to pay this fee, failure to adhere to this license is a criminal offense. So in the United States, you don't get letters from the government telling you do this or it's a criminal offense. Right. The rule we operate is ignorantia juris non excusat right. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. You're supposed to know what's going on. And the government doesn't run around threatening you with fines and imprisonment as a routine matter. But in the UK that's not the case. So they tried to roll that model out to us. They thought it was going to be big and scary and other things. I've been doing this work for 10 years. My clients were frightened by this for sure. But after a couple of conversations, we determined, well, do you plan on flying to the UK anytime soon? No. Okay, well, that settles it. The First Amendment protects you from this kind of foreign intrusion. And we decided collectively, each client decided that they were going to fight back. And I said, okay, I'm going to help you do that. So the regimes are essentially the imposition of duties on content, hosts of user generated content to explain their content, moderation decisions, produce audits about their content, moderation decisions to remove content, which is illegal in the United Kingdom, which includes broad swathes of content that is constitutionally protected in the United States because they don't have the First Amendment over there. And to threaten people with fines of up to $25 million or 10% of your global revenue if you don't comply with any of these rules, or arrest and a term of up to six months for non compliance and just refusal to comply, or potentially up to two years if you send A misleading response. So they've wheeled out everything. They wheeled out all the big guns, lots of threats, big numbers in the four American talk. And we haven't, not to my knowledge. There hasn't really been any new inbound to the United States in a while. So I think we may have slowed them down, although we certainly haven't stopped them. But they were sending these communications in, we received them, my clients refused them, we sent them to the government. And you know, that's been a, you know, that's been going on now for 11 months without, you know, uninterrupted.
- [24:29]
Walker
I mean, it's just wild because I think ultimately this is, this is sort of a, a new frontier in many ways, right? This before the Internet, before the global connectivity of the world, things were a little bit easier to figure out, right? If you were doing something within, within a country, it's like you're bound by that country's laws, right? But now we're in this era where. Well, no, we're in a globally connected world. The Internet is global. I mean, granted you can be shut off from it in places like, you know, North Korea or different governments can have different restrictions on the free and open Internet to varying degrees. But what I think, what I think is really interesting here is that they're basically saying because the UK government could, or the, you know, the European Union or the Australian government, any of these governments could independently go in and just block their citizens access to these sites. Right? They could go in there and block it and then say, look, okay, we blocked it. You can't access this site because they.
- [25:24]
Preston Byrne
Don'T follow our rules.
- [25:25]
Walker
But it seems they, that that's not something they ultimately want to do. They'd rather have the platforms basically self censor. Is that correct?
- [25:33]
Preston Byrne
I think so. The whole way that the Online Safety act is structured relies on the conscription of the platform to carry out the censorship. And I think the reason they do that is because it absolves the government of responsibility, liability and blame for carrying out that censorship, although it's certainly within their power to do that within their borders. The problem that the Internet has created, that all of these foreign laws are designed to fix, is that websites which are hosted and operated in the United States are serving content and communicating with people outside of the United States. And there are two competing theories as to how that conduct should be regulated. Under American legal theory, it's that the law of the server, the law of the web server, is the law of the website. If you're operating in the United States you're running a server in the United States, you're running a business out of the United States, you're subject to U.S. law. The United Kingdom's approach is different. They say, well, we have a new legal theory, which is that if the website is accessible in the United Kingdom, then magically your website is going to be regulated by our laws, which of course, is something that is within their power to do within their own borders. The question is, does that model port across to the United States as well? And what has happened is that the UK has tried to project its sovereign authority into America's sovereign domain by saying that your American conduct, American citizens, American, American servers, American soil, is something we have the power to control. And that's not something that the United States is very happy about. So essentially, we've been muddling through for the last 20, 30 years, 40, 50 years of the Internet, depending on how you measure its start point. But we've been muddling through and the traditional approach has been where the people are and where the machines are is where the regulation is for this particular machine device, anything else. And if you're operating this machine in the United States, then that's it. It's American law, which is relevant because we're not too interested here in the United States. If you've got a search warrant over in London, you're going to have to go domesticate it here in the US if you want to get access to that web server, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the Europeans, the Australians and the Brits decided that they were going to try to rewrite the rules. They did. Most big global corporations did their best to comply with the European rules, comply with the British rules, at the same time as they offer their American users a different experience. But smaller websites can't do that because they don't have huge compliance departments, they don't have massive legal teams. And asking 4chan, which is fundamentally an anonymous website, to implement age verification, dox all your users, make them create accounts, and then, and only then, can they post, would destroy the website. Right. And the conduct that 4chan enables, anonymous speech, is constitutionally protected in the United States. So what has happened is the rest of the world built a regime. The regime was dependent on the Americans not asserting their rights or responding, or the United States not responding to the encroachment on its sovereign territory, which I think is going to happen. And I think it's going to happen a lot sooner than most people think. And they walked into it and they said, okay, this is how it's going to go. They expected everyone to comply. The compliance was not forthcoming. And now they have a big problem on their hands because it's become a massive bilateral trade issue with the United States States and moreover, they're being humiliated politically because every time they issue one of these fines on an American company, the American company says, okay, come over here and try to take it from us. If you think you're going to fine us, okay, come and get it. And of course they can't because of American legal doctrine around the First Amendment. So that's how this arose. And what the problem is is that the Europeans and the Australians and the Brits invented out of whole cloth an entirely new legal doctrine around where a website operates based on who is viewing the website rather than where the website is actually based and operated from. And that fundamentally conflicts with the way that the Americans understand our, you know, our, the way that our legal system works and the way that that international comity between nations works and the way the jurisdiction works, which is that if a website is operating within your borders, then it's subject to your rules.
- [29:32]
Walker
I mean, it's all just quite, I feel like the term Orwellian is thrown out too much these days to talk about the eu, but that's, or excuse me, to talk about the UK but that's just because it's so incredibly fitting these days. I mean all of these surveillance measures, all of these speech laws, the idea of people, I mean, and I've seen varying statistics on it, but it's, it seems pretty clear that a large, large number of people are getting arrested for social media posts essentially and not even for ones where there's know in the US Obviously there are certain limits to like, you can't make a, and you can probably give the exact legal jargon for this, but it's like, can't make a specific direct targeted threat to an individual person that give like. And that's basically like you can't.
- [30:12]
Preston Byrne
The U.S. yeah, the U.S. is not a free for all when it comes to free speech. Right? So you can't, you can't do something called direct incitement to commit a crime. You can't conspire to commit a crime. You can't make a true threat to somebody. You know, I'm going to go over to your house and do X at Y time. That's not something that's allowed. And so we have guardrails, right? We have limits on what's allowed. The difference is that in the European Union the nonviolent Expression of controversial ideas is also in many cases not permitted. So if you have the wrong idea, if you have the wrong opinion, if you express it in terms which are two course. The United Kingdom, for example, has something called section127 of the Communications Act 2003. And section127 bans the uttering or production or publication of a grossly offensive communication. Right? So grossly offensively, imagine what that can cover, right? Or, you know, it's, it's so. Or abuse or insult or insult in public is something which is covered by the Public Order Act 1986. So if you walk up to me and you're like, hey, you know what? You could afford to lose 10 pounds fat, so you eat too much pizza, then you've committed an offense, you've committed a crime if the person on the other end reports it. So they have a very restrictive speech regime. They're trying to port that speech regime online through this particular law, the Online Safety act in the uk, by saying to the Americans who have all of these websites, listen, our speech codes and what we define as illegal now must be removed from your website, which is based in the United States. And moreover, you will have to also do things like age verification and confirm that non UK users aren't using or UK users aren't using your site, or that users under the age of 18 aren't using your site and things like that. And that's just like. That's not constitutionally permissible here in the United States because you don't need a permission slip and you don't need to present your government id, and you don't need to explain your reasons for wanting to access the marketplace of ideas. So that's what this is, right? You've got these very alien speech regimes, and the UK speech regime has not been favorable to free speech ever, right? Not in my lifetime and certainly probably not in the lifetime before that or the lifetime before that. But at least 50 or 60 years ago, it was used much more sparingly in the United Kingdom than it is now, when now you have a thousand people arrested every single month for these minor offensive speech crimes that are committed every day on social networks and things like that. And they want the whole world to be subject to that regime as long as a UK user can access the server in question. And our position is, no, that's all well and good for you, uk, but that's not going to work for us because we're not in the UK and we fought a war of independence with your country and they have been completely unable to understand. I'm not sure whether it's an inability to understand or an unwillingness to understand the American position. They have not backed down. They continue to insist that their rules are of global application. They continue to insist that they, that their rules override the First Amendment legal reality on the ground in the United States. They will never attempt to enforce it here because they would lose immediately in a federal court. But everything that they've done, they've not demonstrated any willingness to accommodate the United States on this particular issue. And I'm getting the sense that the United States is pretty sick of that because we don't want our Internet sector to be run in accordance with British rules.
- [33:31]
Walker
Understandably so. I mean, it's like, like you said, it's a come and take it. You know you want it. Come and take it. Molon Labe or Molon Lebe. Never sure.
- [33:41]
Preston Byrne
The B is pronounced like a B. Malone Leve.
- [33:43]
Walker
There we go. See, I, I had a feeling you'd be able to get it, get it correct there. Okay, so this is, I mean, just patently insane. I think that first of all, like, it's one thing for the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, whoever else to apply these insanely just anti freedom speech laws in their own countries. Okay, fine, you know what, Like, I may not agree with it, but I don't live over there. You know, kind of like not my problem. You guys want to, you know, send yourself into a totalitarian hellscape, be my guest. We'll still be here in America. Yep. But the fact that they believe that they have any sort of jurisdiction in the United States. And this is where things get really interesting because obviously they can say, and this is basically the argument that I've seen from all the EU bureaucrats when it came to the, the fines against X and Elon Musk was, look, you want to do business in our countries, you've got to abide by our laws. And I did recently. I recently saw, I just got a privacy notification from X. Maybe it was, it was yesterday. Let me see if I can bring it up. But it was essentially saying I'll find the exact text of it, but that in the four EU and UK users, some content may be, may be taken down, like maybe restricted. And so I was, oh, here it is. It's our enforcement provisions. We've updated our terms to explain that in some places, for example, the EU and UK we may need to remove not only illegal content, but also content considered harmful or unsafe under local laws. Have you, have you looked into this, this recent Privacy Terms update from X et al? Is that like, is that Elon kind of quietly bending the knee a little bit or is there something else at play here that I'm missing?
- [35:20]
Preston Byrne
I don't think so. I think that's Elon quietly letting all of the X users know that this is going on and that he's under pressure from the British government and the European Union to remove content that they disapprove of, which isn't necessarily illegal in their jurisdiction. So, for example, there's a lot of content that you'll see on X which is posted by, for example, posted by an American citizen, which if you try to view it in the UK you're not going to be able to because it's illegal there, but it's not illegal in the United States. And so there the obligation in the uk they don't have a legal but harmful content removal mandate there. It has to be illegal there. The problem is what is illegal is so broadly defined that there's a range of speech which in the United States is the kind of stuff people would just talk about down at the pub, right, or down at the bar with your buddies that could wind up leading to criminal sanctions. So in order to cover itself, access to widen the net of the types of speech which are visible in the United Kingdom, both, you know, in terms of particular content which is deemed harmful to children, needs to be age gated and then if it's deemed mature for whatever reason or politically controversial or something like that. And then in addition to that, they have content which is illegal per se, right? Because the United Kingdom has this broad net of rules, unlike we do, criminalizing all kinds of normal speech. And there they just have to remove it or block access to it or something else under the Online Safety Act. So that is X communicating to its users. Listen, your user experience, excuse me, is being, is being adversely affected by these rules, right? Letting everybody know we are required to remove this stuff because of the regulations in these countries. We're not doing it because we want to or because we have a choice. We're doing it because we're being ordered to, because a duty has been imposed on us by those countries to do so. So that's, I think what that is.
- [37:09]
Walker
I mean, that makes sense. And I think it's, it's again, just quite interesting seeing this sort of power struggle play out right now because again, it's, it's clear that these governments don't want to be viewed as the bad guys, right? They want to say, look, we just have the laws and these platforms if they want to operate here, it's just that that's what they need to do. They don't want to block those platforms. They don't want to be the bad.
- [37:33]
Preston Byrne
Guys because it looks terrible. Because then once you block a platform under the Online Safety act, it's very clear that it's no, they should have, they could have blocked 4chan a while ago, right? They haven't done it yet because the optics are horrific. Because then it's no longer the Online Safety act, then it's the Online Censorship act. And it forces them to carry out the act of censorship that they want to avoid doing. It is within all of. You know, these governments have the absolute power if they wish to go talk to every single ISP in their country and say, listen, here's an updated list of URLs that we've banned. And it would actually be trivially easy for them to implement that. But what they, they don't do that because that would be politically unpopular because it would be a government agency directly engaging in censorship of the British people. And government agencies are not supposed to do that. So what they've done instead is they've said, listen, here's an outline set of guidelines for you to follow and here's the kind of stuff we disapprove of and we know that every company is going to implement it differently and everything else. But ideally there's enough compliance that we get enough of the speech off and we suppress enough of the ideas we dislike that we'll have an Internet environment which is sanitary enough for us to accept politically, but also is separated enough from the government in order for the government to absolve itself of blame. And they also put in self, so they have self contradictory provisions in there. So there's one provision of the Online Safety act which says that platforms, in exercising their functions and in exercising their duties to suppress free speech, must also have regard for British users free speech rights while they do so. Right? And so if you say okay, and they point to that all the time, like, well, look, the Online Safety act says you have to protect free speech. Okay, well, I'm a free speech lawyer. Let's, let's go through what that means. Does a platform in the United Kingdom have an obligation to carry speech? Disagrees with answer no. There's no obligation for a private platform to do that. Okay, so, so technically, reading that language as it is read and as it would be understood by a judge, they must have regard For British users, free speech rights. But there is no free speech right to force a platform to platform you. So there's not. So it's this meaningless fluff that they put in there in order to defend their censorship regime by saying, but look, we have this one clause that doesn't mean anything that says free speech in it. And we use the term free speech 45 times in the statute. But if you then ask, okay, well, fine, you can use the word all you want, but what is the actual function of this law? And the answer is the function requires platforms to, you know, explain why they're, you know, what their, what their free speech posture is, explain how they're going to censor content, confess if they haven't censored content in the right way, explain their content moderation decisions, explain their design decisions, remove content on demand, remove content proactively. And in terms of the content removals, those removals frequently pertain to content which is constitutionally protected in the United States. So it is very much a censorship law. Which, that particular free speech clause I mentioned, one of the age, the Age Verification Providers association, which is a industry body of the companies that are providing the age verification portals that all of these websites are using, and they're making money hand over fist as a result. They said, well, this is a potential First Amendment for the United Kingdom. They wrote some propaganda about that. Just before the age verification process went live, and as vocal opposition began to burn, began to build up, they said, well, look, this is, this is actually our own First Amendment. It's like, no, it's not the First Amendment. You're lying through your teeth. It has nothing to do with free speech. Like, and if you look at what the First Amendment actually says, if you understood what the First Amendment says, it's very simple. The First Amendment says this whole law, if you enacted it in the United States, the entire thing, every word, would be unconstitutional and the whole thing would be struck down. So they want to make it seem like they're not doing the censorship. They really are desperately twisting themselves in knots to get away from the perception that this is a censorship law. And then they'll do things like send a letter to an American citizen in the United States operating perfectly lawfully here, and they'll threaten them with jail time for simply exercising their constitutional rights. And, you know, I find it outrageous. I think if you look at some of the podcasts I did earlier in the year, I did a GB News spot back in July, and I was visibly angry. Like, I was, I was bright red I was so pissed off at what, at what these people were doing to my clients. And it took about three months for that to kind of just like calm down and for me to just enter into kind of a more level state and where I'm still angry, but now I've just learned to live with it a little bit better. So they're doing things which are fundamentally antithetical to First Amendment doctrine as Americans understand it. It's very, very easy for an American to parry these requests. And every time they try to get into the United States, we're going to make them pay a very, very steep political price by publicizing the notice, sending those notices to the government, publicly refusing to comply, and ensuring that everybody knows that we did it. So that's, that's the, you know, we are very committed, those of us who are fighting this, to seeing this through to the very end. And that means a lot of pain along the way, but hopefully for a very positive result for the entire industry as a consequence.
- [42:45]
Walker
Well, I'm glad that, you know, you and by representing these companies, these companies are actually sticking up for this because this, again, is just something that's antithetical to the basic principles that we hold dear in the United States of America, which they do not hold dear in the United Kingdom or the European Union or Australia. Clearly they don't have it. They just don't have, they don't have constitutionally enshrined protections. Right. And, and maybe this is a good opportunity because you talked about some of the repercussions. Right. And you had just shared something maybe maybe just today or yesterday about basically President Trump suspending this 31 billion pound tech prosperity deal with, with the UK and you know, they're basically talking about the Granite Act a little bit in that you've shared this news segment. Can you, can you talk about that a little bit? Maybe talk about why the Granite act specifically is, is kind of a step in the right direction as far as really making sure that not only like, okay, we should. We already have these constitutionally protected freedoms in the U.S. right.
- [43:46]
Preston Byrne
Yeah.
- [43:47]
Walker
But this is another step to really make sure that, hey, if you want to come for us, if you want to come for American companies, there will be retribution, essentially.
- [43:55]
Preston Byrne
Yeah. So we, so part of this has been, there have been several different pathways to, to getting change in this particular domain. As a solo practitioner, I'm very limited in what I can do alone. Right. I can't take on a nuclear armed G7 member state by myself and win. And so the strategy you're trying, though. Well, I'm not. But here's the thing. I'm not alone, right? I'm not alone. That's the key thing that most everyone sees my Twitter account and they think that I'm out there fighting by myself. That's not true anymore. It was true to start, but it's not true now. So the strategy of sending every communication to the US Federal government and various state governments was to alert them to the nature of the problem and ensure that they were aware of the extent of the problem. Because what happens is they were going on these diplomatic junkets over to London and Brussels and other places, and you go and meet with Ofcom and they blow a bunch of smoke up your ass. They turn around and they say, oh, no, it's just about protecting children. It's nothing to do with censorship. We're not. Keir Starmer said to J.D. vance and President Trump in the Oval Office, of course we're not going to cross the Atlantic and try to censor American citizens. We wouldn't dream of it. And that's exactly the first thing they did. They were doing it at the time, they continue to do it now. And so they haven't changed their posture at all. So there's a very wide gulf between the reality of what they're doing and the marketing pitch for what they're. They're doing. And we had to make sure that the U.S. congress and the Executive branch wasn't buying their marketing pitch and was understanding what was happening on the ground. So that process began in late March, early April of this year. And that was basically involved just sending every communication to the US Government. We knew the whole time, and we continue to know, right, the real game. We have a lawsuit, obviously, in the District of Columbia, but the lawsuit is designed both to assert constitutional rights and defenses. And it was also designed to draw Ofcom out and make them. And see what they did right, when they were sued in an American court. And what they did is they pleaded sovereign immunity, right? They said, oh, we're part of the British state and we're going to plead sovereign immunity because we don't think that our conduct is justiciable by an American court because of American law, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Now, when they did that, we immediately publicized that. And what we did very shortly thereafter, five days later, was propose a draft law called the Granite Act. And the Granite act states stands for. Granite is an acronym. It stands for Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion. And what it does is very, very simple. Two things. It's a sword and it's a shield. The shield piece is really easy. It says foreign censorship orders aren't enforceable in the United States. And no US Government agency, or in the case of what we drafted it was for New Hampshire and later Wyoming, no state agency can cooperate in the service of those orders on American citizens. And if you do cooperate, there's a civil cause of action against the American state for doing it. And then there's a sword. And the sword says that any attempt to enter the United States, any attempt, any effort, any message, any communication, any, anything sent to an American citizen or an American company with the objective of censoring constitutionally protected speech or conduct will, will give rise to a civil cause of action against the foreign sovereign, in respect of which foreign sovereign immunity does not apply. And the damages calculations for that civil cause of action, as we proposed in Wyoming, are Titanic. It's $10 million minimum per message, up to 75 million in the case of the UK because there's also. So you get the greater of triple actual damages, 10 million per message, or triple the fine. Right? And if the UK says to 4chan going to fine you $25 million, okay, we're going to sue you in a federal court for $75 million. And both the foreign state, the foreign agency carrying out the censorship, and any individual who's responsible for that censorship at the foreign agency, they're all jointly and severally liable for it. And so with those two things combined, what it's designed to do is change the math of sending a censorship demand into the United States, because at the moment, sending the demand costs nothing. And the foreign state is able to intimidate American citizens from the free exercise of their constitutional rights. And the American response is very costly because you have to get over a lot of threshold legal issues, chiefly sovereign immunity, which we expect all of these countries to raise in order to get a very simple set of defensive orders from a US Court just confirming that the notices weren't validly served. So this flips that on its head and says, okay, if the letter comes in, civil cause of action and sovereign immunity is gone. So if you send the letter, you're guaranteed UK that you have at least a $75 million damages claim on your hands. And moreover, because you need the access to the US Financial system in order to survive those damages, awards, if they are awarded, will be enforceable, and you can get judgment executed against your assets held in US Banks, sovereign assets held in US Banks, and so it changes the math, because now censorship costs nothing. They can send the orders, they can bluster all they want. They can yell all they want. They can, they can pound the table all they want about how their rules should apply in America. And if we enact this law, if they even whisper, we're going to censor you, you must do this, Then what happens is massive damages claim coming in the other direction. So what it should do is deter those notices from being sent into the United States and restore the position that we had about five years ago, which is that American companies operated in accordance with the First Amendment Amendment. Their European operations largely voluntarily complied with European rules, local European rules, even though they weren't hosted in those countries. And as a consequence, they did substantial compliance, but not total compliance. It was not compelled, and it wasn't under threat of fines and arrest for senior managers. So the objective is to force the Europeans, if they really want to censor their Internet, they will have to do it themselves. They'll have to do it to their own ISPs. It'll have to be an entirely domestic operation where the government assumes responsibility and has to politically own the consequences of blocking individual pieces of content by order. Right. And the Americans aren't being conscripted to do that. So we proposed that it was turned into a bill in Wyoming. That bill has been filed. New Hampshire, it looks like New Hampshire is going to have to wait a year because we just missed the filing period. So we'll probably get that on the calendar until 2027. And there are rumors, whispers that the law or form of it is currently under consideration by the House of Representatives federally. And so if we could. Yeah, which would be great. And I'm expecting, I'm not expecting anything to happen now. It's December 17th, but I am expecting things to heat up a bit on that front in the new year. And if we can get something like that federally, you know, it really changes the landscape a lot because suddenly Europeans no longer have the freedom to threaten Americans as freely as they have been. So, you know, in one letter to Ofcom recently, just after the Wyoming bill was filed, actually, I said to them, flat out, I said, I hope you guys enjoy sending these threats to my clients, because you're not going to be able to do it for very much longer. So enjoy it while it lasts. And that's where we are. So we've got that front going. And then, of course, President Trump with the trade deal you mentioned, the executive branch, I think, has its own view about how the online Safety act is potentially going to affect American tech businesses. I have practically zero visibility into that process. But reportedly, according to reporting in the Telegraph, the Online Safety act just scuppered a $40 billion trade deal between the United States and the United Kingdom. It's been paused because the UK wouldn't cave on the Online Safety act and its extraterritorial applicability. And the US said, sorry, that's a red line, that's not going to work for us. So the Europeans think it's just President Trump doing the negotiation thing. I think it's actually a red line. I don't think the United States is going to cave on that because I think they recognize that American competitiveness is going to be significantly affected if we permit these rules to have extra territorial effect on our soil. And that's something which could result in us losing the AI race to China, for example, which would be catastrophic ultimately. That's the, you know, that's. I said, I summarized all this at the beginning, but it is a multi front war, both on the litigation front, on the messaging front, on the ensuring that the executive branch has an accurate view of what's going on with these foreign censorship rules and also ensuring that the legislative branch and the states have an accurate view of what's going on and making sure that they're not going to buy the BS that's being fed to them by European salesmen of this legislation saying it's just about the kids or it's just about safety. The US Government has seen all of the correspondence. They understand who has been targeted, why they've been targeted, and what they've been threatened with and why they've been threatened with those things. And they no longer believe the European and the British story that this is just about protecting the kids, because they're looking and they're saying, hold on a second, as a law abiding American company, nobody's getting hurt here, right? If you want to get access to their data, they work with law enforcement, that sort of thing. So we're not buying the story anymore that they were initially told.
- [52:41]
Walker
I mean, it seems that all of these, these laws that are being put forward in these various countries, this, ultimately all this does, this comes down to control of kind of their own populace and the narrative within that.
- [52:51]
Preston Byrne
Right?
- [52:51]
Walker
And having these external American companies that are able to, you know, bring a little dash of American free speech into their borders when they're trying to basically crack, crack down with totalitarian speech policies, that's a wrench in the gears is the way I see it. It's a way for. They're saying, oh, you know, any sort of totalitarian or even just totalitarian temptation movement requires control of speech, right? It requires elimination of privacy and it requires ultimate control of speech. Because if you can be private, well, then you can speak freely privately and you can say, hey, this fucking sucks, guys, we. I don't like this. And if you can speak publicly and say, guys, this fucking sucks, I don't like this. That's how revolutions start, right? That's how. That's how tyrannical governments get overthrown. And so for me, and you know, I don't mean to sound hyperbolic, but I really think that's ultimately what it comes down to. It's like they are scared of the fact that American companies are able to still operate and respect free speech of American citizens, and they do not want that same thing for their populace. Because, you know, there's also growing unrest happening in these countries. Like, the UK is a prime example of that. There's a huge. I think there's just an overwhelming sense. I get this both from social media, also from my friends who are in the uk and I'm sure you hear this all the time as well. It's like there is. They're not. The citizens are not very happy with their government right now. Not happy with really any aspect of their government. And so for me, I look at this and I say, well, this is obviously an attempt. What's the first step? Well, it's add age verification for any sort of online activities. Right, but what does that do? How do you verify age? Well, you need your id.
- [54:21]
Preston Byrne
Exactly what they've done, too. That's exactly. They said, well, it's age verification and it's content moderation. Okay, fine, they add age verification, they add content moderation, then what happens? Guess what, everyone circumvents it with a VPN. Next up now they've said, oh, well, now VPNs are going to have to do age verification, right? And next thing up, okay, if VPNs are doing age verification, guess what you're doing? You're doxing every VPN user. You're finding out who they are. What's the next thing? Oh, well, we're going to ban VPNs next, right? So you have to KYC your users on a global basis. So there's an escalation ladder on their side where they understand you start here or Mott and Bailey, right? It's like, oh, it's about safety and the kids. Oh, well, this didn't work. So we'll ratchet it up and ratchet it up and ratchet it up. And that's why we're fighting so hard to not let them get that first ratchet here in the United States. Because we know that if we give them that inch, then they'll take the next inch and the next inch and the next inch and the one after that and the one after that. Because that's what's happened over there, right? One inch at a time. Since 1997, British civil liberties have been progressively eroded just one little at a time. And after over 30 years, that's when you look back and you say, oh my God, look what's happened. And people are starting to wake up. So from our point of view, yeah, there's no daylight between us on this position. I think that it's absolutely about domestic control. I think it is to a certain extent also about foreign control. I think they do genuinely want to control what happens and what discourse is permitted in the United States so that Americans cannot criticize those countries and get ideas out, can't even develop those ideas in the States, United United States, in order that they would be then broadcast or transmitted or sent into Europe, the UK or Australia criticizing those governments for the way that they run their countries. So it's very much about political control. No daylight between us on that, as I said. And yeah, our objective has been to resist, reinforce the perimeter here in the United States, all of the efforts. It's a multi stage thing. So everything that we're doing now is about, has one objective in mind and that is to reinforce the American perimeter so that foreign rules can't get in. And once that's done right, then we can start having conversations about what it's going to look like to extend that perimeter and start bringing free speech, or freer speech, if not American style, free speech to the rest of the world. When everything has been pushed into America and we're the last bastion effectively on the Internet, if we lose it, it's gone. That, that's our, that's our viewpoint. So yeah, no, as I said, no daylight whatsoever between us on that. I think that hits the nail on the head completely.
- [56:47]
Walker
Well, and ultimately this, this makes me think of I saw as the Elon x EU saga was, has been playing out here. But in like the first day after that, one of the things I saw, I saw some EU bureaucrat basically say somebody commented something to him that he really didn't like somehow offended him. I don't remember the exact Comment. He quotes your name. He said, give me your name and your real name and your address. So my lawyers can. And it's like, bro, do you hear yourself? Like, I mean, do you Seriously? But that's how they think. It's like, how dare they be able to say bad things about me anonymously online? We can't have that. We can't have them thinking they can just say whatever they want and criticize us, because that could be dangerous. Like, this is dangerous speech. And I mean, that's just, like. That's just patently insane to me. It's. It's insane that. I mean, it's. I guess it's not insane that people think like that. It's insane that they think that there's some other good guys, because I think that they do. I think they've deluded themselves, many of them, into thinking like, oh, no, we're the ones who are trying to keep things respectful and keep the dialogue productive and. And we just have to get rid of some of these bad apples and make sure that everybody stays in line, because the poor stupid plebs can't possibly, you know, handle the ability. Ability to speak freely. Like, that would just be far too dangerous. I mean, Germany's laws are insane. Like, really insane. I mean, the fact that you can get, you know, you can get arrested for reposting something like, you know, again, the. The whole. If you insult somebody in person or you insult them online, like, you can't call your politician a fat little piggy or something like that. You can get it. Like, I was on the jail for that.
- [58:19]
Preston Byrne
I was on the receiving end of that subpoena.
- [58:22]
Walker
Oh, my God. Were you really?
- [58:23]
Preston Byrne
I handled that. So, yeah, that one. That was fun. So the thing with these Europeans is they're so used to deference that the minute. It's very exploitable in a. In a adversarial legal setting, because they're so used to deference that you can drive them absolutely ballistic just by refusing to cooperate and embarrassing them in public. It's very, very easy to force them into courses of conduct that you want to force them into. The entire thing with 4chan and publicly refusing these requests was that we wanted them to come over here and try to assert their power in as maximal a fashion as possible. In response, we wanted them to react and overreact as aggressively as they possibly could in order to save their dignity. And that's exactly what they did. Because honor is something which runs through European culture. It's not like the Middle east, but, like, it's something which runs through European culture a lot more strongly than it does here in the United States. States where I think everybody's just a little disrespectful. Nobody's, you know, a janitor is as good as a king. Right. If not better here in the United States. So when you challenge one of these bureaucrats in a very forward and frontal way, it's virtually guaranteed that they're going to respond in with as much bluster and as much anger as they possibly can. But not understanding, right, that every time they do that, that creates political ammunition for you here in the United States which you can then use against them. And that has been the strategy the entire time. I mean, the fact that a bill I drafted on October 18 was under consideration in the House of representatives reportedly on December 3, in 51 days or something like that, is astonishing. Nothing moves that quickly. But we managed to goad the Europeans and the Australians and everybody else into sending US communications that we knew when we provided it to our elected representatives in the federal government, they would look at it and just say, this is outrageous. This is unbelievable. They're talking to American citizens, how they're saying what, they're threatening them with what? And that's exactly the reaction that we got. So only but because we refused and the refusals were very, very straightforward, very simple. Thanks very much for your email. We really appreciate it. Unfortunately, under the first, fourth and fifth amendments of the United States Constitution institution, we have a right to refuse this. And moreover, in addition to that, you didn't use an international service convention to service with this notice. So you can do whatever you want under your procedure, but it's not enforceable here. And then they turn around and they wrote stuff like, well, we don't think the First Amendment protects you from us on U.S. soil or that U.S. law supersedes our law on us. So and you're just like, cool, you know, forward. Dear Congress, take a look at this, take a look at this shit. Isn't this a riot? Look what they wrote. And they did it all in writing, by email. So there was this very rapid feedback loop where they would, they had a long process, a six month regulatory process and we were able to get inside their OODA loop by simply forwarding that process to Congress in essentially real time and beginning to spin up a US response while the Europeans. This rolled out in stages. Australia's law went live on December 18th 10th their online safety under 16 social media ban. The Europeans issued their first mine on December 5th and the British started rolling out their law in January, the end of January of this year. So it was a phased rollout. And by the time the Europeans and the Australians really got up to speed, we'd already been telling the US about the British for a year. So the US Kind of knew. And as soon as the Europeans did what they did, the State Department, right out the gate, this is not going to be tolerated. This isn't going to be allowed. U.S. trade Representative today said, listen, this isn't going to be allowed. State Department went to London on December 4. They said, this isn't going to be allowed. And so we managed to get the US Kind of an approximate right. I don't know what the official line is. I don't know what the US Government's planning on doing. I don't know what Congress is planning on doing. But I do know that a view has been formed of some kind and I suspect that a planned response, an ideal response, has also been agreed upon, although I don't know what that is, if indeed that has occurred. And so we have been building their awareness over the course of the last year and providing them with the legislative tools. Right. This is what I, as the one guy in the United States, or two guys in the United States, myself and Ron Coleman, who are dealing with these issues and fielding this inbound. We look at it, we feed it to them. We're the ones on the ground. We understand the strategy. We brought the lawsuit. We've been doing this for a very, very long. Ron and I have been doing free speech work for a very long time in this specific domain. So we understand what the problem space is. And the U.S. government, we're like, okay, here's a solution. And it appears that if reporting is accurate, it appears that they like it, so we'll see if they wind up advancing it. But yeah, The haughty nature of the European bureaucrat has been something which has been very exploitable by us in order to essentially goad them and prod them into making admissions which in Europe look like they're defending their honor, they're defending their position, they're puffing their chest out. They're being appropriately strict and stern and aggressive. And in the United States, people look at it and they say, this is the most outrageous thing we've ever read. How dare they say that to an American citizen. So that, that has been the strategy really, the whole time, and it's worked remarkably effectively.
- [63:43]
Walker
Yeah, I think culturally appeals to authority work a lot better in the UK and in the, and in the EU more Broadly like that's just culturally, it's more ingrained. I'd say maybe the, the UK even to, to that extreme. But in America it's like, that's we, we don't operate the same way, right? It's, it's not as hierarchical from that kind of, that authority perspective, particularly when.
- [64:07]
Preston Byrne
The thing that they're going after is the First Amendment, right. It's like, listen, the targets that they selected are all American targets. They have no operations outside of the United States whatsoever. So they send a letter to an American citizen in the United States with no foreign operations at all. Totally American. Citus, everything in America. And they say, you got to follow our rules. We explain this to them and then they go, we don't care, you still have to follow our rules. It's outrageous. It's so insane. And then of course the media runs cover for them because the American media doesn't care and the British media is on the side of the regulators. So from our point, because they don't like the Internet, because the Internet is eating their lunch. So from our point of view, the messaging has been challenging, but really the entire, the real audience here has never been in London. It's always been in Washington D.C. and I'm very confident that the message that we've been trying to send has been received in Washington D.C. d.C. Which is why now, you know, compared to if you look at some of my podcasts from earlier in the year, you know, it's pretty animated now. I'm just like, all right, well stuff's happening. Sit back, relax, get a, you know, make a nice, nice tub of popcorn and enjoy the, enjoy the show because I think we're going to have some real fireworks in 2026.
- [65:15]
Walker
I mean, you definitely do see, seem quite almost Zen at this point, I think, because you, because you guys have built up such kind of a strong baseline of how to actually interact with these, these foreign institutions. And it's got to be pretty heartening from your side to actually see our American politicians or our state, you know, state level representatives actually, you know, come back and back you guys as they should, like that's, that's what they should be doing. This is kind of just a gross invasion, you know, in the digital ecosystem of our, of our territory. And so I'm glad to see this pushback. I'm curious though too, if maybe flipping the script a little bit. Obviously in the United States during kind of the COVID era, right, there was a lot of, you know, disinformation and misinformation removal. There was a lot of state level or, you know, federal level collusion, but you know, nation state level collusion with some of these big tech platforms to remove information that was inconvenient? My sense, and I think the sense of most people, is that there's been a bit of a vibe shift there and that people are now so aware of that. So much of it has been so public and so much of it was just so patently absurd where it was like, well, this is a conspiracy theory. And now six months later, it's like, well, it's being published in the New York Times as fact. So like, was it in. But my YouTube channel got shut down for saying that. I guess my question is, do you think that in America we've reached a point because of that kind of, again, a bit Orwellian in the US Sense, Orwellian response to some of the information that was being shared during the COVID era? Do you think that we've developed a bit more of an immune system on top of our natural immunity that's there as Americans, on top of those protections we have in the First Amendment? Do you think that we're past a lot of that federal level or state level collusion with these big tech platforms, or is this still something that we need to kind of be on our toes about as Americans as well? Because I, I can kind of go both ways in this. Yeah, I've felt a vibe shift. Yeah, the Overton window shifted around what, you know, what should and should not be able to be discussed in public. And generally people agree. Yeah, we should be able to discuss anything that's obviously not the rule, or, you know, that's not the rule for everyone. There's some political differences there as well, but I'd love to know just how you think about that. Is that part of your focus at all right now? Just in, you know, not only protecting Americans and American companies from foreign governments, but ensuring that we still have those constitutionally know, granted protections here for Americans from our own government as well?
- [67:42]
Preston Byrne
Yeah, I mean, I think from a personal perspective, you know, the, the objective of, of bringing about the complete and total destruction of all foreign censorship from emanating from every country on earth is a fairly meaty task. Fair enough, fair enough. I mean, I obviously have opinions about what's going on in the United States. I'm actually not when it comes to private censorship. I'm fairly absolutist about my First Amendment position, which is that private companies should be able to make any censorship decisions they want as Long as it's not coerced by the state. I think what you had in the COVID period was they call it the censorship industrial complex, which is a group of NGOs, the US government and private actors colluding to suppress information. And at the time it was in their business interest to do so. I'm not sure that it is in their business interest to do so anymore, particularly when you have a company like X, which has a more free speech, forward ethos to the way that it manages its platform and has a competitive advantage as a result. So what you've seen is that X restored free speech, it began to grow, and then everybody else has slowly started to pivot after them because it's in their interest. Whereas I think back in 2020, maybe that wasn't the case. The media, social, social media market was largely static. There were no new entrants, there were no new technologies. AI was certainly wasn't generative AI, for example, certainly wasn't as big a deal as it is now. Whereas now there's a gold rush for getting the best AI systems. And I think if you're focused on making sure the AI says the right thing rather than the AI says the thing which is going to make the user the happiest, you're not going to have as much market share. So I think there are some different business incentives that apply now compared to five years ago, which will prevent that from becoming, becoming a problem again in the foreseeable future. But free speech is under attack everywhere, all the time. I think that's the general rule. And in my case, I just happened to have this weird, funky battlefront that only affected three or four companies in a serious way before this year and now affects every company in the United States. And so it was a strange confluence of skill set, experience, motivation, and the country that started it. If, for example, Bulgaria had decided that they were going to try to enforce the Bulgarian Online Safety act or whatever they have in the United States, I would have been uniquely useless to address that. But because it was the UK that came out the gate first, and I'm a dual qualified uk, US lawyer, English lawyer specifically, it was kind of the nightmare scenario for them and the ideal scenario for my clients because I understood both, I understood what they were trying to do and why, I understood what we were able to do and why, and then position the defense accordingly because there hasn't been a whole lot of back and forth. There's not a lot to defend because ultimately they can lob all the letters over that they want. But what do you like, what are they going to do? Okay, come over here and enforce it, right? Malone, Lavey, come and get it. And they're not going to do that because they'll go talk to their US lawyers and their US lawyers will tell them if you bring this to an American federal court, you will be laughed out of court. So our strategy has been very different as a result. It's never really been what a typical lawyer would do, which is that you get the demand. And then as Wikipedia, I think is a prime example, Wikipedia was told by the UK you're going to be required to comply with our rules. So Wikipedia went over to London and then filed a case in the High Court and tried to challenge the law in the High Court of England and Wales and lost, right, their challenge because of course the deck is stacked against them. Parliament said X and what Parliament says goes. And so they brought a free speech challenger, various other judicial review grounds and the court ruled against them. And that is what your typical lawyer does. I looked at it and said there's not really a legal solution here, right? There is a legal solution, but that legal solution is not the resolution of the case. The legal solution is re architecting the legal system in the United States so as to make it very difficult or not nearly impossible for a foreign government to impose a foreign censorship law here. And so that was a very, we employed very different strategies as a result. And you know, I wasn't talking about any of this in August, September, October because we weren't there yet. But now we've got the take up in that, the state level in Wyoming and potentially also the federal level, tbd, what Congress actually does. But you know, now that we've got that there, the mission has changed, right? It's no longer oh, we've got the strategic litigation and the objective is to get Congress to pick it up and have the litigation serve as an example of what's wrong with the current system. Now the objective is tell everyone why we were doing what we were doing, right? And sell it and say, listen, this is something that we want done, that we need done. And this is the campaign. This is why we did things the way we did. This explains why we sent snarky emails to the Australian esafety commissioner telling them that they should watch the latest cool K drama that I've been watching with my wife at home. I sent them a letter. There's a great K drama called Boys over flowers from 2008. It is fabulous, let me tell you. And, and so I told the Australian eSafety commit, extremely corny, extremely cheesy, very fun. And I wrote a letter to the Esafety commissioner again. Got a million views on Twitter, basically saying, hey, listen, I'd love to explain to you why this fishing expedition against my client is productive, but I have to go upstairs and watch this K drama, so. So we'll have to take this up another time. Really sorry. And I wonder whether anyone in Australia actually then went and watched it, because I would totally. We could have a pen pal correspondence about it and everything. But the reason we've done that is because things like that, which are not the type of activity you would typically expect to see from a private practice lawyer executing any kind of defense to a client, is because the real mission here, the real objective is, is to embarrass the foreign regulators, humiliate them politically, impose political costs over there and over here, and to ensure that Congress notices and Congress gets off the line. Right? And you don't do that by sending a letter that Nobody reads via FedEx to their head offices. You do that by sending a funny tweet. And that has been the strategy, essentially, to build a political coalition in the United States that recognizes the threat of foreign censorship, understands what the nature of that threat is, understands what the nature of the solution is, and supports the implementation of that solution on a rapid timeline. And so that's why we've been so unconventional, right, is because I've dealt with this issue since 2018. Right. For in private practice, if you send an email back to them telling them to go to hell, that achieves nothing. If you send an email telling them to go to hell and that email gets noticed BY A sitting U.S. senator who's drafting a bill. Right. That's a very different kettle of fish. And so that's what we've been trying to do. So, yeah, they had the nightmare scenario, and I had the ideal scenario. It was very much an accident that I happened to be sitting. Not an accident. I mean, I was deliberately here. I was deliberately grinding on this particular problem. But the circumstances lined up with my experience, my education, and my personal interests. And then I think there are probably three or four people who could have done. Who had the experience in this area, all of whom I know who would have done exactly the same thing. But I got the cases, so I did the work, and that was that.
- [74:43]
Walker
Do you think is the Granite Act? Does it go far enough? Is that, like, if this gets passed, you know, by a few more state legislatures, if this makes it, you know, through, through the federal level process. Does. Would you be happy with that, like, or is there still more work to be done after that? Is this just the starting point? Or is this like, hey, if we get this, we're, we're pretty well positioned.
- [75:03]
Preston Byrne
I think the Granite act as a start is, is going to be enough to secure the American perimeter. I think that will largely keep the US off limits because there, there is no conceivable, there's no cons. How to put it? One of my. There's a documentary with Robert McNamara called the Fog of War, and he talks about working under Curtis LeMay, who is a famous Air Force general in the Strategic Air Command during the Second World War or whatever the predecessor was, the army air force. And LeMay looked at the practice of attacking enemy infrastructure through one metric, McNamara says, and that is the loss of his aircrews per unit of target destruction. Not how many bombs did we drop, not how many planes do we have, not how many sorties did we run, but the loss of my air crews per unit of target destruction. You have to quantify, right? You have to. There's. There is a number that makes something not worth doing, and there is a no. And there is a number that makes it optimally worth doing, and you have to figure out what that number is. And then, you know, you can operate and say, listen, within these particular constraints, something is worth doing. And outside of those constraints, it isn't. What the Granite act is designed to do is it is designed to make the practice of, of sending a communication into the United States politically impossible. It's not impossible. Right. Of course, they're sovereign nations, they can do it if they want, but when they do it, it attaches a price to it. And that price is so significant. So let's say you did it to Facebook. Just an example. Or Meta. Meta's revenues per annum are $164 billion per year. Right. And the UK's fines are the greater of $25 million or, or 10% of your global revenue under the Online Safety Act. So an Online Safety act fine against Meta theoretically caps out at $16.4 billion. Now you stand up Granite, you say, okay, the Granite act is here and you have a damages mechanism which is 3x the threat and fine. Well, 3x of 16.4 is 49.2. So that's a $49.2 billion statutory damages claim that Meta can bring against the British government, which is roughly equal to the sum total of British government sovereign assets held in American banks. So you're the British government, do you send meta the letter? No, you do not. And then let's look at the lower end of the spectrum, a website like Kiwi Farms, which is a tiny little Internet discussion board, you know, not very active, not widely ranked, nothing like that. They received a letter from Ofcom, and you say, okay, well, the letters to kiwi farms, $10 million per letter or 3x, the maximum threatened fine. The revenues are practically zero for all intents and purposes. So let's look at what the maximum fine is. $25 million, $75 million damages claim. Great. You send the letter to Kiwi Farms, they can retire now. Right. So it's because they've just got a $75 million claim against you, which is enforceable against sovereign assets. So it's about changing the mathematics. And the math in this case is not, you know, bomber crews lost per unit of target destruction. It is legal cost incurred per unit of censorship achieved. Right? And they are the attacker, and we are on the defense. And so from their perspective, at the moment, the censorship achieved is very high and the cost is very low. And the Granite act flips that on its head because it says the censorship achieved will be very low and the cost will be very high. So suddenly, every letter that goes out has a very major cost attached to it. Even if you assume that, let's say the damages were nil, but you created a cause of action, and every company in America benefited from it. A federal court action. Let's say it costs a million dollars to do this. Let's say it's simple. And you've got 100,000American companies they want to enforce against. That's $100 billion in legal fees alone that they're potentially facing in American court. The scheme immediately becomes unsustainable. As a practical and tactical matter, at the moment, they could conceivably send a censorship letter to every American company, and the only cost would be finding the contact details of all these companies populating the field of the emails, you know, running a macro or something. You're filling in the blanks and sending it out. And they could do that, no problem. It would cost them nothing. So this turns around and says every time you do it, there's an enormous cost attached to it. And by doing that, the cost, the amount of censorship inbound that we should get should be very, very close to zero, if not zero. If they wanted to try to cross into the United States after that, go for it. Great. I'll take the case on contingency. I'll do it for free. You know, say, great, you know, I'll get a. I'll get an option maybe that I can collect assets at a British bank for, you know, and I'll take 30% of that as my fee, maybe 50% even, and I'll do that for free. So suddenly, what you've got is the economics are completely reversed. So I would expect. And that's the what? Granite is not designed to tell a foreign country you can't govern your conduct within your own borders, or the United States can tell you what to do. It's a very simple law. It says if you send this message into the United States, this is the result, and it's your decision, right, as a sovereign nation, whether you want to do that. And I think that. I think that's a. I think that's a good outcome. I think it is very likely to bring censorship requests to Americans to zero or very close to it. And then if the Europeans want to censor their own people, they'll have to do it themselves.
- [80:14]
Walker
Yeah, no, I. First, I just got to say, I. I love this. Like, this is the. Hearing more about this, learning more about this. It's just really quite brilliant. Like this. This, as you said, it flips the economics around. It creates an asymmetric advantage for American companies. Right? Which is what it should be because, again, they're trying to come into our, let's say, territory in cyberspace. And. And that's just beautiful. And again, it's making it way, way too costly for them and risky for them to execute any of these attacks.
- [80:43]
Preston Byrne
What they didn't realize is that we have an asymmetric advantage now. And they're. And they're paying for it politically. Right? But granite puts a real financial price on it as well. When we sued Ofcom in D.C. federal court, we did not ask for damages. Right. We just asked for clarification that the orders were not validly served. And if they had been served, which I don't think they have been, that they'd be unconstitutional if so, or at least unconstitutional for the court to enforce. So this, though, completely changes the game because it says, listen, you attempt this behavior, you attempt to touch an American. You know, if you don't attempt to touch an American, nothing will happen to you. Right? We'll live peacefully. Brotherhood of nations, all that jazz. You cross our border and send a message into our country that does this. Consequences, big consequences, immediate consequences, expensive consequences. Responses. And that's not something that they're used to, which means that if that came and it also, it kind of gives them an off ramp because I think that the UK and the EU know in their heart of hearts, I mean, the UK definitely knows in their heart of hearts, because I'm sure they've been advised on this. They definitely know that they're not going to be able to get their orders enforced here for sure. They have run that analysis now that they've attempted to enforce unfour targets. They've been resisted in American courts, they've been resisted in a public fashion. I'm sure they've gamed this out and they've learned, right, this isn't going to work. They cannot lose to a solo practitioner. That is not going to fly in Westminster. If one guy or two guys, myself and Ron, if we beat them on these four cases, that's not something that they can tolerate politically. If Congress turns around and says, hey, guess what, here's a law, it's impossible, you know what, the UK can then go, there's unreasonable Americans, those crazy cowboys. Look what they did, they enacted this rule, oh well, we don't have to enforce it anymore against the Americans because we can't. Right. So I think ultimately it actually might be something they want to see because it would remove the burden of their having to keep running into this brick wall at top speed where a bunch of American solos are just publishing their correspondence on X and saying LOL every time we receive the letter. Which is embarrassing, fundamentally. So it's like, it's fundamentally, it's fundamentally extremely embarrassing that you have an entire country today they talked about this one client. It came up in Parliament, in Prime Minister's questions. They were wasting parliamentary time on an American target. One of my clients that has already geo blocked the uk, they've already blocked UK IP ranges as far as best they can. But a group of political activists were so upset that they didn't get a scale scalp that they forced their communications regulator Ofcom to reopen the file on them despite the fact that the UK is already blocked and they're demanding that they get a court order to block them again or criminal charges against them, despite the fact that they've already blocked the country and they are so mad about it that it came up in Prime Minister's questions and a government minister, right, the Minister for Science, Information Science, Information and Technology gave a whole fiery speech about it in the chamber. Wasting parliamentary time on an American website that has already blocked the country because they are so desperate, they're so embarrassed, I think, that they can't get their orders enforced and they're so desperate to show that they've got some kind of a spine and that this law actually works, that they're going to go get a bunch of bits of paper issued by an English court and they're going to wave them around like they've achieved anything, when in fact they've achieved precisely nothing because the country's already blocked. So. So it's the weirdest political thing I have ever seen, watching the UK try to intimidate these Americans into silence. And you go to these companies and you say, well, what do you want to do about this? And they're just like, let's not ignore them, because that doesn't get us anywhere, but definitely write back to them and tell them to buzz off. So it's the strangest situation that I've ever been in, where basically an entire country and its media class are ignoring the fact that. That their flagship online safety law is being laughed at in the United States and the emperor has no clothes. And still, 11 months later, nobody can admit it. It's a very, very strange situation, and I suspect I'll never see anything like it for the rest of my natural life.
- [84:49]
Walker
What a time to be alive and kind of at the epicenter of this. I mean, it's just wild to me. And I want to be conscious of your time here. You still have just a couple more minutes. Yeah, of course. Okay. Because I wanted to maybe get a chance to ask you on something else. We were talking the start of this. We had a couple of technical difficulties, but we were going to be streaming on Noster. I think it may have actually ended up streaming on there, but moral of the story here is, so there's. There's companies, right? And then there's open protocols for communication. There's. There's a number of them now. NOSTR is the one I spend the most time on personally. But I'm curious if this is something where, you know, it's a sort of a. I could see the regulators in the EU and UK and Australia really not liking these open protocols, where many different, you know, dozens or hundreds of different applications and end clients are being built on top of them that people can access without providing any. Any personal information whatsoever. No data collected. Don't need. Don't even need an email. Like there is nothing. Do you think this is something that they start to go after in some of these jurisdictions? Because. Because this, I mean, this just really flies in the face of everything that they're doing.
- [85:58]
Preston Byrne
Not yet. I think that at the moment, the small I mean, the smaller social is a kill zone for startups and new companies and new protocols. It's very, very difficult to compete with the network effects. And, and this is not like a defeatist viewpoint, it's just explaining.
- [86:12]
Walker
No, no, it's just true.
- [86:13]
Preston Byrne
The big companies, right, have network effects. Those network effects create feedback loops. Those feedback loops are very, very difficult to reach, replicate because the number of humans in the world is limited and they have limited time and attention and space in their head to do, you know, to interact with various social apps. So it's very difficult for something like a Nostr or something like Farcaster. I think just so far, Caster just exited social effectively and they're just becoming a wallet, if memory serves. And that was the Ethereum, excuse me, that was the Ethereum. That was the Ethereum based social network. And they said, listen, this isn't going to work, this isn't the future for us. And they were wildly successful for a while there, particularly during COVID So it's really, really difficult to break in. It is absolutely essential that these tools continue to be used. There are some companies that were deep, that were more on the free speech side of things, that absolutely survived on Bitcoin when, during mass financial services, deplatforming events, particularly of the type that occurred during COVID So it's very much something which is a huge, huge problem. And Bitcoin is the reason that we have free speech on the web today. It's because Bitcoin helped ensure that some of these smaller companies survived some of the darker days. And so the more tooling we have, the better. I don't think they're focusing on it because ultimately they're seeking minimum effort, maximum social control is the objective. And so if you're going after smaller platforms, I mean, they picked. The four platforms they picked for enforcement were not selected because in the UK's case, they were not selected because they were uniquely dangerous. They were not selected because certainly not because they were breaking any American law, because they're not. They were selected by political activists because they were regarded as incubators for ideas that the kind of people who run the UK's communications regulator and work for the UK's government disagree with. And so that's my read of the situation. And they were all American, right? So they were beyond the UK's jurisdictional reach. So I don't view that. I view their enforcement attempts as being very politically motivated. If you ask them about it, they'll say no, of course, it's about harms and all the rest of it. So how do you define harm? And then you go and dig down a little bit and you figure out what these people, what their character structure is and what politics they believe and their politics directly influence the kind of content they want removed from the Internet. So I don't think that targeting a decentralized infrastructure is something, particularly on the social side of things, is something which is, is a high priority for them. But if you look at how they're positioning, for example, vis a vis app stores, they want to be able to have deplatforming orders served on app stores. That's a power which is within, you know, that's within the UK's power to do you do that. Nostr's gone, right? And then you're just using Nostr through a progressive web app, which is no good. So they, they have, they're going to try to get control of all of these, you know, central nodes which are used for distributing software as well. And then if there's an app which doesn't comply, they will target that node with the censorship order in order to target the app. So they'll say to Apple, listen, X isn't complying with the rules. Apple, you've got to take this down. And so what we're doing, right, part of the Granite act is designed to immunize everything American. The Google Play Store, the Apple Store, all the rest of it, to protect all American infrastructure from the kinds of intrusions that they're currently only targeting companies with. They could also target Apple, Google, something like that. And so, you know, that's part of the wider fight. But no, the more the merrier. We definitely need more experiments to be attempted in order to ideally get to an end state where you do have a free speech, decentralized social app of some kind, which is very difficult to kill or censor. But, you know, whether Nostr is going to be the thing that does that or something else will be, remains to be seen.
- [89:49]
Walker
Yeah, no, I, I appreciate the perspective on it because I've been kind of curious if this is something it's, it's still, I think, you know, small enough where it, it's like not even on their radar probably. Yeah, at least we have some, some, some testing of the fact that like, for instance, you know, Damas, one of the earliest Noster clients was banned by the Chinese App Store. Like, I mean, Chinese flavor of the Apple App Store immediately upon getting released and because downloads spiked like crazy when it went live. But then people routed around, they either, you know, they already had it downloaded, some of them, or they just use different, you know, apps. And that's kind of like the beauty of it. It's like, you know, as long as you have a protocol based communication system, you can always build new apps. It's a, it's a hydra, right? You cut off one head, two pop up in its place. So there's something there I wanted to maybe, maybe round out with. Just something that you had, you had retweeted this some. I swear, some of the EU bureaucrats that I see, I, I keep thinking they're parody accounts. Like, I keep thinking this must like, there's no way any actual person thinks like this. This must be like, this must be a joke, right? But this guy, Gunter Fellinger, Jan said, shall the EU expropriate Elon Musk and hand over X to E? Oh, now I've lost the, I've lost it again.
- [91:03]
Preston Byrne
Here we go.
- [91:04]
Walker
To the EU Public foundation to serve as infrastructure for free public debate, for free world based on European decency. European decency, you know, morality and reasonable regulation and so safeguard this wonderful platform from ever more extremist Elon Musk. And it got like 95% of people voted no. I assume the 5% that voted yes were like, fellow, you know, people on the EU's payroll. But like this, this was just insane to me. Like, do they actually think that this is. That they in any way? First of all, that that's even a reasonable thing to say. Because your response was like, look, you don't know how this works. This is a U.S. company. These are U.S. servers, U.S. employees. You can't just take this. And somebody else is like, well, maybe we'll just recreate X in the eu. And it's like, oh, okay, so tell me you don't understand network effects without telling me you don't understand network effects. Nobody's going to use your surveillance.
- [91:56]
Preston Byrne
You had any ability to recreate X, they would have done it by now. They don't.
- [92:00]
Walker
Right?
- [92:00]
Preston Byrne
I mean, the reality is if they had an Internet industry, if they were able to build an Internet industry, they would have done. And a lot of what they're doing now is because the Internet has grown beyond their control. They're not doing any domestic innovation and they feel like they want a piece of the action. And the way that they're going to get that piece of the action is by extorting American companies with fines and by trying to burden us with regulation so that we're, you know, it's, we're dragged down along with them into whatever hole they're choosing to hide themselves in as the world races ahead. So like the European thing, you know, particularly people who are very patriotic about the European Union as a concept I find very unusual. You know, I'm actually a citizen of the European Union in addition to being a citizen of the United States. And I don't feel any particularly. You know, the Ode to Joy is the national anthem or the anthem of the eu and that's a beautiful, wonderful piece of music, right? However, not a beautiful, wonderful piece of music because I stand up and think of the Berlaymont building in Brussels every time that it plays, right? It's because the EU tries to appropriate to itself. It is a bureaucracy and it tries to appropriate to itself all of the glories of European culture and civilization because it has the name Europe in the name and it happens to include most of the European nations. But it is not co extensive with Europe. It's just a bureaucracy that's sucking the life out of it. But some people get confused by the propaganda and they decide that Europe is something that they want to have an identity with and attach their identity to. And that's their decision. Ultimately, Europe can screech and kick and scream and do whatever they want, but I'm pretty convinced the United States is preparing a robust legislative response and executive branch response to European censorship. And I think that the United States is going to. If the Europeans really want to make a fight out of it, that's their prerogative. But as between the two places, I think the United States will prevail. It won't be pleasant, it won't be fun, it might get a little ugly. But ultimately, I suspect the United States interests in protecting its economy are sufficiently non negotiable to us and sufficiently negotiable to the EU that although I mean the UK is a prime example, they're running around. If you, if you talk to people in the UK about my clients resistance to their laws, they say, oh well, the Online Safety Act. You're ignoring the Online Safety Act. I'm like, okay, fine, the Online Safety act is two years old and it's a statute that you just tried to enforce. And my client is the first enforcement target you've ever tried to enforce it against and you failed. Well, my client's invoking the US Constitution. And the First Amendment to that Constitution is over 230 years old. And it's not just a statute, it is part of the foundation, foundational, you know, legal structure of the United States. So, as you know, in terms of who's ignoring what, you know, an American ignoring the Online Safety act is a lot less delusional than a Brit ignoring the First Amendment. And just in terms of the relative importance of those rules and which one has been operative for what length of time. And yeah, so I just think that there's a lot of willful blindness on their side to how important free speech is to the United States, how structurally central it is to the way that we do things here in the United States, and how unacceptable it is to us in the United States to give it up. So they're going to learn that over the course of the next months and years, just quite what third rail they've stepped on. And they'll either learn their lesson or they won't. If they don't learn the lesson, I think the United States will wind up raising statutory shields and imposing trade barriers and all the rest of it. But at some point, I think Europe is going to say, okay, enough is enough, cry uncle, and they're going to let us continue. They're going to assume that we can continue our relationship as allies and friends with Americans enjoying their free speech rights and Europe doing whatever domestic censorship it needs to do. But the current situation is Europe has decided they want to project their sovereignty into our borders, and that's just not going to fly. So it's. That's where we are. And yeah, that's where we are. There's not, not a whole work. We're, we're still mid flight on the US Response to all of this. I think actually we're actually fairly early in the US response to this. I think the US response will likely be concluded by the end of Q2 of 2026. I think this will be in the history books, done and dusted. I very much doubt Europe will escalate if the US Government does everything that it needs to do to prevent the Europeans from enforcing here. Because I don't think it's in their interest to escalate because again, at the moment, it's in their interest to be as aggressive as they want because the math works out in their favor, right? You can send a letter to X demanding $100 million or $200 million, and it doesn't cost you anything to do it. If the United States creates shield laws and shield legislation, you send $100 million demand, you got a $300 million counterclaim, and you've got a rule in the United States which says that X is immune from this kind of stuff. I Just don't see the point in sending the censorship notice at that point. And they'll figure out some accommodation diplomatically between the two, between the two federations to make it politically acceptable to the Europeans to back down.
- [97:07]
Walker
President, this has been awesome man. I seriously this has been so fascinating. Thank you for this incredible deep dive. I could honestly I've got about eight more hours of questions but just glad that there are such based lawyers representing the interests of Americans and American companies from the would be totalitarian overreach of our friends across the pond. It sounds like we may, you know, someday soon have to go maybe perhaps not save them in a physical kinetic war, but save them in a war of, of freedom of speech and crackdown on that. So you know, at least we can still export American values.
- [97:41]
Preston Byrne
That's the, that's the next mission after we're done. But no thank you and thanks to everyone on on X in particular for reposting and retweeting without everybody chipping in there a little bit and helping get this noticed. We wouldn't it literally it comes down to everyone, every retweet, every like, every comment, every reply, everything has helped us get the attention of the right people in government and help to convince them in particular that this is a good idea. Because you put something like the Granite act out goes viral, people start asking, you know, replying to Elon and J.D. you know, J.D. vance and President Trump saying where is it? Why don't we get it? And that communicates to the US government hey this is a good idea, maybe you want to do it. So no, really, thank you to everybody. This has been a collective team effort by you know there have been a handful of lawyers obviously doing a lot of the legal work, but everyone on the Internet has helped us be seen by the US federal government and is still helping us convince the US federal government that this is a good idea. And we're not done yet. Right. We gotta, we gotta get this, we gotta, we gotta get this plane landed. And you know, I think we will but we're gonna keep pushing until such time as we do. Yeah.
- [98:51]
Walker
So I mean just great example that a bunch of anons on the Internet can, can make a lot of noise and make a difference and you know, lending your voice and supporting these things does actually help. Is there anywhere you want to send people or any, any way that they can support you, the work you're doing? Anything else? I mean is it just really by trolling European and UK politicians online and you know, where do you want to Send people or what else can people do to support this effort?
- [99:14]
Preston Byrne
I definitely would not recommend trolling European and UK politicians online. That would be an absolutely terrible thing that you definitely should not do. You should. When, when, if and when Granite becomes a bill, if and when it gets introduced in either the House or the Senate, and I'm not sure that that will happen or what form it will take, but assuming that it does in substantially the form that we hope it does, when that happens, call your representative and call. Like, don't send them an email. Pick up the phone and call them and say, you know, I want the Granite act, foreign censorship, shield law. Don't do that today because they're not going to know what it is because the bill hasn't been introduced. But when it gets introduced, please do that. And apart from that, get together with other people who care about free speech Network. Do things in person, Become an activist, get active. There are plenty of ways to fight for free speech and get involved with organizations that support free speech, even if it's just joining their newsletters so that you know what to talk about, what the issues are. Get the regular newsletters from the eff, for example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're pretty good on free speech. So that way, when you're going through daily life in the world, as you talk to your friends, you have an educated viewpoint and you can teach other people about this. But literally anything that you can do is useful and anything that you do is appreciated by those of us who. I'm cognizant that for whatever reason, I've managed to catch these cases. I find myself central to a lot of these discussions. And people often ask, what can I do? And it's like literally anything. A year ago, I was just some guy taking clients pro bono, you know, and now it's. This issue has become much more politically significant. Did I plan for that? Absolutely not. I was just there, right? And I just put my head down and worked. And you don't really focus on the bigger picture. You just say, okay, here's a strategy. We're just going to grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. And every day you try to move it forward an inch, right? And you're not going to do everything overnight. And the same is true for everybody else. You can just figure out what, you know, what your lane is, get into it, stay in it, keep pushing. And sometimes that is, you know, if a bill gets published, call your representative once a day, tell them, hey, this is something I want past. And. And that's, you know, we'll but we'll, we'll, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. That's not a Today issue. So enjoy. I think my advice to everyone is enjoy your Christmas holidays and don't worry about free speech too much. I certainly, you know, I think everybody's going to be pens down for a week or two and then we'll be right back at it. Right, right back at it. In the new year.
- [101:35]
Walker
There you go. And you can just do things right. You know, it's just, it's a great example that. Preston, I really appreciate your time. This was, this was fascinating. And yeah, we'd love to have you back on, hopefully when this, this legislation is actually hitting the floor and we can do a, do a push for it and get as many people as possible.
- [101:51]
Preston Byrne
I'll come back on and we can walk right through it. That'd be awesome.
- [101:53]
Walker
That, that would be fantastic. Really appreciate the time. Preston, this was awesome.
- [101:57]
Preston Byrne
Awesome. Thank you. Great to be here. Had a great time. Foreign.
- [102:07]
Walker
And that's a wrap on this bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. Find me on noster@primal.net walker and this podcast@primal.netcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram at tcoin Podcast. Head to the Show Notes to grab sponsor links. Head to substack.comwalkeramerica to get episodes emailed to you. And head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.