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About this episode
Preston Byrne on the cross-border legal fight most people haven't noticed yet — the UK's attempt to enforce its censorship laws on American soil, and the one lawyer who's holding the line against it.
Recorded 2026. The hamster correspondence with Ofcom alone makes this one of the most quoted episodes in the feed.
TL;DR
American attorney Preston Byrne joins Peter McCormack to explain why the UK's Online Safety Act is not a domestic regulatory matter but a sovereignty conflict - one being fought, almost entirely, by a single American lawyer working pro bono. Byrne represents 4chan, Kiwi Farms, Gab and Sanctioned Suicide against Ofcom's attempts to fine and regulate them under British law. He argues the UK has crossed a structural threshold on speech: the political class no longer treats free expression as a default, the legal system has no framework to push back, and the British public is only now — twenty years late - beginning to realise what's been lost. He explains what this means for American companies, for British citizens, and for the people who assumed liberal democracy came with speech protections built in.
Guest
Preston Byrne is an American attorney specialising in free speech, internet law and cross-border regulatory disputes. British-trained and dual-qualified, he is one of a small number of US lawyers actively defending American companies against extraterritorial enforcement of UK censorship law. He is the principal author of a proposed UK Free Speech Bill and the GRANITE Act, a US state-level shield law against foreign censorship orders that passed the Wyoming House of Representatives in 2026.
The GRANITE Act (2026) · The UK Free Speech Bill (2026)
Episode Summary
Preston Byrne's argument is that Britain has slid into a censorship regime most of its own population has not yet recognised — and that the regime is now attempting to extend its jurisdiction into the United States. The Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, gave Ofcom the power to fine non-UK companies for hosting content lawful in their home jurisdictions. Byrne represents the first targets of that scheme. No major US law firm would take the cases. He took them pro bono and has, by his own account, been fighting essentially alone for over a year.
Byrne traces the British speech problem back well before the Online Safety Act. He marks his own awakening at a 2008 Scientology protest in London, where he watched a 16-year-old receive a criminal summons from the City of London Police for holding a sign reading "Scientology is a dangerous cult." That moment, he argues, was already a warning the country failed to read. Twenty years later, the praying woman, the trans-rights protesters, the bloggers visited by police for criticising the local force — these aren't aberrations. They're the system working as designed.
The conversation turns to what's actually happening at Ofcom. Byrne explains the regulator's claim to extraterritorial jurisdiction, why that claim collapses at the UK's twelve-mile coastline under American constitutional law, and why his clients have refused to pay any of the fines issued against them. He recounts the now-famous "hamster emails" — his correspondence with Ofcom on behalf of 4chan, in which he informed the regulator that their fine documents would be used as bedding for his client's pet hamster, Mr Whiskers — and explains why the joke was load-bearing.
The episode covers the constructive side of the work. Byrne is not just defending clients; he has drafted a UK Free Speech Bill modelled on the First Amendment but adapted to British constitutional tradition, and the GRANITE Act, a US state-level shield law that uses the £46 billion in UK assets held at the Federal Reserve as enforcement leverage. The Wyoming version passed the State House 46–12. Federal versions are under active consideration.
The final section covers the political economy: why no British political party has yet adopted a serious free speech position, why Reform is on the fence, why both left and right reach for censorship when their own enemies are speaking, and why Byrne — though British by descent and trained in English law — refuses to set foot on UK soil until the current government is out.
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