This article looks at precedents from the history of Internet law, after the UK authorities have been put  under pressure to ban the social media site “X” formerly known as Twitter.  At issue is the  sexualised manipulation and sharing of women's images using the Grok AI tool, a new and socially abhorrent phenomenon. Ofcom has launched an investigation. Since I wrote this, X has said it will re-programme Grok AI so it does not produce these images. Even so, it's worth understanding how the UK authorities could ban a platform like X, if they wanted to. 

In 2012, when the United States authorities wanted to ban what was then the largest  Internet cloud storage service, they co-ordinated a daring James Bond-style helicopter raid, dropping in the FBI to make arrests  – in a New Zealand mansion. It’s an outrageous story, but it is actually true. I wrote about it in my book The Closing of the Net [Polity 2016]. The service was called Megaupload, and the story offers the closest precedent I can think of to illustrate the issues arising when  a State targets a large public Internet service.  

For the book, I interviewed a senior member of  Megaupload’s American legal team in a London restaurant. He was a somewhat curmudgeonly character, but  from our chat I gleaned  insights into the case. Re-reading what I wrote then, with present circumstances in mind,  it is instructive in informing us about the process and  pitfalls of banning a web service. Please bear with me.

At that time, Megaupload was the market leader, claiming 60 million registered users and 1 billion unique visitors per year.  The case was divisive due to the sharply differing perspectives between the entertainment industries’ concerns about copyright infringement, and the cloud industry’s concerns about the business risks.

The raid was orchestrated between the FBI and New Zealand’s elite police unit, known as the  Special Tactics Group. The  mansion, near  Auckland in New Zealand, was the home of Kim Dotcom, founder and proprietor of Megaupload. He and his staff were arrested at gunpoint, with their hands up. A Grand Jury indictment was issued in the United States, alleging a criminal conspiracy for infringement of copyrighted works, causing harm to copyright holders “in excess of $500 million” and racketeering. Their assets were seized, as were the servers in Virginia, United States, and their Internet domain name. The service went dark forever.   

There followed a long and protracted series of lawsuits in the New Zealand courts.   Megaupload was able to put up a defence, and some of the judgements went in its favour. For more detail, including sources, please see my book The Closing of the Net. From what I can gather the case is still not concluded in 2026, and Kim Dotcom remains under threat of extradition to the US, although some of his staff have reached agreements with the US authorities and will not be extradited. The story underlines the complexity of shutting down an Internet service.  

 Ofcom must go to court

Obviously, Ofcom cannot take down  X as dramatically as the US authorities did with Megaupload. The Online Safety Act specifies that Ofcom must first of all conduct an investigation into X and Grok AI, and whether or not there is a case for any enforcement action. See my previous article  Grok AI images: can compliance be enforced?

The Act directs Ofcom to work through a tortuous series of compliance processes in S. 130 – S.148. Then, if it finds they don't comply, it  may fine a platform, ask them to changes their practices, and it may obtain a court order to remove hosting, advertising or payment facilities. If all of those fail, it can seek a court order to wholly or partially restrict access. If the platform is behaving so egregiously that it  refuses to comply with any of that, Ofcom can skip directly to the final step. Importantly though, it must seek a court order.

The reasons why the Act specifies a court order are rooted in the history of Internet law.

In parallel  with the Megaupload case, there were  other website blocking applications in Europe and the UK. Most came from copyright holders. An important  case from the UK perspective is Twentieth Century Fox v BT.  British Telecom (BT) and other UK  Internet service providers were refusing to block websites or their content without a court order that precisely spelled out the requirement. The importance of this case is that set a legal precedent, and  anyone who wants Internet service providers to block a website in the UK, must first of all obtain a court order. Hence why Ofcom cannot just  say that X is banned, it has to go to court.

I attended the hearing at the High Court in London in 2011 and was kindly given a copy of BT’s submissions to the court which I still have. My reports on the court hearing are here  and here  with a wider discussion about these cases in my book The Closing of the Net.  

BT argued that the court order should  contain instructions telling the Internet providers how to  implement the ban. And then it gets a bit technical. They can  block domain names or IP addresses which are part of the underlying system used to enable connections to websites and platforms. Typically this would render the platform invisible.  They can also block individual URLs or links. The method they choose will depend on the exact aim of the blocking and whether it is a whole website to be taken down or a partial block relating to only some of the platform content.

X has over 150 IP addresses and its servers are located in data centres on all five continents, hosted by two major third party cloud providers, Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services. This is very much more complicated than Megaupload, or any of other cases that precede it. Ofcom will have to take account of this in its court submission.  

 How long will it take? 

None of this happens quickly, and implementing a ban is unlikely to meet the demand for speed demanded by the public. These cases require diligent preparation and are subject to repeated appeals and counter-claims, which can drag on for many years. The Megaupload case was around two and a half years in preparation and still does not have a final conclusion 15 years on. 

Another example can be seen in the case of the notorious Pirate Bay bit torrent file sharing site,  where legal proceedings dragged on for several years after it was raided  by the Swedish police in 2006. The site was  operated from Sweden, and grew to be the largest service of its type,  with 50 million users  in 2014. The police raid came after pressure from US entertainment industry stakeholders to shut it down amid allegations of copyright infringement. See: US Officials behind the scenes on Pirate Bay indictement    A Stockholm court ruling followed in 2009, where the site was found  guilty of secondary liability for copyright infringement by facilitating the communication and dissemination of the music and video files.   The Pirate Bay was the subject of several blocking orders  filed in the European courts  by the entertainment industries, who won an injunction in the UK high court in 2012  (the case  was  Dramatico Entertainment v BskyB). 

So, in conclusion, these cases illustrate how whatever Ofcom does, it is going to take time and careful preparation. Given the twists and turns of the legal action and technical complexities,   Ofcom  will have to give serious consideration to the implementation.  With a platform as large and public as X, it won’t be easy.  I don’t envy Ofcom this task.