Ofcom: Nine of 11 Online Safety Fines Unpaid

Ofcom has handed out 11 fines under the Online Safety Act since March 2025, and companies have paid two of them. Dame Melanie Dawes, the regulator’s chief executive, gave MPs that tally on 20 October, and added a warning that some of the money may never arrive. “We won’t be able to recover every single fine on online safety,” she told the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, according to LBC.

The figures put a number on the hardest part of the UK’s online safety regime: making penalties stick against websites that sit outside British jurisdiction and choose to ignore them. Ofcom’s defence, as Dawes set it out, is that most fined services have changed their behaviour or left the UK market, which she counts as the real test. For more on how governments are policing platforms and AI, see TSN’s AI Regulation hub.

In brief

Ofcom has issued 11 Online Safety Act fines since March 2025; two are paid and nine are not, including one under appeal and one not yet overdue, Dawes told MPs, LBC reports.
She said foreign courts could stop Ofcom recovering some money, but that six of the nine unpaid cases involve services that have since brought in age checks or blocked UK users.
She named no company. 4chan’s lawyer says Ofcom has effectively conceded defeat in its case against the forum; Ofcom has not said it is dropping that case.

Most of the unpaid fines belong to sites that changed course

The session, a regular hearing on “The work of Ofcom” with Dawes and Ofcom chair Sir Ian Cheshire, began at 10:00 BST, according to Parliament’s committee listing. No transcript had been published there when TSN checked on Tuesday evening, so the quotes below are as LBC reported them.

Of the 11 fines, two have been paid, one is being appealed and one is not yet overdue, leaving nine unpaid, according to LBC. Dawes broke those nine down. “Of the nine that are unpaid in total, two are porn companies that have now implemented highly effective age assurance,” she said. “Another four have geo-blocked the UK. And so that’s three that are still available without the risks being mitigated out of the 11 services.”

She also said Ofcom has launched 41 investigations under the Act, and “more than half have now been closed”.

The collection record has drawn scrutiny before. LBC reported that as of March 2026, Ofcom had recovered £55,000 of more than £3 million in fines imposed on adult sites under the Act’s age-check rules.

Foreign courts are the limit Ofcom now acknowledges

The sharpest line concerned services based abroad. “If foreign courts decide to… try and get in our way, there will be a point at which we have to accept that we won’t be able to recover that money,” Dawes said. “But we will always seek to go as far as we can. And in the end, what encourages me about the companies we fined is that they’ve actually done the things that we want to protect the public, and that is the real test of our implementation of the Act.”

She named no company. Dexerto noted that Dawes did not specifically mention 4chan, but said her comments appear to address the central problem in Ofcom’s dispute with the US-based forum, which the regulator has fined hundreds of thousands of pounds over alleged failures including age checks, illegal-content risk assessments and information requests. Dexerto reported that 4chan is still operating and has yet to pay.

4chan’s lawyer calls it surrender; the fines still stand

Preston Byrne, who represents 4chan, read the testimony as a white flag. “Insofar as a political organization like Ofcom is even capable of admitting defeat, it did so in the 4chan enforcement today,” he wrote on his website. “Thus ends this dispute, for all practical purposes.”

That is Byrne’s view as 4chan’s advocate. Ofcom has not said it is abandoning the case, and Dawes’s comments leave every fine in place, as Dexerto pointed out. Byrne’s argument leans on a September ruling by the US District Court for the District of Columbia, which dismissed 4chan’s lawsuit against Ofcom on jurisdictional grounds. In passing, according to the opinion as quoted by Byrne and Dexerto, the judge wrote that American courts “generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution”.

Byrne predicts Ofcom will ask Parliament for stronger “interim business disruption measures” so it can move against foreign sites sooner. On that point, the same hearing offered a hint: MLex reported that Dawes called for changes to those interim powers, in testimony on Ofcom’s handling of Grok deepfakes on X that TSN covered earlier. Whatever Parliament decides, Dawes’s own count leaves three services that are still reachable from the UK, still unpaid and, in her words, still “without the risks being mitigated”.