It used to be said that the sun never set on the British Empire, so far-flung were its possessions. Britain has long since retreated from most of those territories, most recently, and controversially, in its attempt to relinquish control of the Chagos Islands. Yet even as it sheds physical dominion, Britain appears increasingly eager to export something else: its laws and regulations.
In that project, it is joined enthusiastically by its former partners in the European Union. If the Old World has one major export left, it is bureaucracy.
The most obvious current target is X, Elon Musk’s platform, and its Grok AI tool. Some users of questionable taste quickly discovered that Grok could be used to generate deepfake images of celebrities in revealing attire. More seriously, it was alleged that the technology had been used to generate sexualized images of children. In response, last month the UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, opened a formal investigation under the Online Safety Act, citing potential failures to prevent illegal content. The possible penalties are severe, ranging from multi-million-pound fines, based on the company’s global revenue, to a complete ban on the platform in the UK.
Senior British officials were quick to escalate the rhetoric. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall publicly condemned X and emphasized that all options, including nationwide blocking, were on the table. The message was unmistakable; compliance would be enforced, one way or another.
Two days later, X announced new restrictions to prevent Grok from editing images of real people into revealing scenarios and to introduce geoblocking in jurisdictions where such content is illegal. Ofcom described these changes as “welcome” but insufficient, insisting its investigation would continue. Meanwhile, pressure spread outward. Other governments announced restrictions, and the European Commission expanded its own probes under the Digital Services Act. What began as a British enforcement action quickly morphed into coordinated global pressure, effectively pushing X toward worldwide policy changes.
This is the crucial point. British regulators were not merely seeking compliance for British users. They were pressing for changes to X’s global policies and technical architecture to govern speech and expression far beyond the UK’s borders. What might initially have been framed as a failure to impose sensible safeguards on a powerful new tool has become a test case for whether regulators in one jurisdiction can dictate technological limits everywhere else.
This pattern is not new. Ofcom has already attempted to extend its reach directly into the United States, brushing aside the constitutional protections afforded to Americans. Since the Online Safety Act came into force in 2025, Ofcom has adopted an aggressively expansive interpretation of its authority, asserting that any online service “with links to the UK,” meaning merely accessible to UK users and deemed to pose “risks” to them, must comply with detailed duties to assess, mitigate, and report on illegal harms. Services provided entirely from abroad are explicitly deemed “in scope” if they meet these criteria.
The flashpoints have been 4chan and Kiwi Farms, two US-based forums notorious for unmoderated speech and even harassment campaigns. In mid-2025, Ofcom initiated investigations into both for failing to respond to statutory information requests and for failing to complete the required risk assessments. It ultimately issued a confirmation decision against 4chan, imposing a £20,000 fine plus daily penalties for continued non-compliance, despite the site having no physical presence, staff, or infrastructure in the UK.
Rather than comply, the operators of both sites filed suit in US federal court, arguing that Ofcom’s actions violate the First Amendment and that the regulator lacks jurisdiction to enforce British law against American companies. The litigation frames the dispute starkly: whether a foreign regulator may, through regulatory pressure, compel changes to lawful American speech.
That question has now spilled into US politics. Senior American officials have criticized Ofcom’s posture as an extraterritorial threat to free speech, and at least one member of Congress has threatened retaliatory legislation. What Britain views as online safety increasingly appears, from across the Atlantic, to be regulatory imperialism.
Speech is merely the most visible example. Europe has long sought to impose its environmental priorities on both developed and developing countries alike, a phenomenon I once labeled “eco-imperialism.” The latest iteration is the EU’s deforestation regulation, scheduled to take effect later this year. Exporters of products such as timber and beef must now prove, to the EU’s satisfaction, that their supply chains have not contributed to deforestation.
For American producers, this is less about forests than paperwork. As the Farm Bureau has noted, the rule functions as a non-tariff barrier, particularly for producers without vertically integrated supply chains. Native American tribes reliant on timber exports have gone further, accusing Brussels of a renewed form of colonialism.
Financial regulation provides another illustration. Through a patchwork of directives and equivalence determinations, the EU increasingly conditions market access on conformity with its regulatory preferences. Non-EU jurisdictions are pressured to align their rules not through treaties, but through the sheer leverage of access to Europe’s markets, the so-called Brussels Effect.
Even Europe’s revived Blocking Statute, originally intended to counter US extraterritorial sanctions, underscores the contradiction. Europe insists on defending its own regulatory autonomy while simultaneously seeking to universalize its rules abroad.
None of this should be surprising. Administrative overreach is not generally a moral failure but an institutional one. Regulators operate under mandates that are deliberately broad, politically insulated, and difficult to measure. Their incentives are asymmetric; visible failure is punished, while over-caution and expansion rarely are (indeed, they are often rewarded). In such an environment, discretion naturally displaces rules. This, in turn, empowers the production of bulletins, circulars, and even blog posts that have the effect of law, something my colleague Wayne Crews calls “regulatory dark matter.”
When regulators move beyond enforcing clear, predictable rules and instead attempt to manage outcomes like “safety,” “harm,” and “fairness,” they substitute their own judgment for dispersed social knowledge. The claim that complex systems can be centrally overseen within a nation, let alone across borders, rests on an exaggerated confidence in regulatory omniscience and a systematic undervaluation of unintended consequences.
As this tendency is reinforced rather than checked, agencies gravitate toward peer approval rather than public accountability, and therefore toward international coordination rather than domestic consent. Jurisdiction follows the reach of the system instead of democratic legitimacy. Borders become inconveniences, and constitutional limits become parochial relics. Trial by jury, the crown jewel of common law? An inconvenience.
These developments also reflect a deeper shift in governance. In Britain, Parliament has not merely delegated power to regulators; it has largely abandoned meaningful oversight of them. Ministers disclaim responsibility in the name of independence, while courts typically review only whether regulators followed proper procedure, not whether their decisions were wise or proportionate. In the EU, this technocratic design was largely intentional from the start, with the Commission enjoying extraordinary agenda-setting power and steadily expanding its reach since Maastricht.
The result is an administrative order increasingly detached from democratic constraint. As Britain and Europe struggle economically, particularly in comparison to the United States, the temptation is not to reform inward, but to regulate outward. If growth cannot be revived at home, regulation can at least be exported abroad.
Yet Europe’s recent clash with America over Greenland has exposed much of the continent’s weakness. While the Commission may seek to demand subservience from American tech companies, those companies have the capability to turn off the lights — literally. The smothering of Europe’s technological innovation under its regulatory blanket means it has nothing with which to replace American know-how. Britain’s failure to break fully from the European regulatory mindset after Brexit means it is stuck in the mid-Atlantic, regulating Americans while still attempting to stay on America’s good side. That game may soon be up.
The British Empire once projected power by force. Today, the Old World tries to extend its reach not with arms, but compliance. But bureaucracy, like the empire, cannot resist the setting sun.
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