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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

Nope. It's fascinating how many people believe this, but it isn't what that law says, and so sure enough such sites are accessible via my ISP. The ISP is required by law to provide some means by which consumers can choose not to be able to access "adult" content. It does this during sign up, if you pick "Yes, block adult content" it informs you that they choose not to do business with you and suggest you use a different ISP.

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>Nope. It's fascinating how many people believe this, but it isn't what that law says

They do because it's true and that's exactly what the law says.

Digital Economy Act 2017 14 (1):

>A person contravenes this subsection if the person makes pornographic material available on the internet to persons in the United Kingdom on a commercial basis other than in a way that secures that, at any given time, the material is not normally accessible by persons under the age of 18.

Section 23: Regulator’s power to require internet service providers to block access to material

(1) Where the age-verification regulator considers that a person (“the non-complying person”) is—

(a)contravening section 14(1), or

Like its predecessor, the Digital Economy Act 2017 has a huge amount of text that's basically predicated on the relevant Minister pushing the button. And of course this text is a huge mess (which is why it doesn't take effect immediately, the intent is you can come back and fix it before pushing the button) and so in reality nobody pushes the button. Section 23 is one of those parts. The hypothetical regulator doesn't exist, the infrastructure for all this doesn't exist. None of this is actually law.

Go read the "commencement" section - it's actually eye-opening to do this for other laws you've heard are supposed to have drastic effects.

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