Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill
webdevlaw.uk
webdevlaw.uk
No; some tiny minority of UK users may do that, but the overwhelming majority will just use whatever services are "approved" (follow whatever rules they have to, to stay in the market) and remain available by default.
I see no reason UK users couldn’t do the same. All it takes to get grandma on a VPN is for an enterprising grandson to set her up.
For what it's worth, in my experience when I was in China it was trivial to bypass the firewall using a VPN service.
But... if the need's there, people figure it out (as he's doing right now - for him it's something gaming related).
I wonder if I can put an IP block on my own site and just ignore it all too. Dumbass country.
This horribly written law can easily be interpreted to apply to ISP's as well - so if the ISP is allowing these peer-to-peer systems that allow "unsafe" content to be shared, they're liable for it too, or they have to shut down the peer-to-peer systems.
Which again, is the point - to turn the internet into the easily regulable cable TV that they already understand.
So far Tor has implemented WebRTC[0], but that's just for bridging to their main network.
[0] https://snowflake.torproject.org/
P.S. I've also considered the "decentralized p2p social media" idea myself, but mostly because I believe the ideas we have currently behind online voting, ranking and moderation are completely at odds with IRL discussions which are P2P and based on "forwarding" ideas to known peers (friends, family, community members, countrymen) rather than posting and ranking content with anonymous peers (which are susceptible to Sybil attacks). The fact that so much discussion takes place on corporate-owned forums (Including this one, regardless of how benevolent ycombinator may be) presents a major threat to democracy in general.
Instead of "liking" or "upvoting" a post on a centralized forum, why not "rehost" or "forward" a post on a decentralized forum: essentially seeding it like in BitTorrent or "pinning" it in IPFS. "Followers" of a user donate their storage and bandwidth to them, combating bureaucratic attacks like delisting and DDoS against popular users.
If you could port IPFS to run completely in a browser you would have this complete "pseudo-social-media" functionality. They have something called "IPNS" where instead of giving someone the hash of a file like in BitTorrent's DHT, you could give them a public key which you use to sign the latest version of a file that is to be fetched. The Public/Private keypair could represent a user's identity, and the file in this case could be a blog or account page which is updated with new links to the user's posts, or links to other user's posts.
So if you ported IPFS to work within a web browser, it would just be a matter of implementing a user-interface. Boom, social media solved. You could maintain parity between desktop and web versions by using libraries like libdatachannel[1] and datachannel-wasm[2]
[1] https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel [2] https://github.com/paullouisageneau/datachannel-wasm
I built a small proof of concept along these lines a while back. The implementation was similar to what you're describing with peers seeding and forwarding messages. I didn't get as far as name resolution since that's a tough nut to crack in p2p but building off of IPNS would probably be the way to go. The prototype worked but it wasn't very attractive to use since it was only good for passing notes and there are better services out there with more features. I think something like it would only be worthwhile building if there really was a concerted effort to lock down all social media in a fairly heavy handed way.
Unless the UK significantly increases its military capacity and sets up world government, they will not be able to shut down the internet. The internet will still exist. The best they can hope for is a great firewall / North Korea type situation which would require a much more authoritarian (moreover functioning) government than even the UK can muster.
2) The great firewall was complicated by the design goal of accessing some, but not all, foreign websites. The UK could accomplish their goals in a day or two by just cutting all the underwater cables. That sounds like an impossible crazy thing, but so did Brexit a couple years ago.
A large amount (if not the vast majority) of fibre optics from Europe to Americas, go though the UK and cutting them off cuts off the biggest parts of the world from each other.
Is this common knowledge? It's the first claim I've encountered of Canada attempting Internet censorship.
Pre-Elon Twitter compared Canada's proposed regulations to North Korea and China.
>Newly released documents reveal Twitter Canada told government officials that a federal plan to create a new internet regulator with the power to block specific websites is comparable to drastic actions used in authoritarian countries like China, North Korea and Iran.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-twitter-com...
China, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia... Aren't progressive by any metric.
There is no connection whatsoever between progressive social policies, and macroeconomic planning.
Denmark is an extremely progressive country, way more than China in all aspects, yet they run under a free-market capitalist economy.
I disagree that this is a partisan thing however. Whether it's Canada, the UK or anywhere else it seems each party in power just pushes for more surveillance and more censorship, just using different excuses to justify their actions.
For example, Harper's conservative government put forth bill C-13 (online crime excuse) and C-30 ('think of the children' excuse), which arguably laid the way for much of the spying apparatus that is currently in place against Canadian citizens. And while Obama allowed the NSA's warrantless internet surveillance program, Trump extended it until 2024.
All governments want to spy on you, and all governments want to be able to control what you say, period. They just want you to beg for it first.
(Side note: the American Republican party is big government conservatives. Their rhetoric is irrelevant - look at what they do, not at what they say they want to do.)
Are you sure you are not speaking of liberals, who believe government should be applied liberally?
Not like any of them act as they speak, but if I am not mistaken, that's what the words mean.
Longer version: this is a discussion of a bill in progress in the British parliamentary system, where the current government is by a party known as the Conservative and Unionist Party, or "Conservatives" for short. This should not be confused with any colloquial meaning of the term "conservative" that might be familiar to you from American vernacular usage.
Note that political party names undergo drift from whatever they originally described over a period of decades to centuries. For example, the Australian Liberal Party is anything but "liberal" in the US context -- they're roughly equivalent to the US Republican mainstream in terms of ideology. Nor is the Australian "Labour" party a party of organized labour. Neither is the British Labour party -- it used to be, but the party leadership embarked on a protracted and mostly successful campaign to cut it off from its grassroots over a decade ago.
Anyway: the Conservative and Unionist Party has a very specific policy platform, which is described by the word "conservative" in British political discourse and which does not map neatly onto the American concept of conservativism because large chunks of American conservative culture simply don't exist in the UK. Yes, there are out-of-the-closet libertarians and objectivists and Christian dominionists in the Conservative party, but they're minor factions. The main faction can loosely be described as post-Thatcherite free marketeers, with a recent influx of hard-right racists and xenophobes who migrated en masse from UKIP, the UK Independence Party, after the Brexit referendum in 2016. There is no equivalent of the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, so there can be no equivalent of Constitutional Originalism in British conservativism. It's a different animal.
I'm impressed with how many people really do not understand the meaning of these terms. The idea that the US is culturally divided makes a lot more sense to me now, reading all of these responses.
When multiple people tell you that you’re wrong and no one else is taking your side, the rational response is to consider that you may be wrong. But, as humans, we sometimes lack the willingness (or perhaps ability) to do so.
"eppur si muove"
No, they believe "traditional" systems should be retained (i.e. conserved).
> government should be applied liberally?
That is almost diametrically opposite to the use of the word liberal as applied to politics.
Either way, many conservatives are collectivists: they believe the needs of society and preservation of tradition outweigh the desires of individuals, and so they tend to be in favor of concepts such as the traditional family excluding gay people, the rule of mothers in child rearing being more important than the freedom of women to pursue careers and so on.
The opposite of conservatives are progressives, people who believe the status quo is not generally good, and who seek to use the power of the state to change the status quo in a direction they believe is progress.
There are also many collectivist progressives, and as such tend to want things like egalitarian schooling even if certain extraordinary kids may be kept behind, or supporting progressive taxation such that those who have more have to give more to the collective.
On a different axis, we have liberals, who are the opposite of collectivists. Liberals can be conservative or progressive, but they ultimately believe that the most important value is individual freedom.
An example of a liberal conservative is someone like Ron Paul. He believes the status quo is generally good and shouldn't be changed to much, except where he thinks government has over reached. However, he also believes government shouldn't involve itself in people lives, even to preserve societal values, so he tends to support the legalization of Marijuana and perhaps even gay marriage (though given electoral realities, in not sure of his public position on the second). Contrast this to a more collectivist conservative like justice Clarence Thomas, who believes the state should ban gay marriage and even sodomy and contraception.
But behind this fundamental position, there still lies the position that the current state of affairs is fundamentally ok, or very close to it (or if not the current one, then some previous one that you aspire to return to). You can't truthfully be a conservative while believing everything is rotten and always has been - you would have no reasonable reason to oppose change, even change for change's sake.
I think most people agree that through history we've made a slow climb up a mountain. And it's always easier to fall down, than it is to continue climbing. One could look down into the abyss and say "we must be careful not to trip", or one could look up at the top of the mountain and say "we must get there at any cost". In this metaphor I'd say the revolutionary would be looking at another peak in the mountain range and say "we must descend into the abyss if we want to make it there".
(1) This is a good overview, but conservatives don't believe in the status quo for the status quo's sake. They believe that our traditions are highly optimized, essential components to living a fulfilling life. We don't even know why many of the rules even exist, the exact problem they solve has long been forgotten to history; so we should be careful when changing these rules.
There is an element of caring for your long-term health as well as the larger society, and raising the next generation of humans, which most everyone agrees with in some form (even libertarians argue that absolute individual liberty is what produces the best outcome for society). This not necessarily make you a collectivist, in the way that progressives push for labor unions, economic planning, and intersectionality.
What you're missing is a description of when conservatives support use of force to promote social values. Modern American conservatives think that rights come with responsibilities, that neither unfettered libertinism nor enforcement of responsibility with police power is legitimate.
(2) Clarence Thomas has never spoken from the bench about what laws the state ought to pass, he is careful to emphasize he is not a lawmaker and that is not his job. When he dissents in Obergefell and other cases that rely on "substantive" due process, it's because i legal rationale invented to uphold slavery in Dred Scott v. Sandford.
It's a tad more nefarious. Say what you want about cable tv, but it doesn't track your every move.
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-cable-company-know-what-I-am-...
Where is the law vague? Your ISP is not a platform. I feel like this is a scare tactic.
Simple, because if that because popular, new laws will be drafted to ban all of that from all app stores for circumventing this or some other reason.
And all of them are completely irrelevant because only us nerds would even know about them let alone how to use them.
> People didn't buy their copy of Napster from GameStop back in the day
Those days are long dead.
Everything is already in place for this, both hardware- and software-wise.
Napster took off because it meant not spending 10 or 15 pounds or dollars or euros on a CD. THhe DRM came later, and what really killed DRM was the change in business model to iTunes with individual songs, the transformation of the 'star' from a face on a CD to a bigger product.
China has done it already and it's very effective:
* Force every service provider to register their IPs and domains (for CDN use)
* Force every ISP to do stateful firewalling and block every attempt to establish a new connection unless the destination IP is on a whilelist maintained by the government.
Problem solved.
Yeah, they can't 100% win. They don't need to. In fact, even if they did 100% win, they'd still find reasons to need to crush some people just to keep people reminded of who has the guns.
Otherwise one can run p2p over VPNs, like for many other things.
It could also be the reverse (see authoritarian countries), with international players leaving the market and local ones filling the space.
I just don't see that happening here. So maybe the UK becomes a no-travel zone for anyone in the worldwide tech industry? That would be sad, but it's a plausible outcome.
The UK's law is obviously a bit different as international companies can comply with them, but it would essentially just limit legal websites to big tech who have enough market reach that all that compliance could pay for itself.
* https://rewis.io/urteile/urteil/lhm-20-01-2022-3-o-1749320/
* https://www.cnil.fr/en/use-google-analytics-and-data-transfe...
* https://www.gpdp.it/web/guest/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/d...
So far they've just been enforced against companies that use Google Analytics, but the reasoning behind it has been that having users connect to a US server enables that server to know EU users' IP addresses (which are legally PII), which would be subject to US government subpoenas to collect such, and the US government has not agreed to handle data in compliance with the GDPR, therefore it's illegal to have users connect to any US servers. It has nothing to do with "hoover[ing] and hoard[ing]" data.
The only way for an American website to comply would be to form a separate company not subject to US control at all. However, at that point it's not really an American website, since no data or control can go to the US.
Theoretically you could use some international service to handle all primary routing and get users to waive their rights under the GDPR before connecting to your website proper, but I'm not aware of such a service at this time.
Because you "could" be logging visitor IP addresses? First, why would you have to log them? Is this a legal requirement in the US? You can't serve a page over HTTP unless you log a crapton of stuff for the government? And second...I don't believe it's illegal to log IP addresses under GDPR as log as the user consents to it...or is it?
And yeah, it's not illegal if a user consent to it, but the issue is that the user has to connect (with their IP address) to give you his consent or not. That's why I said theoretically you could use some international service to handle all primary routing and get users to waive their rights under the GDPR before connecting to your website proper, but I'm not aware of such a service at this time.
Wait, what? Where do they say that?
> That's why I said theoretically you could use some international service to handle all primary routing and get users to waive their rights under the GDPR before connecting to your website proper
Why would you do such a complicated thing?
We would have real privacy protection, and presumably in the very long term we'd see the benefits of that (more creative new ideas coming out of the EU, wealthy people preferring to live in the EU...).
Wealthy people care a lot more about taxes than vague notions of privacy protection.
Wealthy people are already willing to pay a premium for the sake of privacy. Look at Zuck buying his neighbours' houses.
Or those sites would have to comply with GDPR. Why is that not an option?
It's worth noting that it's the US that would be isolated here, not the EU.
A very large number of other non-EU countries have implemented/are currently implementing extremely similar legislation to the GDPR, including Brazil, Israel, South Korea, Argentina, Canada, Japan, India, New Zealand, Indonesia, etc.
If the world eventually splits into "privacy-required" vs "privacy-optional" internets, the US will be one of few major countries in the latter camp. Yes, clearly the US-based internet is a large chunk, but long-term isolating the US internet entirely from most of the rest of the world will have a meaningful impact.
The EU has an list of countries whose current protections they officially recognize as already equivalent to the GDPR here: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/inte...
don't think this is a bridge too far, covering your face in the presence of public CCTV got you fined/arrested the week before covering your face with feel-good masks was compulsory
don't @ me telling me it's stupid, I know it is, but this govt doesn't believe in free and private communications and it's working hard in progressively eradicating what's already out there, with full support from the main opposition party
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209044791...
it would much more practicable to resort to alternative channels outside the internet, like mesh networking using direct comms (typically ad-hoc wifi modes and other radio protocols to avoid the liability/detectability of cabling), sneakernet, IP over Avian Carriers - those are all cumbersome and rather slow typically, but still orders of magnitude better than trying to pass stuff over ISPs using steganography
The truth is that we already are all violating laws, every day we live, mostly without being aware of them. That is exactly why there are so many of them. The only thing more draconian laws do is make people decide actively that they commit them.
Consider how hard it is in the United States to lay new fiber (and this is an imperfect metaphor). The ideal solution would be to get legislative branches to solve the telcos oligopoly problem. That has not and is not working. So what's happening? Wireless internet over LTE, and 5G being deployed everywhere. Route around.
Why is obeying idiotic unenforceable laws any different to this when it comes to technology, aside from the obvious of the stakes being much lower? Although the way the world is going, that may not be a given in the future.
I'd argue it may even be worse when it comes to cases of governments who are nominally democracies making idiotic laws for their populaces, because at least theoretically, those populaces could have voted in such a way that said idiotic laws would never come to be, and thus their misery, the stupid laws that they're subject to, etc, are somewhat self inflicted, and for those that do dissent it makes even more sense to feel zero obligation to the greater populace given that. I personally don't really buy this because in my experience, what people want in a democracy has very little with what they end up getting, and the same people that will scream blue murder about the right to self rule when it comes to a national group, will scream just as loud when it comes to an individual in the exact opposite direction.
No, the only strategy is to create realities just like the internet did with its inception, just like encryption was established. We would never have it if we tried to legislate it into reality.
Additionally legislation is completely ignored by state actors that put the population under surveillance. The battle for legislation was lost.
You mean like what the Pirate Parties, FSF, EFF, Mozilla, and countless others are trying to and failing? I never thought I'd see "well we have no political power to change things, but as disastrous as these laws are, for us specifically, maybe we can evade them for a little while longer if we're clever" described as "privileged".
Yes there were risks, but zero oversight is how we built the internet byte by byte.
Anyone know if that “two computers talking directly to each other” patent has expired yet? Hard for companies to make those apps while patent-encumbered
This is their attitude.
They will legislate to achieve the outcome they want. If that means making it criminal to use encryption without backdoors, they will do that. If it means making it criminal to use P2P technology, they will do that.
They have and will use control over mainstream infrastructure (Internet traffic, software distribution channels, etc.). Use of non-mainstream infrastructure will be made increasingly difficult and used as an indicator of guilt.
The more sophisticated the technical workarounds required, the fewer people will be capable of using those workarounds, and even fewer people will be capable of building those workarounds. Fewer people are easier to control.
TrueCrypt, Lavabit, etc.
This too will remain constant.
The point Turnbull was making is something along these lines: https://xkcd.com/538/
No, they can't change the laws of mathematics to make all encryption have a government backdoor. They don't have to, though. They can just legislate to make use of non-backdoored encryption criminal. And if they want to make generating random streams of bytes a crime they can probably do that too.
It's not idiotic, it's authoritarian.
And yet it will still be possible to ponder pink elephants.
TL;DR for the article: 1. Any technical solution will be imperfect and can potentially lead to hundreds if not thousands of cases being raised 2. Difficulties in clearing your name in the case of false flags (not to mention how this would actually be implemented) 3. No clear guidance on how such a system would work 4. A death to encryption services since any system that would entail some for of media transfer would be in scope 5. A grey/dark market place for custom software that will still allow encrypted communications run on VPSes/servers that might restrict UK access but could be accessible through VPNs that exit outside of the UK and thus wouldn't fall under the legislation (I think, feel free to correct me on any of these points ofc). 6. A host of other issues from overworked law enforcement trying to deal with the flood to the migration of individuals involved in any illegal activities far far deeper and thus more difficult to detect.
This is a clear as day example of what happens when people with no understanding of these topics (and many others, I'm sure economy, education and law enforcement is managed by people with no real world experience in said fields...) are allowed to legislate.
The only way protect children online is to ban them from Internet. Children should not have access to normal laptops and smartphones, instead they should use "kid phones". Such phones would allow children to communicate only with people approved by parents or teachers and visit only approved sites. This way they will enjoy perfect safety which this Bill fails to provide.
Every site which wants to become approved, must fulfill all the requirements from the Bill and indicate this with a HTTP header. Kid phones and laptops should allow only to visit such compliant sites.
Kid-oriented phones and laptops must be visually distinctive: for example, have a shape of a cute animal. In this case teachers, parents or police will be able to instantly spot and confiscate illegal devices.
This is a win-win plan: kids would be safe and adults would be safe from government overreach. Obviously no government will agree to such plan.
The funny thing is that if I created a phone that had a kids mode lock-down (with kids friendly appstore, social media, browser and education content) with a monthly fee and no-ads. The government would scream that I was harming competition and locking people out by daring to charge for a product that would be expensive to operate.
The great triple fallacy. Never wants you to stop for even a moment to think if doing something is a good idea if the some * we must do* is the wrong thing, if children be used for exploitation, and if not doing something could “save” more people long term than the feel good initial change”.
I bought a BB gun at school, even a butterfly knife. I feel that it's education on how to use the internet that's missing. As well as finance.
I'm reminded of my own childhood years, where most families had television, but some didn't (because it would be bad for the children.)
Annecdotally the kids with no TV would visit, and all they wanted to do was watch TV. The ones who had tvs at home played outside.
In reality in environments where kids have phones, it's more important for your kid to have a phone, and learn how to use it, than see it as a forbidden fruit.
Plus of course the fact that you think your 17 year old doesn't have a phone is delusional. They have one. The only question is whether they share that fact with you.
I get where you are coming from, but scary as it seems children don't magically become adults, making good decisions, on the day they turn 18. They become adults by slowly learning how to handle the world, by being guided with each new step, by making lots (and lots) of mistakes.
The areas that you block off completely are the areas where they will be the least mature, the least able to exercise good judgement.
That's typically why "bans" lead ultimately to worse outcomes not better ones.
If you want to train your kids to lie and hide things from you, going too far in “their protection” is a good way to get there.
Their efforts to shelter me didn't work and caused me to feel guilt about seeking information about the outside world as I aged.
If you're really religious then you're not going to listen to me anyway, but if you're not then please reconsider depriving your children like this.
What about a fourteen year old that is feeling confused about their gender identity or sexuality. Are they not permitted to do some research or reach out to supportive online communities?
I've never blocked, monitored, or filtered my childrens' access to the web. I just parent properly, and try to make sure they are responsible users. You can't regulate your way around this type of problem. Kids will find a way around any barriers that are put in place, and to be honest, good luck to them.
Not quite. It's 16 unless with someone in a position of trust, e.g. your school teacher, social worker, doctor or care worker. A person under 18 cannot legally consent to that in UK.
That's a bizarre way of putting it, isn't it? It's not as if the person under 18 would be committing an offence by giving consent, and the consent would still be valid for defending against an accusation of rape (as far as I know; see the Sexual Offences Act 2003).
At least 18, or more if local government considers it reasonable to raise the age.
> Are they not permitted to do some research or reach out to supportive online communities?
They are permitted as long as they use only compliant sites. Talking to random strangers about this is not a good idea.
> They are permitted as long as they use only compliant sites. Talking to random strangers about this is not a good idea.
"Stranger danger!"
And yeah on AOL there were people that "lived near by and could hang out some time" but I already knew what a creep was... so.. why are kids these days so stupid? Is it because we treat them so?
I'm certainly biased as a more technical parent than most, but I don't think the average layperson knows that much less about the risks. If anything it's shouted from the news any time something remotely internet related happens, and people notice, because it plays on a pretty fundamental fear. I think awareness is up (not always in a good way) more than anything. There's a balance to strike between trying to make things safer and just teaching kids to navigate dangers that will always be there (and always be changing) and I tend to think these laws are a step or so too far into diminishing returns on making things safer. Even then, that's assuming we can even agree what safer means.
We've crossed this line already, the internet is out there and everyone can access everything. Instead of being regressive and focusing on futile efforts like banning children from the internet (hint: never going to work), we need to embrace the new age we live in and adapt. I don't claim to know the answer, it is a difficult question on how to properly raise children in the globally interconnected world we live in, but I don't think simply closing our eyes and pretending the internet doesn't exist will solve anything.
I was born in the 90s, had access to dialup internet from since I was 5 years old, have seen all the horrors the internet has to offer and still turned out fine. I'm sure there is a way without censorship.
I propose to make it illegal to help kids to obtain access to adult Internet the same way as it is illegal to help them to buy alcohol.
The two classes of risk are too different for the analogy to work.
Should kids have the right to "ruin" their future by gaming instead of studying? Yes, and I think the solution should instead be to make it harder for anyone, kid or adult, to "ruin" their future by making it easier to get back on track at any point in life.
Like not allowing them to get off essentially scot free just by apologizing? https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/870-sex-...
(ironically, cant actually read that article atm because of the company firewall)
I personally think MOST legislative to do x to protect children is just BS reasoning to intrude on privacy.
It appears the OSB has become a victim of incoherent requirements specifications. It's grown enormously during its gestation period and is now trying to do way too much, including things that are self-contradictory. Some politicians recognize this, for example Kemi Badenoch:
https://order-order.com/2022/07/11/watch-badenoch-slams-onli...
but I recall others saying similar things. I just can't find the references right now.
I mean realistically if it became a problem I'd just IP-block all of the UK because they're small, but I don't understand what the legal framework for "extraterritorial enforcement" even is.
- Julian Assange
Good god!
You really believe your own hype don't you? (I believe the American expression is "drunk the kool-aid").
Like how would it even work if Alabama made it a crime for anyone in the world to have an abortion, extraditions all around?
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/100739/response/25520...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9237663/No-America...
Another case of myopic, joyless stodges ruining what they don't understand.
I've paid enough taxes to this worthless, bloated institution that claims to 'protect my liberties' - is it too late to get a refund? Don't they owe me something for clear breach of contract? The 'social contract' isn't what it was when I was born!
So, instead of a 'right to' free speech, rather we _would_ have no laws restricting freedom of speech (libel and incitement excepted). This was the understanding that would've permeated Parliament, the courts, the palace, and the hearts and minds of everyone who understood it.
More or less, until 1997.
So we ended up with the Communications Act (2003) and its dreadful Section 127. As well as admission to PRISM, and making ourselves one of the CCTV capitals of the world.
And he's still taking aim at freedom from beyond the grave: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/does-tony-blair-think-fr...
The Online Safety Bill is the brainchild of a Conservative government, included as a flagship commitment in a Conservative manifesto aiming to appeal to conservatively minded voters, a successor administration to the Conservative government who brought us the national porn block. Nothing makes it easier for such legislation to be passed more than revisionist nonsense about how the wonders of negative liberty meant we never needed any of the positive protections this law specifically supersedes and it's all the left's fault anyway.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/treaty/pdf/amst-en.pdf
The UK Human Rights Act landed in 1998. Schedule 1 Part I Article 10 covers "freedom of expression"
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/schedule/1/part...
The UK doesn't have it, which makes it a lot less stable, as seen in 1997
> _would_ have no laws restricting freedom of speech (libel and incitement excepted)
This is optimistic ahistorical nonsense; the UK had a censorship regime until the Lady Chatterly trial. There has been intelligence service related censorship as long as those have existed, as well (see Spycatcher, Zircon). And let's not get into Northern Ireland. Nobody old enough to remember "Gerry Adams has his voice read by an actor" would claim the UK used to be a bastion of pure free speech.
https://www.dfa.ie/media/dfa/alldfawebsitemedia/ourrolesandp...
"The British Government will complete incorporation into Northern Ireland law of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), with direct access to the courts, and remedies for breach of the Convention, including power for the courts to overrule Assembly legislation on grounds of inconsistency."
> The European Court of Human Rights has upheld the conviction of an Austrian lecturer who suggested that the founder of Islam, Prophet Mohammed was "a pedophile" for marrying a 6-year-old child.
https://neonnettle.com/news/5449-austrian-woman-convicted-fo...
> Woman’s conviction in Austria for calling the Prophet Mohammed a paedophile did not breach her right to free speech, European Court of Human Rights rules
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6316567/Woman-corre...
When this video is a criminal offence in the UK, you don't have freedom of speech.
The woman, named only as Mrs. S, 47, from Vienna, was said to have held two seminars in which she discussed the marriage between the Prophet Mohammad and a six-year old girl, Aisha.
According to scripture the marriage was consumated when Aisha was just nine years old, leading Mrs S. to say to her class Mohammad 'liked to do it with children'.
She also reportedly said '... A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? ... What do we call it, if it is not paedophilia?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6316567/Woman-corre...
Everything else aside, if MPs don't show up for a scheduled meeting they should just be sacked.
How many of us can just blow off meetings like that with no consequence?
I mean that's even more explicit in a parliamentary system, where members are nearly always expected to vote the party line or face consequences.
yes, that is a feature (not a bug) of a parliamentary system. A complementary feature is that parliamentary systems tend to have representational seat distribution. So a party that wins 35% of the vote gets 35% of the seats. And those seats are expected to vote as a block unless there is an extreme question of conscience.
You could contrast with for example the US system, where the original intent was that the senators/representatives would represent their state, not the party. Worked well for a while. Now, however, they also follow party line or face consequences. But there are realistically only two parties, and the the "first past the post" system locks us into 2 parties.
At the last general election to the UK parliament (2019), the Tories won 44% of the votes, and ended up with 56% of the seats - first past the post strikes again!
> the "first past the post" system locks us into 2 parties.
What you say is true, but while we're discussing an article about the UK, it is worth stating, for the avoidance of doubt, that the UK also uses the First Past The Post electoral systems (for its national parliament) and therefore doesn't have a representational seat distribution.
Indeed, that may be part of the reason that such an extreme policy from such an unpopular party is being put forward at all. (The current government won 43.6% of the vote at the last general election, with 67.3% turnout, meaning it had the support of 29.3% of the electorate, but won 56.2% of the seats).
We saw this is the Netherlands a while ago. There was a referendum about whether there should be closer relations between the Netherlands and Ukraine, and the options were "agree" and "disagree", but many people who were in favor of closer relations chose not to vote at all, hoping that the referendum would fail to hit the minimum turnout. So the minimum turnout was hit, and afterwards they were all whining about it, because they disagreed with the result, but had intentionally chosen not to vote.
More or less, I want my lack of voting to be a signal to the Democratic party that, "Your vision is out of whack and does not serve me". Today, when someone doesn't vote the party and constituents try some mental gymnastics to put fault on people who don't vote as if they don't care.
I think voting is too hard, so it tells me that voting is too hard.
I'm a Conservative so it tells me the liberals aren't turning out because (as I know) their message is weak.
I'm a Liberal, so it tells me the exact opposite.
I think all politicians are bad, so frankly I don't care who wins.
You get the point. Not voting doesn't send a message. It sends every message.
Incidentally, if you care about the nuances within a party, then voting in primaries is where the real difference is made (traditionally also the voting with the lowest turnout.)
Actually no. It depends on the "whip" guidance (in the UK)
Important context since this is about the UK: we don't have a representation seat distribution like that, we have first past the post. In the last election (2019) these are the results for each party with at least 10 MPs:
- Conservative Party, 43.6% of votes, 56.2% of seats (outright majority).
- Labour Party, 32.1% of votes, 31.1% of seats.
- Scottish National Party, 3.9% of votes, 7.4% of seats. The SNP only campaign in Scotland and win most seats there, which makes them extremely over-represented by FPTP.
- Liberal Democrats, 11.6% of votes, 1.7% of seats.
In 1983 the Conservatives had 1.5% fewer votes compared to the previous 1979 election, but ended up with 7.7% mote seats resulting in the largest majority in decades.
I think it's a real missed opportunity that the Blair government didn't change anything when they had a large majority in the 90s/00s. They said they would, but it fell by the wayside. The problem is that Labour always thinks this time it will be different and this time they will come out on top. And for a while they will, right up to the point they don't.
Yes, essentially we can just keep the main leaders of each party and assign them everyone's votes from their respective parties (35% in your example) that "won" and get rid of everyone else and end up with the exact same outcome, except orders of magnitude cheaper and more expedient. If you're a member of x party and x party won, why are you actually needed if you're not the leader? Your salary, benefits, retirement and as well as every single person on your staff are all a waste at that point, because you're going to vote for x's position, which is decided by the leadership.
That was (and to a degree, still is) also the intent in the British system: you would primarily represent your constituency, not your party. This is why you have constituency surgeries where you meet your constituents, maybe address some concerns, etc. which are similar to the "town hall meetings" you have in the US. The US essentially copied the British system.
I don't know how well it worked in the past as I'm not that familiar with the history; in HMS Pinafore there's already a joke about it ("I always voted at my party's core and never thought of thinking for myself at all"[1]) which is from 1880 or thereabouts, so I'm guessing not very well shrug
It's natural for like-minded people with similar ideas to gravitate towards each other and form political parties for strategic and social reasons. In the US the founding fathers set up the system to work without parties, only to found the first political parties themselves a few years later, so that idea broke down pretty quickly.
lolnope, this is a FPTP country.
The last election, the Conservatives got 43.6% of the vote and 57% of the seats.
Even more extreme, although overall irrelevant, the SNP got 45% of the popular vote in Scotland, resulting in 48 out of 59 seats won in Scotland.
Reason #2458729349 why political parties should be banned everywhere.
I wouldn't be so quick to judge in this case. I think the extremely high expectations and little room for error ("they should just be sacked") is part of the problem. If you bollock a child every time they do something slightly wrong they will learn to lie and hide things very quickly.
Parliamentarians aren't employees, they're elected officials and this meeting is a lobbying effort (the author being 'head of policy' for some web3/crypto startup) and representatives are accountable only to their constituents, who can 'sack them' in elections.
Do people just not get educated in online literacy anymore? An adult getting abused online is like getting third degree burns because you laid your hand on a hot burner and refused to take it off. If people saying mean things to you is disturbing your groove so much you're calling it "abuse" maybe you should stop reading them. This is stuff from the first week of 1990s computer class in elementary school.
In school we teach kids how to be responsible with alcohol and drugs. But some still become addicted. The same applies to social media.
The difference is that instead of the pusher being some shady character at the back of the school bus, it's a massive company with marketing, public relations, and lobbying teams.
I spend time with people in person or on the phone usually. We, gasp, _do things_ like go to restaurants or go camping. Sometimes we all sit on the sofa in a big pile and share snacks and watch movies or talk about life.
It's nice. Sometimes I'm even alone and get to read a dead tree book or just enjoy nature.
What happens "on the internet" is of very low importance, slightly below my choice of socks or what brand of snack to get.
Obviously we do care, otherwise we wouldn't comment. You don't have to be terminally-online to have an opinion about what we should be allowed to do online.
This analogy is broken on quite a few levels. When did the internet become a hot burner?
The internet is not designed to get hot - it's not a cooking device. If your laptop consistently got so hot it burned your lap, you'd try to fix it, not say "of course it does that".
> If people saying mean things to you is disturbing your groove so much you're calling it "abuse" maybe you should stop reading them
There are laws governing abusive behaviour in person. Our society does not just advice people to "just not listen".
Why would you expect different principles to apply to online and in-person behaviour?
https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/verbal-abuse-and-harassmen...
Because you can't instantly erase someone from your perception in person to person interaction. Online you can even proactively protect yourself, such as by adding words and phrases you don't like to your blocklist. Suppose I decide I don't ever want to interact with someone who still uses the word "retard". My computer can preemptively block those people on my Twitter, my email, even pages containing the word on my browser. It takes only seconds to wipe entire categories of people and opinion from every facet of your online experience.
As easily as you can block a message, so too can abuser create a new account.
Online harassment can be as persistent as in-person harassment - there's countless stories of people being continuously harassed. If it were so easy to block people online 'cyberstalking' wouldn't be such a big problem in the same area.
I understand many people rely on social media for professional networking but there's absolutely no reason why you have to use this professional networking account to trade verbal jabs with people on contentious topics, or confront trolls, or start political debates, etc. Make an alt if you want to slum it in the comments section. Again, this was common sense 20 years ago, and now seems like it's lost knowledge.
Seconded.
As the saying goes; "What is the difference between posting something on the internet and a tattoo on your arse?..... It's easier to remove the tattoo."
Because that personal information you posted or 'offensive' joke you posted when pissed will stay around forever to haunt you.
Not if the fix isn't worth the price and will be abused to stiffle competition and for governments and companies to get control over interpersonal communication.
If you get in an argument with someone and they start saying nasty things, then it's simple to disengage. You just stop replying and you don't go back to the thread. In this scenario, your comment makes sense, but you should count yourself very lucky if this is the worst you've experienced.
Personally, I pissed off a cult leader and she sent her followers to harass me. They used email and social networks, among other methods, to send me regular messages accusing me of all sorts of horrible things. If I followed your suggestion of "stop reading them" it would mean I no longer check my email or social networks...
For those inexperienced with these matters, it may seem like I can just block the messages, but in many cases that's near impossible. A "professional" abuser knows all about VPNs and will just keep creating new email addresses.
A "professional" abuser knows all about VPNs and will just keep creating new email addresses.
You had no luck with keyword filters? You have my sympathy.
also, learn not to overexpose yourself with your real id online, also from 1990s internet 101
the idiotic model of the 2020s with everybody posting their entire private lives with their real names and profiles that have their mugs in circles, and then proceed to broadcast hot takes they're afraid to get feedback on - it doesn't work and it's stupid
Also, it's unfair and cruel to put the responsibility for preventing abuse onto the abused. The person engaging in dysfunctional behavior is the problem, not their victims.
Sure, you can avoid being bullied by staying hidden all the time, and I guess that works for some people but it doesn't sit well with me.
the draconian legislation attempts we're seen now are the govt's weaponisation of 2020s dysfunctional behaviour to shut down the free internet wholesale and substitute it with a heavily surveilled and censored alternative that actually benefits from the child-like narcissism of the 2020s
People saying things about you can affect you even if you don't read them.
This creates a barrier to entry that allows ONLY big tech access to the playing field.
These types of barriers to entry already exist in other areas like the pharmaceutical business and finance. Now we're getting artificial barriers created in IT.
Or - you take a leaf from the pirate's book and throw caution to the wind. Which will be pretty much the only way to get the growth that investors expect, even as investors will refuse to invest without at least the appearance of legal certainty of the first option.
This article doesn't really apply to anything I'm doing (at present), but I enjoyed the read.
I wish it was more widely recognized and understood by more folks.
Which law in particular?
Seems incorrect, no? The visit is more important than just typing URL. Worst-case scenario I will check your IP and if its in UK/GB scope, you will see "Unable to browse this site due to your-stupid-anti-blah-blah-UK-policy"
> [A pretty reasonable set of questions that companies must consider regarding how children might be harmed on their service]
> "you’re probably curled up in a ball crying"
No actually, I wasn't.
Filtering out the breathless commentary, the actual proposals don't seem that bad...? Certainly no worse than GDPR obligations and nowhere near the kind of regulatory compliance industries like Manufacturing, Construction and Medicine have to meet.
Admittedly I didn't make it to the end of the article because the tone was beginning to grate too much.
It's fine if you don't like the flourishes in her writing, but this is the correct way to read proposed legislation.
If the uncharitable reading describes the law enabling/preventing things in a way the authors don't intend, all they have to do is clarify the scope in the text of the bill.
The light least favorable to the drafting party is needed now. In 5 years when there are legal cases over the bounds of the law, the courts will use the text of the law rather that call in the authors and politicians that voted for it and check what they intended for the law to mean. Or maybe they would, I don't know how British courts work.
The cost of entry into this space is really low compared to most other industries. You can very cheaply provide a reasonably competitive product.
One of the aspects of this bill that I do find worrying is that there are clear costs being added on that we're obligated to pay likely before we've validated the business works.
I do feel a lot of side-projects that could have gone to become viable businesses will never be released with this bill in place. Who wants to expose themselves to costs to try out a fun idea?
A lot of what she's arguing for could have been covered similarly to GDPR if there were carve outs for smaller entities, which would have been easy to mention, the absence of them lends weight to her assertion that the goal of this bill as it stands is to generally increase political control of the tech sphere.
Even if that control only extends to and harms UK businesses...
Then, moving forward, whenever you changed any (unrelated) business process, you'd need to re-up your business process certifications.
Makes me wonder what a site like HN would have to do in order to stay in compliance. While on the one hand HN could make the argument that the site is not geared towards children so this kind of stuff is not a concern, regulations will say: well TECHNICALLY a child could use HN, and TECHNICALLY a predator could message with them, and therefore there is TECHNICALLY a risk, so please pay up $20k/yr for compliance costs.
I use HN as a stand in example for many many sites and services out there. IMO, I don't think it will be that enforceable. Sure the big tech companies will comply, anyone that runs a smaller service outside the UK will just tell the UK govt to kick rocks if they come knocking (what can they do besides blocking the site in the UK).
If this bill gets passed were going to get the following:
- Big tech company scandal over CSAM.
- A heartbreaking story over some small time website owner facing prison time over non-compliance.
- Opinion pieces from the tech community about how it's a terrible idea all around.
- Puff pieces from non-tech outlets that praise the legislation without fully understanding the technical ramifications.
- Flame war between techies and non-techies over competing puff pieces.
Just like what we see with the DMCA. Cheaper toner cartridges? Think of the creatives!
If that was possible, wouldn't CCP or Russia be ordering websites all over the world to shutdown to control information they don't like be visible?
So companies can choose to comply or not.
You and I are probably violating several (severely) punished laws from around the world every day but the respective authorities can't do anything about it.
this will set a massive barrier for all but a few whitelisted giant entities to host user-generated content, and then it will be massively censored and used to prosecute people
Easy answer: geoblock the UK.
And it covers Stack Overflow.
And Mumsnet.
And basically any site that takes user generated content of any kind.
Prevent people being able to communicate except through a handful of controlled middle men who can spy on or block content the government dislikes. The end goal is complete control of the communication of its citizens.
"Is it possible for your site, service, or app, which allows content to be shared and/or people to communicate with each other, to be accessed by any adult or any child within the UK?
Then you’re in scope.
NB “accessed” doesn’t necessarily mean that a user can set up an active account on your service. If a British adult can merely download your app on the app store, the app is in scope."
However, the draft bill doesn't seem to say that. I found the draft here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safe... (and note that the article doesn't seem to link it, which seems odd).
The bill says:
"In this Act “user-to-user service” means an internet service by means of which content that is generated by a user of the service, or uploaded to or shared on the service by a user of the service, may be encountered by another user, or other users, of the service.
That seems reasonable to me. There are more details, but as far as I can see, the ability to merely download an app does not put it in scope contrary to the claim in TFA.
I now find myself doubting the the other claims made by this author.
You're linking to the draft bill. Burns has linked to the actual bill as amended in the Commons: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/58-03/0121... (it's linked under the heading of "How to read this post")
However, I looked at the definitions in there and they remain essentially the same. My concerns still stand.
No, there's definitely a bill. It's had its first and second readings and it's in committee stage in the Commons: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137
If an app is available in an app store are the users who can access it not a target market?
I'm not really sure what "material risk of significant harm" means for the second qualifier but if it means "users can potentially post bad things" then that seems very broad too.
I feel it's telling that they had a need to make exceptions explicitly for email/voip/sms texting.
A site or app that doesn't allow user content isn't in scope. But just add a comment section and suddenly you have this world of regulatory requirements with mandates to age-verify all users, which bars anonymity.
In practice this will end discussion and comment sections from all but the largest sites that can afford all the regulatory compliance.
I agree, but the article's author's phrasing, IMHO, claims the opposite.
> In practice this will end discussion and comment sections from all but the largest sites that can afford all the regulatory compliance.
My possibly contrarian (for HN) opinion is that the Internet's "wild west" approach of disclaiming liability when republishing and algorithmically editorializing content on a platform isn't acceptable, so I'm actually in favour of this. Otherwise we have people being harmed with nobody to hold to account.
If when tracking down an offender the offender cannot be found, then they're effectively being shielded by the platform, and the platform should be held liable. They shouldn't be able to have it both ways.
I don't think this would necessarily exclude all discussion or comment sections because I'm only talking about (my definition) a "platform". I would exclude "mere conduit" direct communication apps. This bill probably doesn't achieve the distinction and exception I want though.
The GDPR has teeth only because the EU is big enough to make companies care. It is a watered down version from some privacy rights compared to the old laws in my country. But the old laws were ignorde by US tech because why wouldn't they.
So as the UK left the EU, they are now a small country in the computer world. I'll ignore its laws just as I ignore Afghan laws requiring women to stay at home or whatever country's laws to forbif gays from existing.
Related point: if you're intending to get out of GDPR, blocking the EU doesn't really help, because the law applies on the basis of citizenship, not territory. If an EU citizen accesses your website in America, that's still within GDPR scope. If you have EU business assets, ship things to the EU, or have any other ties to the EU, then they still have jurisdiction and you certainly still have to comply with GDPR.
No it doesn't. depends on location only. A US, or any other, citizen is protected by GDPR when they access the web from within the EU
And the GDPR is a way way more sensible law than whatever the UK is trying to do here, nobody will comply and no body will care, its only going to Hurt UK citizens and The UK's economy.
I care about privacy and really like what the EU has passed with the GDPR and DSA, but unfortunately we will have countries that does stupid things like this. Hopefully they aren't that important so no one complies.
No, that's not correct. You have to be clearly intending to (not just incidentally happening to) offer goods or services to an EU data subject.
> ship things to the EU
This wouldn't be enough to make the GDPR applicable. You'd have to be specifically targeting EU customers in some way, such as allowing users to pay in euros - not just incidentally selling some stuff to folks who live in the EU. Your other examples (such as having EU business assets) hold because they would make you an EU entity.
The other is when you are processing personal data of EU data subjects that is related to "the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union".
There's a recital that adds:
> In order to determine whether a processing activity can be considered to monitor the behaviour of data subjects, it should be ascertained whether natural persons are tracked on the internet including potential subsequent use of personal data processing techniques which consist of profiling a natural person, particularly in order to take decisions concerning her or him or for analysing or predicting her or his personal preferences, behaviours and attitudes.
Unlike the recital that explains the goods and services case, which talks about it only applying if you envisage offering goods and services in the Union as opposed to your site merely being accessible from the Union, the monitoring case doesn't seem to have any requirement that you are intending to monitor EU data subjects.
That's pretty broad as written. From what the recital says it even applies if you are gathering data the could be used for profiling even if you are not actually currently profiling.
As noted in the article at gdpr.eu that a parallel commenter cited:
> If your organization uses web tools that allow you to track cookies or the IP addresses of people who visit your website from EU countries, then you fall under the scope of the GDPR. Practically speaking, it’s unclear how strictly this provision will be interpreted or how brazenly it will be enforced. Suppose you run a golf course in Manitoba focused exclusively on your local area, but sometimes people in France stumble across your site. Would you find yourself in the crosshairs of European regulators? It’s not likely. But technically you could be held accountable for tracking these data.
I'm not aware of legal cases that have specifically hinged on this issue, but Soriano v Forensic News LLC (from 2021) touched on this clause, and seemed to doubt that merely collecting information (e.g., using cookies) without further processing it with the intent to profile would make you subject to the GDPR.
I didn't specifically mention Article 3(2)(b) - the clause you're citing - because the post I was responding to didn't really mention profiling in any way. Still, it's good to note that the legal landscape on this particular point isn't totally clear as far as I'm aware.
Argh, why won't this misinformation die? You are completely, utterly, 100% wrong.
The GDPR applies if either the data controller is established in the EU or the data subject is physically in the EU.
Article 3 (territorial scope) is incredibly short, read it: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:...
Wow, does that suck. I see about 20% of the "cookie track consent" popups Stateside that I saw browsing from the EU.
Especially given that what constituted "tracking" was so broad that a lot of sites took the "better safe than sorry" approach because it was cheaper than a full audit of their tracking and a lawyer to interpret whether, say, Apache logs that show IP address constitute "tracking."
Well, except the big, commonly-used ones where you've already consented (or not). Facebook, for instance. It's like this law was hand-tuned to consolidate users into only visiting a few commonly-accessed sites to save themselves the UX annoyance at the cost of the broader Internet's discoverability.
Posting to say you live somewhere else and don't care about the article doesn't contribute to any intelligent conversation, and usually means you do care about something involved, strongly, but aren't willing to say so.
https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/fra-20...
But yeah believe what makes you happy. Just don't let the hate get to you to much.
So as a person, I of course do care. The UK used to be fairly good concerning human rights, privacy, cooperation, ... This represents another step back. So the best thing to do is ignore this insanity as good as possible.
Laws like this tend to spill over to other countrys, unless the politicians in question have to tiptoe away from the mess
Pick a lane.
You can ignore its laws by blocking users, and clearly saying you won't comply with such stupid laws.
Being concerned that this can spread to other countries is a big reason why you have to be clear about not playing along.
Umm yeah no. Perhaps regulation wise but no, the uk is not a “small” country in the “computer world”.
1. https://www.statista.com/topics/7208/digital-economy-in-the-...
With this legalization I would IP ban the UK, then grow the service and look into opening up for the UK when my service was big and the lawyers didn't matter.
Suggesting that the market size of the UK might not be big enough to make up for the costs of complying with a law like this is not at all the same as saying that people from the UK are not capable of making using industry contributions.
The term small used by op can also be read as a pejorative term meant to describe uk’s would be weakness post brexit - often used by a small but vocal number of eu citizens that like myself (a uk person as well) have been against brexit. And i’ve it read as such.
The uk market may be small in size in comparison with the whole of the eu, but the uk is by no means a small player in the “computer world”, whatever that means.
Indeed due to its size it may not hold much legal clout over the eu, and the eu being protectionist as it is it might even seek to punish british isps or web companies by the excuse of having different laws. Thats not in anyone’s interest and it reflects poorly on the eu and on those people here proposing a ban on uk ips because of some silly laws. I despise the mindset of those who only seek “sanctions” and “punishment” instead of actual solutions and are constantly spewing nationalist nonsense as if, say, germany isnt full of crap and a root cause of quite some major issues on the continent right now.
So yeah I am pretty much bored by all this nonsense. How can we fix the issues that such legislation is causing? Before the righteous ban our ips - not that we’d lose much.
That isn’t righteousness, it’s simply taking the most logical step to protect myself and my company.
Also your example of ignoring Afghan laws on women doesn't work. If you tried to setup a business in Afghanistan that was say an online tutoring programme tailored for Aghan women. How quickly do you think your DNS will get pointed to 0.0.0.0 on the Afghan internet? And how quickly will they seek to prosecute you as a director of that business? As a foreigner living abroad, you'll probably be fine but you won't be making money from your target market. So you're finished. The law worked and you didn't ignore it.
Its clearly not a sensible law, and blocking users will send a clear message to them that they should complains about it.
Also the EU is a way bigger user base than the UK, and being complaint with the GDPR is actually possible without needing to pay anyone anything.
I think the affect of this law is going to be way bigger than the GDPR.
The answer is we demanded it.
Instead of parents taking responsibility for what their children see on their phone, we tried to push a parental responsibility into the service provider, that they're simply unable to logistically comply with.
This is the end result of trying to solve a problem in meat space with legislation. Everyone that sat around going "Hurr hurr XKCD! Slippery slope! Seat belts and road safety!" are complicit.
I consider them conceptually similar because in both cases it means that permission-less publishing will ultimately die. Right now the consensus is to allow publication, after which a reasonable effort is made to moderate, including the typical "report" function where you correct after publication.
It looks like we're swinging in the direction where whatever you publish (by means of your users) makes you fully accountable hence the only way to dodge that legal liability is to pre-check instead of post-check.
There's some hope in the sense that none of this can actually work nor is it enforceable. GDPR is a fine example of that. In my country, privacy authorities are a few hundred in staff only. When you report a violation to them, absolutely nothing will happen. They're 2 years behind and the cases they do handle almost never lead to any kind of verdict. No government is going to add thousands in staff just to regulate cookies, as surely they have better things to do with a budget. As such, the strategy seems to be to occasionally make an example out of a few by applying severe fines, just to scare everybody else and remind them that this legislation is a thing.
Let's also not underestimate the ability for people to revolt. If memory serves me well, article 13 had a modification so that people can continue to meme, lol.
So everybody around the world could and should register with them and basically perform a DoS at that very first step of the process?
This is insane - and worse the UK is just, just small enough that you could if you wanted, turn off the service to those geo-IPs and carry on.
I wonder. If any non-English speaking country tried it, it would almost be guaranteed
Ultimately the only people who benefit as the internet gets more and more locked down and more and more regulated is the people at the top who are able to reassert control of the information those unwashed masses receive.
From the American point of view, the entire EU has bought into something very heavy-handed in terms of the GDPR, but IIUC the GDPR is pretty popular in the UK (though full compliance with it technically requires one not even run a default-configured Apache server).
There definitely is.
They want their cut. At least about their own cattle, I mean, they surely see British people as.. people?
The total size of legislation should be constitutionally limited. So that if someone wants to add 230 pages of new legislation, he should point to other 230 pages of the older legislation that should be eliminated.
So I think.
As an American, I rarely see young people able to write like this anymore.
On the topic: are they trying to kill their startups? Because this is how you drive startups out of the UK.
Like the Chinese, they propose to put executives of ISPs and websites in jail if they fail to assist the government in the creation of this police state.
Unlike the Chinese, part of the plan is to make a few companies [more] fabulously wealthy: Namely the biggest tech giants like Alphabet and Meta who can afford the enormous costs of compliance, as well as certain homegrown British companies who specialize in estimating a user's age by using AI to analyze the size of a user's head in a webcam image.
Super-important points:
1. This is not about "adult content" websites. It covers just about any website that uses technology more advanced that static HTML files, regardless of content.
2. The provisions apply to any website worldwide that can be accessed in Britain.
3. The provisions make it effectively impossible to browse the Internet anonymously in Britain. The government also wants browser makers to make special British versions of browsers to assist them in deanonymizing users.
4. The cost of compliance for any small business will be so astronomical that GDPR compliance will seem trivial by comparison.
This is, I believe, also the intention behind the calls to repeal Section 230. It takes politics back to the simpler age where there were just a few entities deciding what the public were talking about, and they could be reached with either a bribe or an arrest warrant.
For a lot of politicians, who don't understand social media and mostly receive criticism on it, I can imagine them not caring if the costs of pre-screening all content ended up making social media accounts require annual payments. That would have the immediate effect of removing anonymity from users, and limiting online comments to people with disposable income (who could be profitably sued for insulting politicians).
This must be what they meant by "Singapore on Thames" coz it's certainly not about good economic policy or building enough social housing.
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and arguably there is also some interaction with tech companies doing malicious compliance as well which generally means that the original intent of the legislation gets lost and user experience further degrades (cookie popups anyone?)
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I think it's too simplistic to make this a "politicians want to control the discourse" - there's always a bunch of tradeoffs in these things, and arguably the edge cases /are/ the base case (anyone that has done content moderation for a reasonably large community knows that it is very hard to make any sort of blanket rule, even if you have blanket rules)
They do sometimes, mostly by chance, coincide.
The advanced level of this is to be aware this applies even to your own actions.
I believe GP is referring to the fact that the true aim of much of this legislation had nothing to do with protecting kids from the beginning. They use that rhetoric because it's easy to get people on board and much more difficult to explain the real world implications for security.
Separately, the honest activists are often lying to themselves, in the sense that their real motives are not what the they tell themselves and others.
https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...
A great book to realize that the reasons you give for what you do are not the real reasons is Strangers to Ourselves
https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Ourselves-Discovering-Adapt...
May have to read Strangers to Ourselves as well.
What do you think about calls to remove platform immunity from algorithms that have an editorial effect?
Isnt this every non-chronilogical sorting algorithm?
It seems like the proponents of such a rule change are being underhanded, thinking "We can't ban companies from having a political bias, so we'll say that if the company has a political bias (i.e. any editorial/content policy), it becomes liable for any libel, or scams, or threats (written in any language) that appear anywhere on its platform".
I might support a narrow form of this, though, which says that if a platform doesn't let you opt out of (legal content) filtering/re-ordering of content, then the platform has profited from you receiving messages with an unwanted bias (i.e. commercial speech), and therefore owes the user a small amount of statutory damages each time the user suffers some harm.
You mean, "repeal Section 230"? Because the entire point of Section 230 is to allow imperfect biased moderation without having to eliminate all user content. Such calls are ridiculous, stupid, or malicious on a host of levels. Making editorial decisions about what to allow on your own private property is core 1A Freedom of Speech, with caselaw dating back to well before the web.
"Editorial effect" is also an utterly meaningless phrase. You probably have some silly politics thing in mind, but moderating against porn or violence also has an "editorial effect". So does having a forum devoted to aircraft or cats. I think trains and birds are great too. But if I want to run a forum specifically about aircraft or cats, I need to be able to delete train or bird posts, and if necessary ban users who won't follow the rules. This is all completely biased and has the editorial effect of shaping the forum to a specific niche of speech, there is nothing common carrier about running a focused forum. And politics could indeed enter into it, what if some political group proposes a law banning aircraft or cats? Rallying and organizing against that could include being biased against those who want to support that law. Colorful and strident invective may be featured. Such is life in a free society.
If you want a soap box that does something else, the law also protects your ability to make that (or to group up to do it or pay someone else to do it or whatever else). And as a practical matter it is now easier and cheaper to do so and get to a potential global audience then at any time in human history (let alone the history of the US). Win the argument in the marketplace of ideas, not using the state monopoly on violence.
Off the top of my head, I don't have a good way to differentiate those algorithms in legal terms. As another comment points out, even sorting chronologically has an editorial effect of sorts, but these things are different and I know it when I see it. Perhaps someone wiser than me has an unambiguous definition.
That's always the rub and the core issue of free speech: there are no oracles. You have to imagine what your worst most hated enemy demagogue would do with the tools you propose to create, because they will have them. Nobody can be trusted with the power. It is hard though, and I won't completely dismiss the idea that the scale networking/storage/ML offers can create emergent effects that don't show up at a smaller level. The legal notion of tracking for example.
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0: though "amplify rumors over well-sourced reporting, demagoguery over reasoned debate" = the tabloids that exist right there at a large percentage of supermarket checkout aisles, remember nothing new under the sun, you might be surprised at some of the content of regular newspapers for that matter in the 1800s say.
Now what if I hand-curate a front page? If I feature this libelous rumor on it, I'm acting like an editor/publisher rather than a platform and the chances you can successfully sue me go up. What if I pick the users who have been most responsive to that sort of content and email it to them in the hope they'll visit my site and spend more time there as a result? I see my legal risk increasing even more.
Of course it's easy to hold a person responsible when a person is making the decisions. It's harder to say exactly what criteria an algorithm can use, and not the sort of thing I'd want a politician or bureaucrat deciding. Perhaps what I really want is for people to voluntarily stop using corporate social media so much, but I don't know how realistic that is.
[0] Other technologies are better-suited to regulation; I think I wouldn't want to fly on an airplane that got only the maintenance the market demanded.
So, an end to social media companies that are actively hostile to their users? No more psychologically deceptive tactics to force engagement at any cost? No more ad tracking? An end to foreign spam accounts?
Looks like quarterly ARPU is about $12 per US user per month. So a $5 a month subscription would destroy their business model. However go back 6 years and $5 a month was what they were bringing in from ads, and Facebook wasn't exactly suffering as a business 6 years ago.
In Europe, ARPU is just $6 per month right now, though I'd presume UK is higher, since EU is very diverse in terms of country economies.
Of course most people would leave Facebook if it was $5 a month.
And if they judge you broke a rule that will be an extra $50. But you can appeal for $200?
The fact that money is involved would put them under legal scrutiny. It may not actually be a bad deal - the fee can be refunded if the appeal is legitimate (the fee is just to deter spammers) and if they still act maliciously you can take them to small claims court since there's now a defined monetary loss.
Disagreed - if ad- and engagement-based social media becomes a regulatory minefield then other monetization models suddenly become attractive. The final price will always only be limited by what the market is actually willing to bear.
Ultimately people have a specific amount of disposable income regardless of how much advertising you throw at them, so the market will rebalance. There might be less advertising overall, which is a good thing for many reasons but one of them would be that the advertising that remains becomes more effective. The mediums you mention currently don't have the viewership because all attention is consumed by social media - this may very well change.
In addition, the issue only applies to the common definition of internet advertising. Advertisers can still produce first-party content just like any other user on the platform and people will like/follow/share it if it's useful or entertaining to them. Product placement will still work, and so on.
We pay for TVs (the physical objects), and most of them are still riddled with ads. They will double dip if they can. The reasoning won’t be “if we charge them this much we can drop ads and not lose money”, it will be “if we charge them this much we can have it on top of however much we are doing with ads”.
If they can, yes. But it will now open them to competition.
Not to mention, if the law is structured in such a way that advertising-based business models remove their (UK equivalent) of Section 230 while purely fee-based models don't (as you'd assume fee-based models benefit equally from any content, where as ad-based models benefit from certain content more than other) then they can't double-dip since the extra liability will wipe out any advertising profits.
Modern smart TVs are subsidized to heck and back.
You can actually get smart TVs w/o lots of ads, Sony's Android TVs give you a slew of opt-out options when you first turn them on.
Roku is the worst about this, they show ads to customers and try to collect $ from the streaming platforms.
Western Governments are looking to control the discourse and are following the footsteps of China.
Honestly sad to see the web move in this direction :/
There is definitely some change to do to section 230. I do not think it needs a repeal, but i do think it needs some rethinking and probably some more regulation on privacy and safety.
If the terms are just linked somewhere, it’s a “browsewrap” contract, which may or may not be enforceable. [2]
Other jurisdictions may differ.
At some point, we are going to have to be able to do something about it. At the very least have some ways to handle this kind of problems.