I don't mean this to be as insulting as it may, but the UK government trying to police US businesses has always felt like a toddler trying to ground his mom.
Where I think they are going wrong is that they are trying to levy fines rather than just blocking the business.
Oh, and the whole age verification thing is bonkers. I'm a parent of 2 teenagers, I don't think its asking too much for a parent to be responsible for what children see and do on the internet.
By the time they're teenagers, it's pretty easy for them to access anything on the internet regardless of the controls implemented.
4chan is a cesspool, and society is worse off letting it fester, but you arn't solving this problem by "personal responsibility" of parents.
Buy Wines Online currently does not ship alcohol to AL, MI, MS, UT, HI, AK
Says it requires an "adult signature" but anyone who's signed for fedex/ups knows they don't check your ID. I can say, when I was in high school, they did not check...
It's physically addictive with harsh withdrawal symptoms that makes it difficult to quit; and it has significant healthcare costs for the wider community when smokers eventually get sick and die prematurely.
Nobody is going to get addicted and die prematurely from reading 4chan. Cleaning what you consider a cesspool is not the job of the government. These laws are about kids stumbling into the cesspool before they are ready.
Parents can choose to just not give their kids phones till they are 12 or 13 (highschool). Before that, internet access is on locked down devices in the family room with somebody else around.
Personally I think once your kids are about 13-14 you have probably had your chance to pass on your morals, they need to be mentally prepared to encounter bad stuff on the internet and deal with it.
The government in general has been becoming increasingly authoritarian and centralized far before social media, see the abuses of the CIA and MK ULTRA, Operation Mockingbird, COINTELPRO, the War on Terror. You use the term neonazi, yet I hope you're honest enough to recognize the left also has dark authoritarian impulses. It was only a few years ago that we had ruinous lockdowns, widespread censorship, illegal mandates for experimental medical interventions, mostly peaceful riots, a 30% spike in homicides, anarcho-tyranny with the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, etc.
Plus, there is plenty of dopamine (or other brain juice) to be had from more healthy activities.
I agree thwres no chemical component but addictiond are broadee than just external chemical iintroduction.
I mean, point 1 in favour of this theory is the fact that tobacco is legal, while most drugs aren't.
I don't have them chained up, but I'm also not concerned they are become radicalized, or damaging themselves watching snuff films and goatse.
In a way they are like addicts: you love them and want the best for them but you absolutely have to be on your guard for egregious breaches of trust cropping up without warning. Children / teenagers / young adults can be driven by curiosity, peers, and lack of judgment into all kinds of dreadful behavior, and it can come from the least likely ones just as much as the obviously naughty ones.
The best we can do is to warn them in advance, accept that mistakes will be made anyway, and support them in learning from their mistakes. Keep at it for even a short while and you too can experience the shock of how your most charming, academically brilliant, upstanding star pupil is found throwing up a bottle of vodka she just drank!
The parents I’ve seen who give up and make no efforts because they think it’s impossible to perfect control everything don’t have great outcomes. This applies to everything from internet to drinking alcohol and more.
All it takes is the kid wanting to go behind your back, the rest becomes easy for them. The only chance you have is establishing a good relationship with your kid and instilling good values. You can't actually control them online unless you lock down their life like a supermax prison.
The obvious next step is to ban VPNs too or to block connections to their servers.
The big one is to start whitelisting good protocols only. That means everything must be https and you have to at least pass the hostname in plaintext. Random traffic on UDP ports is now illegal as it is assumed to be VPN traffic.
Another one is to pass a law telling ISPs to flag customers with traffic patterns only to a single IP address, set of IP addresses, or a single ASN. This means that you can’t just tunnel everything to your VPS in Amsterdam.
You might also pass a law that still allows, say, ssh and random UDP traffic, but with the provision that bandwidth on any non HTTPS ports is capped at 200kbps. You only use ssh for running a shell after all — why would you need more than that! /s
ASNs are a fun feature of the internet in that there are a lot of them but they are finite and scale on the order of organised human activity, mostly businesses. That means it is eminently tractable to categorize them all and regulate traffic from residential ISPs to commercial services ISPs only, and throttle traffic from home users to hosting providers. This already happens — try connecting to Reddit from anything other than a residential IP address.
A far more expedient course lies in legislative control: the imposition of a licensing requirement for VPN usage, coupled with punitive measures – fines and imprisonment – for defiance thereof. A few well-chosen prosecutions, conducted publicly with a fanfare and pomp and without leniency, would suffice to instil both fear and obedience amongst the populace.
As ever, the familiar refrain of «think of the children» would provide an acceptable veneer of moral justification to soothe the public conscience.
You do realize that things other than VPNs use UDP right?
The whole post is so nonsensical I would have assumed it's all sarcasm, but the single tag in the middle has me confused.
What's stopping VPN providers from being forced to censor the internet?
These slowly degrade societies, like it or not. At least someone tries to do something to weed out the utter, batshit crazy adults, actually childminded idiots, who think the world is their playground.
Any way I see it this is a slow virus, a weapon of sorts. Just politicians usually have their heads lodged in their own back orifice, hence slow reacting.
So, thought crimes?
It's not like we are not warning you, you have netflix, amazon, google, whatever you want - somehow pirating an American movie is an offense in Europe - but abiding by the same logic is not acceptable - same goes for Assange and Snowden - why the did we abide with American shenanigans if that's just one sided ?
And are you getting ready for the turn-over ? Because all it takes is some mad politicians - alternatives - and I'm not sure the status quo is going to last while AI is booming - more than that - people are increasingly hostile to US and it seems it's going to continue this way if the toddler attitude is kept over.
4chan's whole gimmick is that you can say whatever you want, because you don't have to identify yourself when you say it. It's a way for Internet denizens scream their intrusive thoughts into the pseudovoid.
If expressing intrusive thoughts makes society worse, and should be controlled. That, arguably makes expressing thoughts a crime. You shouldn't be allowed to think or say thing.
I guess you could insist that thinking is different from expressing, and that thinking is fine as long as you repress the inate human trait and desire of expression... But I feel that's a stupid line in the sand to draw given my intent was to point out 4chan doesn't make society worse, tolerating ideas you don't like generally improves society. It's how you behave that matters.
In other words, If 4chan didn't exist, people would behave better.
If you weren't exposed to those thoughts and ideas, you would behave better.
If you didn't have a thought....
What’s happening online just drags things down. People chasing clicks, money, and attention by any means. When platforms like 4chan or influencers resort to gimmicks or self objectification to get views, it encourages people to act less like thoughtful humans and more like they’re reverting to base instincts - like animals. It normalizes shallow, attention-hungry behaviour and chips away at basic self-respect and awareness. One idiot can lead a hundred astray.
Why is it ok for a young woman to put a paper bag on her head in a live chat session, in order to gain more subscribers? Or swallow insults after insults? Is this ok? I don't think so.
You want to tolerate ideas like GGG movies and Dick Wadd gay videos where black guys sodomize whitebois acting as nazis and then piss in steel bowls and force them to drink it from said bowl? How do these "ideas" improve society hm? You need these things to be tolerated?
This whole idea that anyone can do anything and people will decide what's best for them is absolute hogwash.
I don't want any of these “services” thank you very much. Inflict them on your own people, not us.
American technology companies operate by finding technological solutions to evading the law, then counting on being too big to fail once regulators catch up. These companies do not provide innovative products, they abuse monopoly power to dominate industries. The Chinese are smart enough to make their own versions of all this stuff so that they aren't under the US yoke and I want the same here (sans the dictatorship of course). I want to replace every horrid US machine with something FOSS or publicly owned, and every regulatory step towards that is a win in my book.
Maybe instead of turning your nose up at other countries that dare to regulate your tech overlords, you should try to get your politicians to do the same thing.
You're showing yourself to believe that America can regulate conduct that never touches American soil.
If you enter America, there may also be consequences, but you don't need to enter America.
That isn't much different. Say an adult American drinks alcohol in America; then they travel to a country where alcohol is illegal. Should they be prosecuted in that country for having drank in America?
There's a world of difference here. Ofcom is claiming to be able to shut down an American website for content generated in America, stored in America, and shown only to Americans. There are no UK citizens in this chain at all. This sets up Ofcom as having global censorship authority even over content seen elsewhere.
> Should they be prosecuted in that country for having drank in America?
In my opinion, no, but some countries are hardasses about this. If you want to do things that are illegal in certain places, you should not plan on traveling to those places. Usually, they will just refuse you entry but you kind of do put yourself at their mercy if you touch their soil. This is how the world works.
You picked a bad example - there are many US crimes that you could get away with if done elsewhere within the local laws, it generally isn't seen as worth bothering with when done elsewhere if the other country doesn't care.
You are making the same argument that Trump is making with the tariffs. Personally, while I can see some good arguments for protectionism, I'd rather have the choice to decide whether or not I want to buy Chinese products, rather than the government making the choice for me.
So you two are on completely separate frames of thought. One party sees it as a matter of choice, the other sees it as removing choice because one party has a monopoly on avoiding the regulations.
The issue here is IMO more so that the taxi driver should be able to operate a taxi business without a license without having to go through Uber. Ultimately what is happening in a lot of places is the guys with medallions will basically use agents of the state to violently enforce their racket (which Uber breaks up, but then monopolizes), or alternatively in some places in Latin America the entrenched taxi drivers will simply shoot to kill their competitors that don't have cartel sanctioned 'medallions.'
Do some research on why these services are so attractive before you give your opinion on it being a good thing. What these companies are doing should be illegal under US law as well, but they have paid your president to make that issue go away.
Keep your american movies and social networks please. Btw why is TikTok banned in US?
1) whatsapp (facebook)
2) telegram (incorporated in dubai)
3) messenger (also facebook lmao)
There is 0 reason for us to let american suck away important infrastructure tools, benefits that goes with it, or even benefit from tax exemption trough the best company framework there can possibly exist.
I still haven't got an answer here - why is TikTok US owned ?
China may be able to bully Apple into letting it snoop on its citizens’ icloud backups, but when the UK wants the same illiberal snooping powers, with 10% the population it’s 90% easier to walk away.
The EU is big and rich enough to force Big Tech into submission under threat of loosing the market.
Capitalism works when there is a competition between companies. Corporations are everything but that.