For your own personal sake, you may be selfishly wishing it’s as few people as possible. Eventually they’ll outlaw VPNs too and by then you’ll have little recourse. You can’t hide behind them forever, deeper change is needed.
Even China doesn't quite manage to enforce that.
Bypassing internet restrictions in mainland China is a normal part of life for people who want to access the western internet. China is able to censor the Internet effectively because Chinese people are most comfortable using apps that cater directly to Chinese people, through language and culture. The Chinese government has a lot of control over these companies because they’re based are located in China.
The English speaking west is so dependent on the U.S. internet that it is impossible to copy the Chinese model.
It’s only techies who think “if I can get around it, it’s not that big of a deal”. As long as you live in a society, how other people behave affects what you can do too.
Even those who are happy to break laws, don't generally do so perfectly.
Even nation states' pulling James Bond stunts don't do it perfectly.
Imperfect enforcement used to be the default even for petty crimes, before CCTV and finger prints and DNA tests and all the other forensics got cheap. The legal systems don't care if the methods are imperfect… and worse, they don't understand why we do, making it hard to explain to them the consequences of this kind of thing in our domain.
Mass surveillance, population control, and the destruction of services they disapprove of. Pornhub’s traffic went down by 80% when they implemented the mandatory age verification checks in some state. So they simply blocked them because it wasn’t worth it. Later, someone (I don’t have the ability to track down the source right now) was caught admitting one of the goals of the law is to drive those sites out of business.
I recommend reading about authoritarian regimes in Europe (it was not just Germany) and how they controlled discourse, and what people had accessed to. Some of their decisions have repercussions which are felt to this day. In Spain, foreign media is dubbed while in Portugal it is subbed. Both are due to their respective dictators.
I will read about that, but I quite quickly realised talking about this in person it's one of the few things I feel this strongly about, and even I'm not sure why I agree so entirely. I think I look at it a bit like climate activists interacting with deniers. Say what you want about future risks and criticisms, but there is no time, the situation is extremely fucked right now, particularly with children, and something needed doing asap.
I don’t think these lawmakers understand what they’re doing.
It does not work that way in functioning democracies. This is like blithely raising people's electric bills in the name of preventing global warming. Noble aspirations but brain dead implementation that completely undermines the original goal. And fuels, one might add, the rise of political parties that just want to burn everything down.
Personally I went from more or less ignorant of these laws to completely outraged in the time it took to eat a couple of sausages.
Why don't we humans think this stuff through? Surely we can do better.
EIAs are £452.17/month (a statutory amount originally defined in The Online Safety Act’s 2027 update, subject to triple-lock inflation), licensed, and subject to inspection. There’s a four month waiting list for licensing due to backlogs at the local County Court.
The alternative is therefore to use up a strike and apply to have the account repurposed back to a Citizen User Account. CUAs must remain below a 50:1 down/up ratio and must have p90 non-https “control” traffic of 48kbps or less. They are expensive too but you get a 25% discount if you install your ISP’s mobileconfig / MDM profile though. With the profile discount the price is now only £64.99 a month.
(This assumes you run an Approved Platform capable of mobile device management. Anything else — Linux based, old versions of macOS, Windows <= 13 etc. — has to pay the full price and CUAs are limited to one Custom Access device per connection.)
You can get it down to £49.99 a month if you sign up for a 12-month trial of their home security system — cameras, door “e-locks”, that sort of thing. The devices are locked down but you can see the last 48h of events on their cloud portal. The devices have tamper detectors and the traffic is encrypted e2e but luckily that doesn’t count towards your CUA agreement’s limits on opaque traffic.
* does not apply to pensioners
..but sadly within the margin of ridiculousness for our government's approach to the internet.
If your society is anti freedom of information, your society deserves a spanking.
My primary complaint with the UK and EU right now is that they have been attempting to restrict US freedom of information, versus say China who doesn’t make an effort overseas. Not only are the UK and EU exerting pressure against US companies to change their global policies, but especially in the case of the UK, they are attempting to change the legal framework governing the internet by claiming that sites are somehow subject to UK law unless they proactively block the UK. All this on top of long time EU/UK participation in shady “counter-misinformation” efforts that have spun up a web of state-funded NGOs who attempt to influence US policy against freedom of information. So yeah, I’m pissed at your countries in particular.