Online activities to be made impossible by the UK Online Safety Bill

Interestingly, if you run a BBS through the telephone system, you'll be immune, as the bill specifies "the Internet", but:

1. I think the lines have jitter now they're over IP anyhow.

2. Bit niche...

Source code hosting; Gitea or Gitlab or Gogs etc all have UGC. The interesting part to me is I'm not sure how this helps the UK citizens who are using the internet be any safer, all you'd have to do is access the rest of the internet to circumvent this.

Certainly the online activities that the bill is meant to address will still continue. Criminals don’t care about following the law unfortunately.

While I'm not a supporter of the Online Safety Bill, I do find that the opprobrium that it has inspired is consistently hyperbolic.

The Online Safety Bill bans nothing. What it does do is create a regulatory framework for the Office for Communications (aka Ofcom, HM Government's regulator for the communications industry) to operate and enforce. The regulatory framework is based around risk assessments, and sets out specific risks (of the sort that most people would agree need to be minimised). Ofcom is empowered to decide that internet services are within scope, and then demand to see policies relating to ameliorating those risks within a service.

The regulatory framework does specify that end-to-end encryption is incompatible with the reduction of these risks. However, we do have to play the ball and not the person of unspecified gender here.

We are, after all, talking about the UK here. The phenomenon of 'those whom the law protects but does not bind, and those whom the law binds but does not protect' is still very much in effect here. This legislation has also been proposed by a government that responds to increasing crime (caused by insufficient police officers) by giving those police more powers (that they don't have the resources to exercise).

Ofcom has wide-ranging responsibilities: it regulates the press and broadcast media, it allocates EM spectrum bands, it regulates the telephone network, and regulates the Royal Mail. Like all organisations in the Home Civil Service, it is staffed by a core of 'generalists' with humanities degrees, assisted by a small cadre of 'specialists', who are put back in their cupboard once they've given their opinion.

What this all means is that the bill will only have the effects that the government has said it will in its press releases. Ofcom will go after the big social media companies and the likes of 4chan. Your Mastodon server or your Gitea server or your corner of the Tildeverse or whatever will never appear on their radar. Ofcom won't have the budget or the resources to go after individuals or small communities; they won't even know you exist.

In the UK, an energy bill or council tax bill is an important identity document, necessary for opening a bank account, because any time someone starts talking about identity cards, the readers of the Daily Telegraph start muttering about the Gestapo. Ofcom isn't going to audit your homelab for online harms.

> you become a private service provider, and then have a host of responsibilities including annual audits of whether a significant proportion of your users are minors. If they are then you need to use a (commercial?) age verification tool and monitor everything assiduously. Difficult to see most people being able to satisfy those requirements.

And then I just block the UK instead, let's hope this just doesn't go through.

This might be useful from June, can’t vouch for correctness.

https://www.taylorwessing.com/en/interface/2022/the-online-s...

One scenario is that Whatsapp and Apple leave the UK market, another is that nobody going to do anything about the "law", which is rubbery enough to be ignored. I'm quite curious how it's going to go down.

Does it matter? The UK can't enforce anything outside its borders. Just putting another nail in the coffin of UK tech startups that aren't in Financial Services.

Why isn't VPN to an out of country relay a solution?

At any rate situations like these are what partially motivated me to write something like this: https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems/blob/master...

"Use Signal" seems like it won't be possible any more.

Comment section on your personal blog?

I read the title and thought that the legislation had gone through already! Might be worth tweaking

(Ask HN: List...)

Should add MUDs, website guestbooks?

My understanding is that the OSB creates a responsibility for Ofcom to create a regulatory system for discouraging online harms.

Has Ofcom actually said what these regulations will be?

Is there any reason to expect them to be as dystopian as you predict? The interim codes of practice that the government published don't even apply at all to individuals. They also acknowledge that smaller companies should not be expected to be subject to the same level of regulation as large companies.

My experience with online activists' predictions of imminent dystopia is that they generally turn out to be extremely overblown. Hopefully that's true this time as well.