> In the most extreme cases, with the agreement of the courts, Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, preventing it from generating money or being accessed from the UK.
They’ve done this before (various piracy websites are blocked by ISPs).
The criminal liability of senior managers could cause travel headaches too.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
This is going to fizzle out, like the Australian eSafety team trying to remove content off X globally.
Or get Apple to poke holes in it's crypto. Just not going to happen.
The current US administration isn’t pro free speech, they just use other tools to prevent it.
UK uses laws, US uses money respectively the lack of money for you if your speech doesn’t suit them.
US free speech has a price tag.
He'll need to start first with taking action at home. Florida and I believe Texas have also implemented age restrictions for various websites and did so before the UK.
So maybe they're not your friend.
There may be significant differences between KOSA and OSA in their implementation but they are the same in essence.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
Mississpi is a pretty Republican state and has enacted even more stringent and privacy-invasive laws.
What can be done if those who represent you, don’t?
However you really need to name your MP. These political public figures need named and shamed for using binary fallacious logic like that. And barring listening to constituents, get rid of them.
Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
Rolling that back essentially makes you a prime minister that believes children should have unfettered access to porn, self-harm material, gore, and that the outspoken parents of kids who've killed themselves after accessing this material shouldn't be listened to. At least, that's how the media (on all sides) would spin it. Not really a fight worth picking.
Voters aren’t all that rational. They could choose to vote against the person that blocked their access to porn but also choose to vote against the person who made porn available again because doing so puts children in danger or whatever the scaremongering line would be.
If their real interest was in protecting children, they'd make a free, publicly accessible age blocking system that parents could choose to opt into, that isn't thrust upon all citizens at once
But your age is personal information.
Given the spread of explicit "give us our pedo games" and "let kids watch porn" voices, I don't think there's any demand for a moderate solution.
And when the moderate solution is actively rejected for a very real problem, nobody has a right to complain when the problem eventually is addressed using extreme solutions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_201...
People seem to have forgotten that all major UK ISPs are now logging TCP connection metadata and all DNS queries
ISPs will send you warning letters if you're using bittorrent
You're not like the US. The US turns over a good portion of Congress every two years, and re-elects what is basically a active King every four. All you did was make sure that no one in government has to think about the public for a second, while they do what their backers and buddies ask, then retire in five years.
There's no way out of it. Starmer should try to get down to an <10% approval rating just to make the history books.
It’s amusing/depressing that Labor in Australia is doing the same nonsense too. They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
They will say, and do, whatever they perceive as being the most politically expedient thing to do. The ones that took moral stances in the actual best interest of the populace usually suffered politically for that. The ones that side with power tend to keep their power. This is the folly of political systems in general short of tyrannies, dictatorships, and kingdoms. And now we are seeing how democracies can be stretched into the same quality of life as so-called "lesser" systems but people don't like hearing that argument because the alternative is made out to be so scary.
It's not so much that democracy is the problem, but that it's too easy to sway people when it's so easy for money and power to be leveraged to manufacture consent. So now it's the people electing their own tyrants who will enrich and entrench themselves and being grateful for the privilege to be used for that purpose.
steps down off of soap box and stops yelling at clouds
You’re clearly not paying attention to American politics.
Always has been. What has changed is they now have the power to force their constituency to live with their hypocrisy and lies. Any effort to challenge the "leader" results in claims that you are now a "terrorist."
The internet was supposed to empower the citizenry. It's been captured and is now a tool used to suppress them. So now we see leaders completely unchallenged when their darker habits are exposed.
Cambridge Analytica showed politicians in real time that on a population scale, hypocrisy doesn't make any difference. In fact people will bend themselves around to square the circle.
Politicians finally knowing for a demonstrable, data-backed, evidence-based fact that they can do basically whatever they want and keep their support as long as they just say they right things is what has brought us from 2016 to now.
And most general people I meet here in the USA are either heavily propagandized, extraordinarily dumb, or both.
We could be for "better and better, which is what the Chinese have been doing the last 50 years. Instead we've been at" fuck you I got mine haha", and "don't let THEM have anything".
Well, the out groups have sacrificed so they have no more. Now making the lower and middle and even upper middle class suffer is the name of the game.
4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC
Finding content is the issue. Unless I go directly to each site every day and scan for new articles I'm likely to miss them. If not for aggregators and RSS how else would this be accomplished?
That's a stretch.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss/
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
arguing that RSS is dead because the average person doesn't understand it is like saying HTTP's dead for the same reason. neither are dead: we've just abstracted them to the point that they're no longer the front-facing part of any interaction.
And for sites that don't you can make your own feeds by selecting links on pages (such as how AP News doesn't have an RSS feed).
As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag though - whilst some big websites still have an RSS feed, you can’t get the full article text, smaller blogs etc seem to be better in that regard.
They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.
"Only a criminal would need 10 terabytes of storage!"
Something stupid like that.
I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
I know people who don't know how to use Google because they only use a smartphone to browse scroll Instagram and Facebook. They're never going to access a website.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
The comments on HN are worth reading precisely because of the discussions, so I'm not sure what the point of political posts are if that fails.
svgmaker•7h ago