That would either create a gigantic loophole that makes the safety act toothless, or it would create a giant bureacracy of people who review and approve applications. Either outcome is sub-optimal.

The real answer is to repeal this nonsense (IMHO as a non-UK citizen)

The UK shouldn't have stupid ID requirement laws at all.

So I think this law is stupid. But it's also popular, for the reason "something should be done, this is something, so this should be done". I doubt that exceptions are going to be made until the effects are felt strongly by everyone. Geoblocking a .cz site used by a tiny number of developers is not having any effect.

Maybe Orcs?

It is a super simple git repo hosting/mirror based in EU. https://repo.or.cz

It's one of the older Git hosts, predating Github.

It's a bit hard to find, but going to the service's Mastodon account eventually leads one to https://repo.or.cz/uk-blocked.html

They specifically listed their reasons in the geoblock message. As a someone impacted by this I applaud their decision. I also hope more high-profile cases like Wikipedia[1] will surface and expose the utter idiocy of the deliberately vague language of the language and the "guidance".

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/09/12/wikimedia-fo...

It hosts user uploaded content I would guess, so presumably the OSA could apply to them.

It says so at https://repo.or.cz/uk-blocked.html:

> UK's Online Safety Act 2023 would require us to do a prohibitively complicated risk assessment for our service. We're talking reading through thousands of pages of legal guidelines.

> We're a volunteer operation and would likely be held responsible as individuals. There is talk of fines up to 18 million GBP which would ruin any single one of us, should they get creative about how to actually enforce this.

> Our impression is that this law is deliberately vague, deliberately drastic in its enforcement provisions, and specifically aimed against websites of all sizes, including hobby projects. In other words, this seems to us to be largely indistinguishable from an attempt to basically break the internet for all UK citizens.

> If we could afford to just hope for the best, we'd love to.

The way I understand this is that it's not feasible for them to assess how the legislation impacts them, so they would rather stay safe than risk having their lives destroyed.