Other aspects of the OSA have similar effects on other types of sites such as forums vs social media.
Because only 10% of visitors actually do it. It might not be as bad as this because probably anyone who was actually going to pay for the porn would be ok with giving them their credit card number anyway. Bad for advertising income though.
I don’t know what you had in mind by “big porn sites”, but the biggest one I know of (Pornhub) is not doing that.
They decided to voluntarily withdraw from the US markets where age verification became required (TX, GA, etc.), and wrote a pretty good blog post explaining their rationale (which revolved around the idea that letting third parties to just receive and process ID documents just so that users could watch porn was both not secure at all and absurd).
We're talking about just watching porn in private, normally. Find me an MP that admits to that.
> The Science Department, which oversees the legislation, told companies they could face fines if they failed to uphold free speech rules.
> A spokesman said: “As well as legal duties to keep children safe, the very same law places clear and unequivocal duties on platforms to protect freedom of expression.
> “Failure to meet either obligation can lead to severe penalties, including fines of up to 10 per cent of global revenue or £18m, whichever is greater.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/09/social-media...
They seem to be putting social media platforms between a rock and a hard place, particularly as political debate in the UK is starting to heat up somewhat. I suppose the best to hope for at this point is that fines for infringing free expression never materialize.
Hmm. So Reddit, Youtube, etc. would be blocked by ISPs by default?
As another commenter pointed out in the earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44721712
> The categorisation regulations are a statutory instrument rather than primary legislation, so they _are_ open to judicial review. But the Wikimedia foundation haven't presented an argument as to why the regulations are unlawful, just an argument for why they disagree with them.
Ofcom's SI could simply be modified to exclude research texts, and it could even be modified to exclude Wikipedia specifically; there's no obvious problem with that considering its scale and importance.
If you go through Ofcom's checker:
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
The answers are 1) yes, 2) yes, 3) no, 4) probably "No, but...", 5) no, 6) no.
But the answer to getting out of the problem entirely might be to change the answer to question 6 -- that is, register Wikipedia as an education provider in the UK (since it is already used in that capacity).
I mean Wikipedia have actually exhibited at BETT, the main educational tech show here; Jimmy Wales did a keynote.
That's certainly a potential workaround. But carve outs often mean that similar communities become hard to create!
This isn't to say that the OSA is a universally good thing, or that smaller sites won't be affected by it. However, this request for judicial review wasn't looking to carve out any special cases for specific large sites in favour of smaller sites.
Remember the "Repeal the Online Safety Act" petition? It has gotten over half a million signatures and the response from the government was a loud "no".
> The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477966 ("Wikipedia blackout page (wikipedia.org)" (2012))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA...
On that occassion, it was very effective at getting the American government to back down.
> The Wikimedia Foundation shares the UK government’s commitment to promoting online environments where everyone can safely participate. The organization is not bringing a general challenge to the OSA as a whole, nor to the existence of the Category 1 duties themselves. Rather, the legal challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.
---
I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did their conscience go?
A lot of voices on the left [1] are now pro-censorship. As long as you're censoring the opinions they don't like, it's totally fine.
We used to have an ACLU and EFF that would fight for free speech regardless of political belief. They defended the most reprehensible groups on both sides because "unless all speech is free, none of it is free". The ACLU has stumbled in that regard [2-4].
[1] I'm not picking on the left. Both the left and the right want to censor the other side. They're united in installing the means of control, they're just unclear about who will wield the power. Someone will win, and it probably won't be you. You should support near-absolute free speech if only to selfishly protect yourself. Once it's gone, it's gone forever.
[2] https://fee.org/articles/the-aclu-is-no-longer-free-speechs-...
[3] https://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/commentary/the-acl...
[4] https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/391682-the-final-na...
I have a very hard time taking any of your sources seriously, particularly when it comes to any categorization of "the left".
FEE is a conservative libertarian think tank. Heritage Foundation is the most infamous conservative think tank. Alan Dershowitz is most famous for defending Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Jeffrey Epstein, and decided to leave the Democratic party as soon as it showed signs of becoming a bit less Zionist.
These are prime examples of pundits who love to frame the "the left" as a singular cohesive boogeyman. You may not intentionally be picking on the left, but the sources you have cited make a living picking on a version of "the left" that they invented.
For the left, it's:
> Eugene Debs, for example, was sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Espionage Act after he spoke at a rally for peaceful workers telling them they were “fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder”... Likewise, in 1919, Schenck v. U.S., the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Socialist Party member after he sent anti-war leaflets to men across the country.
For the right, it's:
> It will not defend the First Amendment rights of pro-life pregnancy centers [...to trick desparate women into receiving useless propaganda instead of the medical care they were seeking] or small religious businesses [...to deny service based on rank bigotry]. It no longer defends religious freedom [...to deny adoptions to LGBT couples[1], to fire employees for receiving or abetting an abortion[2], and to perjure yourself in a senate hearing about your intention to make legal rulings on the basis of religion[3]], although it once did. And in a leaked internal memo, the ACLU takes the position that free speech denigrating “marginalized groups” should not be defended.
If you're ever in a position to write "marginalized groups" in scare-quotes, perhaps that should be a wakeup call...
P.S. It doesn't help that your links are to 1) a libertarian thinktank founded to oppose the New Deal, 2) the Heritage Foundation and 3) an opinion piece by Alan Dershowitz. The first is extremely biased, and the latter two are just plain bad-faith.
[1] https://www.lgbtmap.org/kids-pay-the-price
[2] https://laist.com/shows/take-two/heres-the-last-of-the-bills...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/feinstein-the-...
At issue was whether antiwar speech can constitutionally be punished as espionage, which can be a capital crime under US law, punishable by death.
Whether you're allowed to to speak in ways that Congress considers too close to 'creating a clear and present danger of a significant evil that Congress has power to prevent'. Whether you could criminalize speech deemed disloyal or detrimental to the war effort.
Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921, and among other things, his administration dramatically expanded the precedential authority of the federal government in authoritarian directions, particularly with regards to things like surveillance and censorship. The Sedition Act of 1918 "broadened the scope of prohibited speech to include any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the U.S. government, flag, or military", and the Espionage Act of 1917 "made it illegal to interfere with the military, obstruct recruitment, or convey information that could harm the U.S. or aid its enemies. "
It took the Warren and Burger courts of the 60's/70's to reel this back in and re-establish many of the Constitutional rights you were taught about. It's unclear whether the pendulum will swing back the other way precedentially, but doubtless Trump would prefer carte blanche to target dissidents.
Also, I definitely love the track record of "the measure of free speech is your willingness to defend nazi and never use words to support the left":
> To be sure, the ACLU will still occasionally take a high profile case involving a Nazi or Klan member who has been denied freedom of speech, though there are now some on the board who would oppose supporting such right-wing extremists. But the core mission of the ACLU — and its financial priority — is to promote its left-wing agenda in litigation, in public commentary and, now, in elections. If you want to know the reason for this shift, [...]
Yeah, their litmus test is always willingness to defend nazi AND not have left like opinions. If you are aligned with right wing specifically, you are fine. Just dont you dare to have left like opinions. Total neutral.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/31/how-the-resurge...
Please note: I 100% abhor white supremacy and any kind of racism. But you can and should defend the right to free speech without agreeing with that speech.
We need to support the speech of all groups we detest - baby eaters, satanists, polygamists, racists, sexists, murderers, capitalists, Marxists, televangelists, etc. - in order to champion free speech for all. Once that freedom disappears, it won't come back. Then the systems of censorship and oppression will be used against us.
I'm LGBT. I know what it was like to grow up when my "lifestyle" was taboo. I know how easily and quickly society can change. I don't want to ever have my freedom removed or to be put into a box.
If you're uneasy about this, remember that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from judgement. If you say something disgusting, you'll lose credibility and business from most people. Crowds already effectively censor. But we don't need the government or public squares becoming thought police and building automated systems to muzzle and detain us. Once those systems get built, we're done for.
Except that, in practice the defense of self styled free speech advocates did not extended to left, gay, radical feminists, progressives anyone not far right.
In what world is NY times left leaning.
> If you're uneasy about this, remember that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from judgement.
Somehow that part did applied to only selected groups. Criticising right and conservatives was treated as grave danger to free speech by the self styled free speech advocates.
The big crisis of free speech is never about speech rights of anyone left of center. Literally even now.
I don’t want to go right or left. I want to move forward and leave this stupid, stupid mess behind.
This new multi-media technology was going to give everyone on the planet access to a complete free university education, thousands of books, and would prevent the likes of Chinese state-run media suppressing knowledge about Tienanmen Square.
And after they receive this marvellous free education, all the communists and nazis and religious nutjobs will realise they were wrong and we were right.
Also the greater education will mean everyone can get better jobs and make more money, and with this trade with China we're just ramping up they'll see our brilliant democratic system, and peacefully adopt it. The recently fallen Soviet Union is of course going to do the same, and it's going to go really well. We'll all live happily ever after.
This Bill Clinton chap has a federal budget surplus, now we're not spending all that money on the cold war, so we'll get that national debt paid off in no time too.
You may be able to figure out why this particular brand of optimism isn't so fashionable these days.
I absolutely abhor the "Kids these days" sort of argument, but it does seem the case that we lowered the barrier of entry sufficiently in the tech sector that people who simply dont give a shit, or actively want to harm our values, now outnumber us greatly.
What has happened previously was we would rally around corporations and institutions that would generally work in our best interests. But the people driving those social goods in those entities are now the villains.
Not to mention all the mergers and acquisitions.
In Australia, during the internet filter debate, we had both a not for profit entity spending money on advertising, but also decently sized ISP's like iiNet working publicly against the problem. The not for profit was funded by industry, something that never happened again. And iiNet is now owned by TPG who also used to have a social conscience but have been hammered into the dust by the (completely non technical, and completely asinine bane of the internets existence and literal satan) ACCC and have no fight left in them for anything. When Teoh leaves or sells TPG, it will probably never fight a good fight ever again.
Its the same everywhere. We cant expect people to fight for freedom when the legislation just gets renamed and relaunched again after the next crisis comes out in the media. We lost internet filtration after christchurch, for absolutely no justifiable reason. And we lost the Access and Assistance fight despite having half the global tech industry tell our government to suck eggs.
The only real solution is to prep the next generation to fight back as best as possible, to help them ignore the doomsayers and help the right humans into the right places to deal with this shit.
1. They lost this legal challenge, so perhaps their UK lawyers (barristers?) knew that much broader claim would be even less likely to work and advised them against it. Just because they didn't challenge the overall law in court doesn't mean they wouldn't challenge it in a political sense.
2. The Protests against SOPA and PIPA[1] were in response to overreach by capitalists, and as such drew support from many capitalists with opposing interests (e.g. Google, Craigslist, Flickr, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Wordpress, etc.). Certainly Reddit et al have similar general concerns with having to implement ID systems as they did about policing content for IP violations, but the biggest impact will be on minors, which AFAIK are far from the most popular advertising demo. Certainly some adult users will be put off by the hassle and/or insult, but how many, and for how long?
3. Wikimedia is a US-based organization, and the two major organizers of the 2012 protests--Fight for the Future[2] and the Electronic Frontier Foundation[3]--are US-focused as well. The EFF does have a blog post about these UK laws, but AFAICT no history of bringing legal and/or protest action there. This dovetails nicely with the previous point, while we're at it: the US spends $300B on digital ads every year, whereas the UK only spends $40B[4]. The per-capita spends are closer ($870/p v. $567/p), but the fact remains: the US is the lifeblood of these companies in a way that the UK is not.
4. More fundamentally, I strongly suspect that "big business is trying to ruin the internet by hoarding their property" is an easier sell for the average voter than "big government is trying to ruin the internet by protecting children from adult content". We can call it fascism all we like, but at the end of the day, people do seem concerned about children accessing adult content. IMHO YouTube brainrot content farms are a much bigger threat to children than porn, but I'm not a parent.
The final point is perhaps weakened by the ongoing AI debates, where there's suddenly a ton of support for the "we're protecting artists!" arguments employed in 2012. Still, I think the general shape of things is clear: Wikimedia stood in solidarity with many others in 2012, and now stands relatively alone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA
[2] https://www.fightforthefuture.org/
[3] https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-cases
[4] https://www.salehoo.com/learn/digital-ad-spend-by-country
That's my point, though. This is the perfect opportunity to do so, and they aren't doing it. Instead, they are picking the smallest possible battle they can. That decision alone makes waves.
> Certainly Reddit et al have similar general concerns with having to implement ID systems as they did about policing content for IP violations, but the biggest impact will be on minors.
That's ridiculous. ID systems endanger everyone, particularly the adults who participate. This issue isn't isolated from capitalism. These ID systems must be implemented and managed by corporations, whose greatest incentive is to collect and monetize data.
> We can call it fascism all we like, but at the end of the day, people do seem concerned about children accessing adult content.
The think-of-the-children argument is the oldest trick in the book. You are seriously asking me to take it at face value? No thank you.
> More fundamentally, I strongly suspect that "big business is trying to ruin the internet by hoarding their property" is an easier sell for the average voter than "big government is trying to ruin the internet by protecting children from adult content".
If people really are blind to the change that has happened right in front of them, then we should be spelling it out at every opportunity. This is my biggest concern with how Wikimedia is behaving: they are in a significant position politically, and are abdicating this crucial responsibility.
Executive acts, on the other hand, can be annulled or overturned reasonably straightforwardly, and this includes the regulations that flesh out the details of Acts of Parliament (which are executive instruments even when they need Parliamentary approval).
In short, judicial review is a practical remedy for a particular decision. "These regulations may unreasonably burden my speech" is potentially justiciable. "This Act could be used to do grave evil" isn't. If an act can be implemented in a Convention compatible way then the courts will assume it will until shown otherwise.
The consequences can look something like the report of this judgement. Yes, it looks like the regulations could harm Wikipedia in ways that might not be Convention compatible. But because interpretation and enforcement is in the hands of Ofcom, it's not yet clear. If they are, Wikipedia have been (essentially) invited to come back. But the regulations are not void ab inito.
This is the perfect opportunity to do so, and they aren't doing it. Instead, they are picking the smallest possible battle they can.
More recently, they've proposed the "Wikipedia test" to the public and to lawmakers (such as at the 2024 UN General Assembly[6]) that pretty clearly implicates this bill. The test reads as such: Before passing regulations, legislators should ask themselves whether their proposed laws would make it easier or harder for people to read, contribute to, and/or trust a project like Wikipedia.
That's ridiculous. ID systems endanger everyone, particularly the adults who participate.
The think-of-the-children argument is the oldest trick in the book. You are seriously asking me to take it at face value? No thank you.
This is my biggest concern with how Wikimedia is behaving: they are in a significant position politically, and are abdicating this crucial responsibility.
The real nuclear option--blocking the UK from accessing Wikimedia sites--would certainly garner some attention, but it would cost them greatly in terms of good will, energy, and raw output from their (presumably quite significant) UK editor base. And when would it end? If the UK government chooses to ignore them, wouldn't it feel weird for Wikipedia to be blocked for years in the UK but remain accessible in brutal autocracies worldwide?
In the end, this feels like a job for UK voters, not international encyclopedias. I appreciate the solidarity they've shown already, but implying that they are weak for "abdicating [their] crucial responsibility" seems like a step too far.
...IMHO. As a wikimedia glazer ;)
[1] March 2022: https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/early-impressions-of-the...
[2] November 2022: https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/deep-dive-the-united-kin...
[3] May 2023: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/05/11/good-intentions-bad-ef...
[4] June 2023: https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/p...
[5] September 2023: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/09/19/wikimedia-fo...
[6] September 2024 & June 2025: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/06/27/the-wikipedi... // https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/06/27/the-wikipedi...
Aaron Swartz is no longer with us.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Opposition_to_the...
AI chatbots are only capable of outputting “vibe knowledge”.
Under the Misconceptions header
My personal test usage of AI is it will try to bull shit an answer even when you giving known bad questions with content that contradicts each other. Until AI can say there is no answer to bull shit questions it is not truly a viable product because the end user might not know they have a bull shit question and will accept a bull shit answer. AI at it's present state pushed to the masses is just an expensive miss-information bot.
Also, AI that is not open from bottom to top with all training and rules publicly published is just a black box. That black box is just like Volkswagen emissions scandal waiting to happen. AI provider can create rules that override the actual answer with their desired answer which is not only a fallacy. They can also be designed to financially support their own company directly or third party product and services paying them. A question about "diapers" might always push and use the products by "Procter & Gamble".
2) Lots of people like it when a company does an obviously good thing, and dislike it when a company does an obviously bad thing. I guess you’ve made a happy discovery: it turns out the underlying principle was something about what the companies were trying to accomplish, rather than some reflexive “American companies are bad” silliness.
Even if I'd rather have Wikipedia stay put, it does matter to me if they push for something I support as opposed to something that I'm against.
And they also ignored this one a few years back that had just under 700,000 signatures to "make verified ID a requirement for opening a social media account":
https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/575833
Ironically, the primary reason they gave for rejecting it was:
> However, restricting all users’ right to anonymity, by introducing compulsory user verification for social media, could disproportionately impact users who rely on anonymity to protect their identity. These users include young people exploring their gender or sexual identity, whistleblowers, journalists’ sources and victims of abuse. Introducing a new legal requirement, whereby only verified users can access social media, would force these users to disclose their identity and increase a risk of harm to their personal safety.
[0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
As long as websites don't want to lock out any user without an account, and as long as vpns exist, it'll be hard to enforce any of this. At least for now, that's one line big tech won't let them cross easily.
The percentages would change dramatically were one to write it as, "From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring adults to upload their id or a face photo before accessing any website that allows user to user interaction?"
Both questions are factually accurate, but omit crucial aspects.
It's very difficult to oppose a law ostensibly designed to fight CSAM. But once the law passes, it'll be easily expanded to other things like scanning messages to prevent terrorism.
See also:
> Concern over mass migration is terrorist ideology, says Prevent
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/06/concern-over...
Y/N
I can't find the survey it's entirety, but I think the above question was followed by (this is based on the number at the end of the URL, which I'm guessing is quesiton order) - https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
Isn't this the whole story of government policy? The stated policy so rarely actually leads to the hoped-for result.
If they name something the "Protect Children Act". You can be sure that what it does is put Children in Danger.
That means that on the face of it, it is difficult for someone to oppose.
drum roll
Lie whenever it’s convenient because the public are children anyway and won’t or can’t understand.
Through this lens many things make more sense. They’re comfortable with lying because there are zero repercussions for lying.
You cannot trust the YouGov polling. It is flawed.
> Despite the sophisticated methodology, the main drawback faced by YouGov, Ashcroft, and other UK pollsters is their recruitment strategy: pollsters generally recruit potential respondents via self-selected internet panels. The American Association of Public Opinion Research cautions that pollsters should avoid gathering panels like this because they can be unrepresentative of the electorate as a whole. The British Polling Council’s inquiry into the industry’s 2015 failings raised similar concerns. Trying to deal with these sample biases is one of the motivations behind YouGov and Ashcroft’s adoption of the modelling strategies discussed above.
https://theconversation.com/its-sophisticated-but-can-you-be...
Even if the aforementioned problems didn't exist with the polling. It has been known for quite a while that how you ask a question changes the results. The question you linked was the following.
> From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material?
Most people would think "age verification to view pornography". They won't think about all the other things that maybe caught in that net.
Think about how many people are less comfortable with porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40.
The way the very question was asked is a problem in itself. It is flawed and will lead to particular result.
> if they have an especially bad sample, the UK probably really does support the law
The issue is that the public often doesn't understand the scope of the law. Those that do are almost always opposed to it.
> Think about how many people are less comfortable with porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40.
It isn't about the pornography. This is why conversations about this are frustrating.
I am worried about the surveillance aspect of it. I go online because I am pseudo-anonymous and I can speak more frankly to people about things that I care about to people who share similar concerns.
I don't like how the law came into place, the scope of the law, the privacy concerns and what the law does in practice.
Even if you don't buy any of that. There is a whole slew of other issues with it. Especially identity theft.
Are you suggesting that techies do not have any sexual appetite? That runs counter to many stereotypes I've encountered
1) Men.
2) Men age 18-40 in particular.
3) No evidence for this but in my experience tech people tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason.
So a survey of HN users would show more pro-porn respondents than a survey of the UK or the US or EU as a whole.
While that is possible, it doesn't negate the fact I have good reasons to be suspicious of polling organisations such as YouGov.
You have secret reasons to suspect all polling?
If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy.
Fake statistics just to illustrate the difference. Males 18-40 support porn at 60%, which is higher than any other demographic. HN is 60% males 18-40. With these numbers, 36% of HN is males 18-40 who support porn, and if all other demographics on HN oppose it, then those 36% are the minority.
(By the way, I have no idea what the real numbers are, and don't really care. I'm just responding to an evident confusion about what was actually said.)
1. Policy by default will always be planned and implemented by a minority. As well as those who comment to policy, or online.
2. You'll have some 20-30% of people who will say yes to anything if you phrase it the right way.
>do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material?
"may" is doing the heavy lifting. Any website that hosts image "may" contain pornograohic content. So they don't associate this with "I need id to watch YouTube" it's "I need ID to watch pornhub". Even though this affects both.
On top of that, the question was focused on peon to begin with. This block was focused more generally on social media. The popular ones of which do not allow pornography.
Rephrase the question to "do you agree with requiring ID submission to access Facebook" and I'd love to see how that impacts responses.
MPs are elected to Parliament, they get input from their constituents. Bills are debated, revised, voted on multiple times. There are consultations and input from a board range of view points.
A petition is in effect trying to shout over all that process from the street outside.
How do you force your representatives to actually represent their constituents?
They instead propose a bill that will cut jobs
There's deliberation, but a lot of other people want to cut jobs
Is you shouting "hey, that is not what I voted for!" yelling and disrupting process, or calling out the fact that you were lied to and your representative is in fact not representing you?
MPs belong to political parties - consider what happens if an MP's constituents and an MP's party disagree?
They might be allowed to vote against the government, if their vote will have no effect on the bill's passage - but if they actually stop the bill's passage? They're kicked out of the party, which will make the next election extremely difficult for them.
MPs are elected for reasonably long terms - and that means they regularly do things that weren't in their party manifesto. Nobody running for election in 2024 had a manifesto policy about 2025's strikes on Iran, after all!
That flexibility means they can simply omit the unpopular policies during the election campaign. A party could run an election campaign saying they're going to introduce a national ID card, give everyone who drinks alcohol a hard time, cut benefits, raise taxes, raise university tuition, fail to deliver on any major infrastructure projects, have doctors go on strike, and so on.
Or they can simply not put those things in their manifesto, then do them anyway. It's 100% legal, the system doing what it does.
We shouldn't have to hide behind our more vulnerable peers in order to have reasonable rights for online free speech and unfettered anonymous communication. It is a weak argument made by weak people who aren't brave enough to simply say, "F** you, stop spying on everyone, you haven't solved anything with the powers you have and there's no reason to believe it improves by shoving us all into a panopticon".
Totalitarian neoliberalism sucks; your protest petition with six million signatures is filed as a Jira ticket and closed as WONTFIX, you can't get anyone on the phone to complain at, everyone in power is disposable and replaceable with another stooge who will do the same thing as their predecessor. Go ahead and march in the streets, the government and media will just declare your protest invalid and make the other half of the population hate you on demand.
And who would they need to hide from?
Oh you're that anti-games, anti-porn guy, best to ignore anything you say.
I wonder what happens if they simply don't comply. Will the UK at any point ask ISPs to ban Wikipedia?
Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
I'm quite critical of the implementation of this legislation but the idea of an American company throwing their weight around trying to influence policy decisions in the UK gives me the ick.
Fair enough if the regulations mean they just don't want to do business there but please don't block access to try and strong arm the elected government of another nation.
Also, no-one asked for this bill, both parties support it, it received basically no debate or scrutiny and was presented as a fait accompli. Where's the democracy exactly?
Oh yeah, they left that.
Well, the OSA was put into law by the Tories in 2023. The democratic decision of the UK was that they resoundingly rejected what the Tories were doing in the landslide win for Labour in the 2024 GE. I'd quite like UKGOV to respect the democratic decisions of the country and if they won't, I'm quite happy for other people to push back via the courts, public opinion, etc.
The current government is more than able to use their democratic mandate to appeal or change the law.
Tell that to the US please.
>The current government is more than able to use their democratic mandate to appeal or change the law. °
Yes, but they probably a won't without a lot of push back. Here's the push back
But you already knew that.
Blocking, making it clear why your blocking and that you will continue to block until it changes is respecting the decision.
If the UK effectively bans public wikis above a certain size (even if by accident), then it is the law of the land that Wikipedia is banned. Or at least the english wikipedia, which is indeed very large. And if it is banned, then it must block access for the uk, under those conditions. Depending on the exact rules, possibly the uk could make do with the Swahili wikipedia?
That said, the problem here is that it is a public wiki of a certain size. One option might be for Wikipedia to implement quotas for the UK, so that they don't fall under category 1 rules.
Another option would be to talk with Ofcon and get things sorted that way.
It is fair to say it's not a business, but essentially there's no difference to my feeling that private entities from other countries shouldn't be throwing their weight around in local democracy.
Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the letter of the law? If so why is there a question of it continuing to operate there?
Wikipedias are not merely localized versions of each other, they're truly independent.
If you happen to know two languages and want to quickly rack up edits (if that's your sport), arbitraging knowledge between two Wikipedias is one way to go.
Wikipedia is not throwing their weight around. They are merely pointing out that the law happens to make their operating model illegal, and surely that can't be the intent. If they are illegal, they cannot operate. Is "very well, we disagree, but if you truly insist, we shall obey the law and leave" throwing your weight around?
And yes, I get the impression that the UK's letter of the law could lead to a categorization with rules that (a) Wikipedia simply cannot comply with, and still be a Wikipedia. So in that case Wikipedia would be effectively banned.
But we're not there yet. Hence the use of proper legal channels, including this court case. Ofcom is expected to make their first categorizations this summer, so this is timely.
But that said I want to be clear that I have no issue with the Foundation's current actions or position in the court system. I was responding only very specifically to the suggestion above that they "should" block Wikipedia access immediately in order to force the hand off the British government.
>respect the democratic decisions
Let the peope have a say in the going ons instead of lying to get elected, and maybe we can call it democratic again.
Blocking is respecting the law!
They do that by staying out of such countries. Many US companies don't want to work with EU GDPR and just block all european IPs, wikipedia has full right to leave UK. They are under no obligations to provide service to them in the same was as pornhub is under no obligation to provide services in eg. a country that would require them to disclose IP addresses of all viewers of gay porn, etc.
Saying that it was a democratic decision without people actually being asked if they want that (referendum) is just weaseling out instead of directly pointing out that it's a bad policy that very few brits actually wanted. Somehow no one uses the same words when eg. trump does something (tarifs, defunding, etc.), no one is talking about democratic decisions of americans then.
Wikipedia has the full right to say "nope, we're not playing that game" and pulling out, even if an actual majority of brits want that.
In general, I think we need a shift in society to say "yea, screw those kids". We don't put 20km/h limits everywhere because there's a non-zero chance that we might kill a kid. Its the cost of doing business.
Having privacy MEANS that it is difficult to catch bad people. That is just the price. Just swallow it and live with it.
Basically, DENIED, DENIED, DENIED. Ofcom can keep the loaded gun pointed in Wikipedia's face, forever, and make as many threats as it likes. Only if it pulls the trigger does Wikipedia have a case.
Wikipedia should voluntarily remove itself from the UK entirely. No visitors, no editors.
Ofcom haven't ruled Wikipedia is Category 1. They haven't announced the intention to rule it Category 1. The Category 1 rules are not yet in effect and aren't even finalised. They aren't pointing any gun.
Wikipedia have a case that they shouldn't be Category 1 if that happens. But they went fishing in advance (or to use an alternative metaphor, they got out over their skis).
What else is the court to do but give a reassurance that the process will absolutely be amenable to review if the hypothetical circumstance comes to pass? That is what the section you are quoted says.
First, it's a statutory instrument that ministers will amend if it has unintended, severe consequences.
Second, the rules in question have not been written yet and they are being written in conjunction with industry (which will include Wikipedia). Because Ofcom is an industry self-regulation body.
I remember an example where the UK Government decided it's OK to rip CDs you own (no, really, it wasn't legal until then), and codified that in law. The parasites that run the UK Music trade organisation appealed and found that the UK had not sufficiently consulted them before deciding to make the law.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933
So - ripping is completely illegal in the UK. Always has been, always will be. Never rip a CD, not even once. Keep paying all your fucking money to the UK Music member corporations and never think you own anything, not even once.
But it illustrates that the UK's law-making is subject to judicial review, and government cannot make laws or regulations without consulting those affected by them how much of a hardship it constitutes to them. The judge here is merely saying we haven't seen the harm yet, and Ofcom can keep threatening indefinitely to cause harm, Wikipedia only have a case when they do cause harm. By contrast, passing the law making CD ripping legal, UK Music argued, using an absolute load of bollocks they made up, that it immediately caused them harm.
This is at best disingenuous.
There is no general requirement on government to consult. It is often referred to in various Acts, which are binding. There is a common law expectation that if the government has made a clear promise to consult that they have to.
But since the Glorious Revolution, parliament has proved to be supreme. It may have to be explicit in the laws it passes, but it can literally overrule itself as needed. Pesky EU human rights legislation is just a mere vote away from being destroyed.
This is misleading. Actual primary legislation isn't subject to judicial review. The only exception to that is a Judge can declare legislation incompatible with the ECHR - but even then that doesn't actually nullify the law, it only tells the government/parliament they need to fix it.
The bit that is subject to review is _secondary_ legislation, which is more of an executive action than lawmaking. It's mostly a historical quirk that statutory instruments count as legislation in the UK.
It is what in the UK gets called a Quango. A quasi-non-government-organisation.
It is not a government body. It is not under direct ministerial control.
It gets some funds from government (but mostly through fees levied on industry):
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c8eec40f0b...
But it operates within industry as the industry's regulator, and its approach has always been to operate that way (just as the other Of- quangos do).
Here is what appears to be their own take on it.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/cons...
This seems pretty consistent with what I said -- it is essentially a self-regulation body, promoting self-regulation but backed by statutory powers/penalties.
Now what else is untrue?
ETA: rate-limited so I am not able to properly respond to the below. Bye for now.
Ofcom was created by the UK government for the sole purpose of enforcing laws passed by the UK government [and sometimes interpreting those laws]. It acts on behalf of the State at all times, and is not empowered to do otherwise under any circumstances EVER.
You appear to be confused about what being a "quango" actually means in this case. "Quasi-NGO" means that while it appears to be a non-governmental organisation, it is not one. Ofcom's at arm's length because the majority of its daily legal obligations are closer to judicial than administrative, and it is UK custom (rightly) to not put judicial functions inside government departments.
Ofcom, Gambling Commission, and the rest of the quangos are independent statutory bodies, and (this is a big distinction!) their employees are not civil servants.
Quangos include judicial tribunals and places like the BBC, or the Committee on Climate Change- it is a broad umbrella.
No, it should remove servers, employees and legal presence from the UK. It's not their job to block UK people from accessing it just because the UK regime want them to. Let the regime censors actually put an effort to block them. Let them make a Great Firewall of the UK, why make it easy for them?
Backlash but positive backlash.
I’m seeing that playing out with a Russian Wikipedia (forked as Ruwiki and heavily edited to be in line with Kremlin propaganda), and I don’t like it one bit. There’s not much you can do as it’s free/open content, but it still sucks.
- Increases barrier to entry for smaller competitors
- Reliable user data (age, race, who knows what else) derived from video age verification
Anecdote:
My mom recently visited Spain. The process of buying a local SIM card was as follows:
• Show your US passport at a major local cellular provider’s store (Movistar) to have its number associated with the SIM.
• During SIM activation, open a browser page that accesses the phone’s camera.
• Scan the first page of your passport.
• Point the selfie camera at your face, then close your eyes and smile when prompted.
I was about to ask about this, but then I realized it must so that you can't just point it at a photo of someone.
Which law are you talking about by the way?
I was mostly familiar with laws that required porn companies to verify their user's age. That is a lot more targeted and less offensive than UK Online Safety Act Regulations IMO. I mean it's already illegal to distribute porn to minors - that's just requiring them to enforce it at the expense of porn watcher's anonymity. Whereas the UK Online Safety Act is more like a backdoor for content moderation across the internet.
It should close itself before elections to burn the politicians that try to screw it.
Not that it's unthinkable or anything, but my impression is that people are not quite aware that it ain't free.
It allready collects few hubdred million per year, spends like 10 on wikipedia itself and rest goes for political projects. They could do something useful for once.
(On a side note: all those money and they dont use it to track the cliques / country level actors across admins...)
I do believe the social factors leading to support for these bans are quite a bit different, but the core minds behind them are of the same creed.
> When there is No Internet, there is Kiwix Access vital information anywhere. Use our apps for offline reading on the go or the Hotspot in every place you want to call home. Ideal for remote areas, emergencies, or independent knowledge access.
Post reads: "Periodic reminder that Wikipedia has a squillion times more money than they need to operate the actual website, and all marginal donations go to the fake paper-shuffling NGO that attached itself to the organization for the purpose of feeding on donations from rubes."
Quoted post reads: "I have no interest in giving Wikipedia money to blow on fake jobs for ovecredentialed paper-pushers, but if the banner said “Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia and he’d like to buy a yacht” then I’d pull out my wallet immediately."
Long-time WP contributor and apologist here. I still think Wikipedia does more good than bad (for all its sins), is the greatest collaborative human work of our time, and there is some merit to the idea of having a giant pile of money to be able to fight government-scale battles like this one. But the story of the bureaucrats settling in and leeching donations at scale is basically accurate.
They have surely ignored demands to censor Wikipedia in more authoritarian countries. What makes the UK different? Extradition treaties? Do they even apply here?
I have the same confusion about Signal's willingness to leave Europe if chat control is imposed[1], while still providing anti-censorship tools for countries like Iran and China. What makes the European laws they're unwilling to respect different from the Iranian laws they're unwilling to respect?
The worst thing is, people will vote out the labour government, and the tory bastards (who will say they are 'the party of freedom) will tell the country "Well, it wasnt us".
- Employees become accountable for their company's actions - Wikimedia could be blocked - Other kinds of sanctions (e.g. financial ones) could be levied somehow
In practice what will likely happen is Wikimedia will comply: either by blocking the UK entirely, making adjustments to be compliant with UK legislation (e.g. by making their sites read-only for UK-users - probably the most extreme outcome that's likely to occur), or the as-yet unannounced Ofcom regulations they've preemptively appealed actually won't apply to Wikimedia anyway (or will be very light touch).
The UK has the authority to arrest them (anyone who owns a website) if they ever set foot in the UK if they feel they either haven't censored it adequately enough or refuse to do so.
It's one of the reasons why Civitai geoblocked the country.
Not only people in their 30s, but it's who I see making a fuss about it. Presumably because they are now parents of children newly reaching this age.
They are completely ignoring that they are entering a debate that's been going on for longer than they have been alive, and are just arguing from a source of "common sense" gut feelings. They are literally a third of a century behind on this issue, but it doesn't stop them talking about it.
They are incompetent on this issue (nothing bad about that. I'm incompetent in most things), but they are also stupid because they don't let that incompetence stop them.
They are too incompetent to understand that they just did the equivalent of entering a room full of mathematicians with a collective thousands of years of math knowledge, and saying "how about just making 2+2=5? You could make 2+2=4, so you smart people should be able to do it". How do you even start with someone this ignorant? They don't even understand what math is.
"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" — "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
In fact you've picked probably the least offensive, which is not to say uncontroversial, part of the law to argue with. Its illegal to distribute porn to minors just like its illegal to let underage people gamble on your poker app.
Yet people in factor of age verification laws for porn still have concerns with this because it's just a totally open-ended backdoor into content moderation across the internet.
FYI, Wikimedia Foundation just wants a carve out/exception to be able to opt out of category 1 duties.
To be clear I totally agree with you. But they are playing a game.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/wikipe...
Large user-to-user services, known as Category 1 services, will be required to offer adult users tools which, if they choose to use, will give them greater control over the kinds of content they see and who they engage with online.
Adult users of such services will be able to verify their identity and access tools which enable them to reduce the likelihood that they see content from non-verified users and prevent non-verified users from interacting with their content. This will help stop anonymous trolls from contacting them.
Following the publication of guidance by Ofcom, Category 1 services will also need to proactively offer adult users optional tools, at the first opportunity, to help them reduce the likelihood that they will encounter certain types of legal content. These categories of content are set out in the Act and include content that does not meet a criminal threshold but encourages, promotes or provides instructions for suicide, self-harm or eating disorders. These tools also apply to abusive or hate content including where such content is racist, antisemitic, homophobic, or misogynist. The tools must be effective and easy to access. [1]
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...
This is the sort of regulatory compliance that has stifled European businesses for decades. Useless overhead.
Unfortunately, the Internet world we live in today isn't the one I grew up in, so I'm sure things will just go according to plan. Apparently a majority of Britons polled support these rules, even though a (smaller) majority of Britons also believe they are ineffective at their goals[1]. I think that really says a lot about what people really want here, and it would be hard to believe anyone without a serious dent in their head really though this had anything at all to do with protecting children. People will do literally anything to protect children, so as long as it only inconveniences and infringes on the rights of the rest of society. They don't even have to believe it will work.
And so maybe we will finally burn the house to roast the pig.
[1]: https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
They have enough touch points with the UK that complying not complying with UK law could cause significant problem.
Having said that, if Wikipedia geo blocked the UK it would send a powerful message to everyone living here.
So maybe yes, but maybe no, depending on how things pan out in subsequent rulings?
Some of us prefer civilization, though.
Primarily it was drafted and lobbied for by William Perrin OBE and Prof Lorna Woods at Carnegie UK[1], billed as an “independent foundation”.
William Perrin is also the founder of Ofcom. So he’s been using the foundation’s money to lobby for the expansion of his unelected quango.
It has also been suggested that one of the largest beneficiaries of this law, an age verification company called Yoti, also has financial ties to Carnegie UK.
It’s difficult to verify that because Yoti is privately held and its backers are secret.
It’s not as if anyone was surprised that teenagers can get round age blocks in seconds so there’s something going on and it stinks.
I would like to see much more thorough journalism on the origin of these laws
> Definition of content recommender systems: Having any “algorithm” on the site that “affects” what content someone might “encounter”, is seemingly enough to qualify popular websites for Category 1. As written, this could even cover tools that are used to combat harmful content. We, and many other stakeholders, have failed to convince UK rulemakers to clarify that features that help keep services free of bad content — like the New Pages Feed used by Wikipedia article reviewers—should not trigger Category 1 status. Other rarely-used features, like Wikipedia’s Translation Recommendations, are also at risk.
> Content forwarding or sharing functionality: If a popular app or website also has content “forwarding or sharing” features, its chances of ending up in Category 1 are dramatically increased. The Regulations fail to define what they mean by “forwarding or sharing functionality”: features on Wikipedia (like the one allowing users to choose Wikipedia’s daily “Featured Picture”) could be caught.
they would at least want to block the UK from accessing it first?
Everybody including the judges seem to agree this is dumb but it's the current law.
(I am a UK citizen).
1) private - anonymous (don't know who is requesting access) and unlinkable (don't know if the same user makes repeated requests or is the same user on other services).
2) widely available and extremely easy to register and integrate.
The current situation is that it's not easy, or private, or cheap to integrate. And the measures they say they will accept are trivially easy to bypass - so what's the point?
I worked in a startup that satisfied point 1 back in 2015. The widely available bit didn't come off though when we ran out of runway.
It's anonymous to the sites or companies you use it with and not to the government, but that would still be more robust than the uks checks so far. it's only end of 26 though, I thought it was at the end of this year instead.
They see a general need which the market cannot easily satisfy on its own - it needs standardisation to be cheap and interoperable, and it needs an identity backed by a trusted authority. So they establish a framework and legislation to make that possible.
The UK instead just states it's illegal not to do it, but without any private and not-trivially bypassed services available.
Proactive vs reactive.
It is often said that legislation tends to lag behind technology. At last, the UK is beating the world by legislating ahead of it!
This whole concept runs into similar issues as digital voting systems. You don't need to just be anonymous, but it must be verifiably and obviously so — even to a lay person (read your grandma with dementia who has never touched a computer in her life). It must be impossible to make changes to the system that remove these properties without users immediately notice.
The only reason why paper identification has close to anonymous properties is the fallibility of human memory. You won't make a computer with those properties.
Voting is very different - you do need to be able to demonstrate the fairness of the process verifiably to everyone - not just crypto nerds. Age verification - well, some people might get around it, but if it generally seems to work that is good enough.
Read business books and news from the 80's - 90's, and they almost never mention China - it's all Germany, UK, Japan, USA. The stats tell the same story - China spent half a century going nowhere fast.
After liberalizing their economy, China spent the 90's quietly growing, and only started making real waves in the news around 2000.
All this to say that economic authoritarianism has never worked and there's no reason to suppose that the social kind is going to fare any better for anyone either.
No, if Wikipedia falls under it anything meaningful does. You have once again failed to understand the internet.
Wikipedia is a product of the free internet. It is a product of a world that many politicians still don't understand. But those politicians still make laws that do not make sense, because they believe that something has to be done against those information crimes. And they also do it to score brownie points with their conservative voting base.
The internet has it's problems, no doubt about that. But what these laws do is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Actually, the water probably stays in, because it's not like those laws solve anything.
So, yes, I believe they both want tracking to exist, because they both benefit massively from it.
Sad thing is people ignore a politician's actions and keep applying Yes or No to their marketing statements. They use social engineering wording just to get votes and then they will ignore that standing to support their own action of legislation crafting and voting.
By block and limiting access to information, such as Wikipedia, they are advocating for a dumb populous. Irony is that in order to have a strong national security, an educated populous is needed. They are the ones see beyond the easily deployed social engineering tactics and are better at filtering out misinformation.
Care to remind me what side of the political spectrum was desperately trying to silence all health-related discourse that did not match the government's agenda just a few years ago?
But the top articles are always perma-locked and under curation. Considering how much traffic those articles receive relative to the more esoteric articles, the surface area of vandalizable articles that a user is exposed to is relatively low. Also to that end, vandalism has a low effort-to-impact ratio.
Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some.
> In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its contributors, undermining their privacy and safety.
Some of the articles, which contain factual information, are damning for the UK government. It lists, for example, political scandals [1] [2]. Or information regarding hot topics such as immigration [3], information that the UK government want to strictly control (abstracting away from whether this is rightfully or wrongfully).
I can tell you what will (and has already) happened as a result:
1. People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid restrictions placed on them.
2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win.
3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_in_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Labour_Party_(UK)_sca...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_Unit...
I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government (which, by the way, there is still a non zero chance could be Labour) will necessarily reverse this. Maybe Reform would tweak the topics, but I’m not convinced any party can be totally trusted to reverse this.
It may not make sense to you, but they've been arguing constitutional law there for hundreds of years.
Plenty of monarchies also have modern single-document constitutions, like Norway, Spain and Thailand.
Indeed, the founding fathers of the US identified political parties as a threat to their republic.
Maybe in Britain. Parties were definitely a thing going back to Roman politics.
> The United Kingdom constitution is composed of the laws and rules that create the institutions of the state, regulate the relationships between those institutions, or regulate the relationship between the state and the individual. These laws and rules are not codified in a single, written document.
Source for that quote is parliamentary: https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-com... - a publication from 2015 which considered and proposed a written constitution. But other definitions include unwritten things like customs and conventions. For example:
> It is often noted that the UK does not have a ‘written’ or ‘codified’ constitution. It is true that most countries have a document with special legal status that contains some of the key features of their constitution. This text is usually upheld by the courts and cannot be changed except through an especially demanding process. The UK, however, does not possess a single constitutional document of this nature. Nevertheless, it does have a constitution. The UK’s constitution is spread across a number of places. This dispersal can make it more difficult to identify and understand. It is found in places including some specific Acts of Parliament; particular understandings of how the system should operate (known as constitutional conventions); and various decisions made by judges that help determine how the system works.
https://consoc.org.uk/the-constitution-explained/the-uk-cons...
The thieves no longer have to hack servers in order to obtain sensitive data, they can just set up an age-check company and lure businesses with attractive fees.
In that sense it is safer (for criminals).
It would be an extraordinary amount of work for a government that can barely keep up with the fires of its own making let alone the many the world is imposing upon them. Along with that, watching the horse trading going on over every change they make - I don't see how they ever get a meaningful final text over the line.
It's not a mainstream political priority at all to my knowledge, so I'm mostly curious why you disagree!
1. “You may be interested in…” search suggestions on the Wikipedia interface—these are algorithmic, content-based recommendations.
2. Editor suggestion tools that propose pages to edit, based on prior activity. Academic systems helping newcomers with article recommendations also qualify.
Most links within articles—like “See also” sections or hyperlinks—are static and curated by editors, not algorithmically chosen per user. That means they do not meet the recommender system definition.
The legislation text for reference:
"Category 1 threshold conditions 3.—(1) The Category 1 threshold conditions(10) are met by a regulated user-to-user service where, in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, it—
(a)(i)has an average number of monthly active United Kingdom users that exceeds 34 million, and
(ii)uses a content recommender system, or
(b)(i)has an average number of monthly active United Kingdom users that exceeds 7 million,
(ii)uses a content recommender system, and
(iii)provides a functionality for users to forward or share regulated user-generated content(11) on the service with other users of that service.
(2) In paragraph (1), a “content recommender system” means a system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user service in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, that uses algorithms which by means of machine learning or other techniques determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other content, may be encountered by other users of the service. "
perihelions•7h ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44721403 ("Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations (wikimediafoundation.org)"—189 comments)
beejiu•7h ago
exasperaited•7h ago
Seems pretty logical.
Again I think people outside of the UK perceive Ofcom to be a censor with a ban hammer. It's an industry self-regulation authority -- backed by penalties, yes, but it favours self-regulation. And the implementation is a modifiable statutory instrument specifically so that issues like this can be addressed.
In a perfect world would this all be handled with parental oversight and on-device controls? Yeah, maybe. But on-device parental controls are such a total mess, and devices available so readily, that UK PAYG mobile phone companies have already felt compelled (before the law changed) to block adult content by default.
ETA: I am rate-limited so I will just add that I am in the UK too. Not that this is relevant to the discussion. There is no serious UK consensus for overturning this law; the only party that claims that as a position does not even have the support of the majority of its members. I do not observe this law to be censorship, because as an adult I can see what I want to see, I just have to prove I am an adult. Which is how it used to work with top shelf magazines (so I am told! ;-) )
I suppose it's not really the done thing to say this, but if you disagree with me, say something, don't just downvote.
vidarh•6h ago
The issue here is not parental oversight. It's the massively overly broad assault on speech.
The UK PAYG block is a good example of a solution that would have had far less severe impact if extended.
piltdownman•6h ago
The problem with 'child safety' in the UK has almost nothing to do with pornographers or 'toxic' influences as viewed through the lense of neo-Victorian morality anyway.
Instead, it is a societal powderkeg of gang indoctrination and social deprivation leading to a culture of drug-dealing, violent robberies, and postcode gang intimidation. This bill is simply a cheap and easily supported deflection from the dereliction of duty of successive governments towards the youth of the country since Blair.
In short, it is nothing but an electoral panacea for the incumbent intolerant conservative voting base; moral-hysteria disguised as a child safety measure.
This is inherently obvious when you assess the new vocabulary of persecution and otherness - detailing 'ASBO Youth', 'Chavs', 'NEETs and NEDs' and their inevitable progression to 'Roadmen'.
The Netflix series 'Top Boy' is the Sopranos equivalent of how this culture operates and how children are indoctrinated into a life of diminished expectations in a way that is often inescapable given their environment and cultural norms around their upbringing.
Even with this plethora of evidence and cultural consciousness, the powers that be are smugly insistent that removing PornHub is more important than introducing Social Hubs and amenities - and those that argue otherwise are derided as 'Saville's in the new parlance.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/online-saf...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgery3eeqzxo
nemomarx•6h ago
the UK strategy on kids is very very strange to me. I can't follow the logic at all. Do they expect them to silently sit at home, not using the Internet, not going anywhere with friends, and end up well adjusted adults anyway?
piltdownman•5h ago
If teenagers Felicity or Joshua need to purchase a knife, or access questionable internet content, it'll be an assumed part of their privilege that they'll be able to do so. Similarly they are unimpacted by anti-social behaviour orders or restrictions on their entitlement to exist in public spaces unmolested, as this is the demographic insulated by their memberships to 3rd spaces such as Social and Sporting clubs - a fry cry from their lower-class urban peers resigned to hanging around the Tesco carpark.
stephen_g•6h ago
For a lot of sites, the safe response has just been cautious over-blocking as far as I can see (or smaller UK-based services just shutting down) but you can imagine why Wikipedia don’t want to do that.
But you’re right that encouraging much better parental controls would have been better than passing this bad law - I’ll give you that one.
amenhotep•5h ago
gnfargbl•5h ago
So, is Wikipedia really a Category 1 service? From https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2025/9780348267174, it seems to come down to whether Wikipedia is a site which uses a "content recommender system", where that term is defined as:
> a system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user service in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, that uses algorithms which by means of machine learning or other techniques determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other content, may be encountered by other users of the service
There's plenty of flexibility in that definition for Ofcom to interpret "content recommender system" in a way that catches Facebook without catching Wikipedia. For instance, Ofcom could simply take the viewpoint that any content recommendation that Wikipedia engages in is not "in respect of the user-to-user part of that service."
After today's judgement, and perhaps even before, my own bet is that this is exactly the route Ofcom will take.