You may or may not know, there is a porn site called xhamster - I have literally no idea why it is called that.
Yet, it is reported a forum for people with pet hamsters has shut down, along with hundreds of other sites and forums run by volunteers and individuals, because of the risk of fines and cost of compliance with this crazy new law.
OFCOM reportedly consider the costs of compliance for small sites “are likely to be negligible or in the small thousands at most”. Even without the risk of a fine of up to £18,000,000.00, the costs of "small thousands" of pounds, which OFCOM considers negligible, is more than a small volunteer site can bear, understandably. We are not talking businesses with income and a budget for legal fees here!
What is especially frustrating is the unknown - I don't know if this blog is in scope, and if so whether google or I personally am at risk of a fine. Worse - actual lawyers don't know either. I don't know if my GitHub repositories are in scope, and if so whether GitHub or I am liable. I don't know if my single user mastodon instance is in scope, etc... OFCOM have even admitted that they have no definition of "email" (one of the exceptions - yes you, or kids, can be on a porn email mailing list with no restrictions under this law). I have, again, written to my MP asking these questions.
A fun one, I do not know: If my blog is in scope as it has user generated content (comments), if I stop publishing comments (i.e. they get emailed to me, which is out of scope, and maybe I paraphrase and reply by an edit on the blog post) does that make it out of scope, or do I have to delete the user comments from before the new law came in to force as well?
Think of the Children, indeed, but making millions of individuals with small sites comply, at a cost of thousands of pounds each, is just crazy, especially when the law is not even doing what it aimed to in the first place.
By the way, my personal view on porn is that we need better education for children on the nature of porn as entertainment, and how actual relationships are not the same - after all we allow crazy violence in TV films and shows as entertainment, which people know is not "real" (even for <18 rated films where someone blows ups the planet, etc), but have a hang up over porn for some reason. At the end of the day nothing will stop a teenager with hormones from seeing porn, so let's accept that and educate to make that safer for society. But that is just my view. You may disagree, which is fine.
“There is a simple solution – the Secretary of State can exempt small, safe websites from onerous Online Safety duties, and protect plurality online.”. In practice this could be suitably worded so that small sites (by some measurable metric), and non business sites, etc, only need to comply if explicitly notified by OFCOM. This would mean no loophole for small sites that are actually porn sites, but provide the reassurance for those with pet hamsters to be able to continue their forum.
Unfortunately we've long passed the era in which "small volunteer sites" is a concept that politicians or OFCOMnadzor pretend to care about. Their idea of a "small site" is probably Rumble or Truth Social, which they can't wait to censor or block.
ReplyDeleteAs far as lawmakers are concerned, the internet is just a glorified shopping channel and cable TV service, in which you pay Virgin Media to provide access to Google, Amazon and Netflix. Big companies engaging with other big companies to serve government-approved content to helpless plebs whose only role is to passively consume (then maybe express their polite appreciation in a carefully-moderated online chat).
That's why freedom of speech is always ignored when passing new laws like the Online Safety Act. It's not that the politicians are against the principle of free speech, they just don't see it as being relevant to the internet. If the oiks want free speech they can write a letter to the local paper; the internet is just another broadcast medium run by mega-corporations, who should be regulated like ITV and Channel 4.