Online Safety Act Storm Cloud Approaching Rapidly
owl writes:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/12/storm-cloud-approaching-rapidl.html
This, from Techcrunch, seems like a good summary of a bad situation facing this blog: Death Of A Forum: How The UK's Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities.
This blog is just that: my personal blog, with comments.
Over the past two decades a lively community has evolved in the discussion threads. However, the Online Safety Act threatens to impose impossible hurdles on the continuation of open fora in the UK. The intent is officially to protect adults and children from illegal content, but ... there's no lower threshold on scale. A blog with comments is subject to exactly as much regulatory oversight as Facebook. It applies to all fora that enable people in the UK (that would be me) to communicate with other people in the UK (that's a whole bunch of you), so I can't avoid the restrictions by moving to a hosting provider in the US. Nor am I terribly keen on filing the huge amounts of paperwork necessary to identify myself as the Trust and Safety officer of an organization and arrange for commercial age verification services (that I can't in any event integrate with this ancient blogging platform). And the penalties for infractions are the same-fines of up to 18M (which is a gigantic multiple of my gross worth).
From the techdirt article:
We've been warning for years that the UK's Online Safety Act would be a disaster for the open internet. Its supporters accused us of exaggerating, or "shilling" for Big Tech. But as we've long argued, while tech giants like Facebook and Google might be able to shoulder the law's immense regulatory burdens, smaller sites would crumble.
Well, it's already happening.
On Monday, the London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed (LFGSS) online forum announced that it would be shutting down the day before the Online Safety Act goes into effect. It noted that it is effectively impossible to comply with the law. This was in response to UK regulator Ofcom telling online businesses that they need to start complying.
This includes registering a "senior person" with Ofcom who will be held accountable should Ofcom decide your site isn't safe enough. It also means that moderation teams need to be fully staffed with quick response times if bad (loosely defined) content is found on the site. On top of that, sites need to take proactive measures to protect children.
While all of this may make sense for larger sites, it's impossible for a small one-person passion project forum for bikers in London. For a small, community-driven forum, these requirements are not just burdensome, but existential.
[...] This is why we've spent years warning people. When you regulate the internet as if it's all just Facebook, all that will be left is Facebook.
[...] The promise of the internet was supposed to be that it allowed anyone to set up whatever they wanted online, whether it's a blog or a small forum. The UK has decided that the only forums that should remain online are those run by the largest companies in the world.
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