Comment by alwa
7 months ago
The hacker in me is real grumpy about all this, and believes that they’re nannying a whole lot of the dumb superficial stuff while pushing serious malfeasance underground.
But they make a good point: if you exclude the smaller providers, that’s where the drugs and CSAM and the freewheeling dialog go. Assuming it’s their policy goal to deter these categories of speech, I’m not sure how you do that without a net fine enough to scoop up the 4chans of the world too.
It’s not the behavior of a confident, open, healthy society, though…
> if you exclude the smaller providers, that’s where the drugs and CSAM and the freewheeling dialog go.
- Bad actors go everywhere now.
- £18 million fines seem like a fairly unhinged cannon to aim at small webistes.
- A baseless accusation is enough to trigger a risk of life-changing fines. Bad actors don't just sell drugs and freewheel; they also falsely accuse.
18m maximum fine.
As a quick cheatsheet, laws targeting CSAM are always just tools to go after other things.
CSAM is absolutely horrible.. but CSAM laws don't stop CSAM (primarily this happens from group defections).
Instead it's just a form of tarring, in this case unliked speech, by associating it with the most horrible thing anyone can think of.
The cure is worse than the disease.