Comment by schappim
7 months ago
We have something similar in Australia with the Online Safety Act 2021. I think this highlights a critical misunderstanding at the heart of the legislation: it imagines the internet as a handful of giant platforms rather than a rich tapestry of independent, community-driven spaces. The Online Safety Act’s broad, vague requirements and potential penalties are trivial hurdles for billion-dollar companies with in-house legal teams, compliance departments, and automatic moderation tooling. But for a single individual running a forum as a labour of love—or a small collective operating on volunteer time—this creates a legal minefield where any disgruntled user can threaten real financial and personal harm.
In practice, this means the local cycling forum that fostered trust, friendship, and even mental health support is at risk of vanishing, while the megacorps sail on without a scratch. Ironically, a measure allegedly designed to rein in “Big Tech” ends up discouraging small, independent communities and pushing users toward the same large platforms the legislation was supposedly targeting.
It’s discouraging to watch governments double down on complex, top-down solutions that ignore the cultural and social value of these smaller spaces. We need policy that recognises genuine community-led forums as a public good, encourages sustainable moderation practices, and holds bad actors accountable without strangling the grassroots projects that make the internet more human. Instead, this act risks hollowing out our online diversity, leaving behind a more homogenised, corporate-dominated landscape.
> We have something similar in Australia with the Online Safety Act 2021.
That wasn't the one I was thinking of, to be honest.
I'd have thought you would be mentioning the latest ball of WTF: "Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024".
According to the bill, HN needs to identify all Australian users to prevent under-16's from using it.
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...
That bill is an amendment to the aforementioned act.
But yes, I'm confused as to whether it applies to online gaming, or sites such as wikipedia as well
> I'm confused as to whether it applies to online gaming
As written, it should. Which is ridiculous, and it's a ridiculous law in the first place. I'm loathe to discuss politics, but by god both Labor and the LNP are woeful when it comes to tech policy.
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> it imagines the internet as a handful of giant platforms rather than a rich tapestry of independent, community-driven spaces.
As sad as it may be, their imagination is correct. The small spaces, summed up all together, are lost in the rounding errors.
Also nobody is going after the small spaces, because they don't even know they exist. And when they do they can be shut down I guess, if there really is misunderstanding. I don't get preemptively doing it other than giving up after a long duty of almost 30 years and using this as excuse. At least pass them to someone else that won't care about the liability.
Shut down and fined up to £18m.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
So, I fully understand why someone would rather shut down their site rather than potentially deal with the legal fallout. Even if the end result is "just getting shut down", that will come after a significant amount of legal troubles, and likely money spent dealing with them.
> when they do they can be shut down I guess, if there really is misunderstanding.
The fear some have is not misunderstandings, but disgruntled types (the sort of people who blow up over a perfectly reasonable moderation decision) and common garden variety griefers reporting things to cause inconvenience. I know people who have in the past run forums and had to put up with spurious reports to their ISP/host or even on one occasion local law enforcement. If someone did this it would likely go nowhere in the end but not before causing much stress and perhaps cost via paying for legal advice.
> I don't get preemptively doing it other than giving up after a long duty of almost 30 years and using this as excuse.
Having been involved less directly with that sort of admin & moderation work I can see this change being the final straw after putting up with the people of the internet for years. Calling it “just an excuse” seems rather harsh.
> At least pass them to someone else that won't care about the liability.
Depending on the terms people agreed to when signing up and posting, passing on the reigns might not be nearly as legally/morally clear-cut as several in these comments are assuming.
Some poeple just don't like to be illegal.
You're assuming the point of these laws is what they say on the tin and the people writing these laws are ignorant. A huge amount of legislation is written by think tanks and lobbyists.
Authoritarians don't want people to be able to talk (and organize) in private. What better way to discourage them than some "think of the children" nonsense? That's how they attacked (repeatedly) encryption.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter all could have lobbied against this stuff and shut it down, hard. They didn't.
That speaks volumes, and my theory is that they feel shutting down these forums will push people onto their centralized platforms, increasing ad revenues - and the government is happy because it's much easier to find out all the things someone is discussing online.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. have really done as much as they can. Whoever are pushing this in Australian Government have a super weird kind of personal vendetta against 'Big Tech' - many speculate it's about how chummy our political class are with the media owning billionaires here in Australia, and how the shakedown they devised to wring money out of tech companies to subsidise the local media (the 'Media Bargaining Code') failed to really work.
It's honestly super weird. Now of course they are just proposing to tax the tech companies if they don't pay money to our local media orgs for something the tech companies neither want nor care about.
The sad part is, our major politicians are pretty much straight up blackmailed into doing this (though in practice they appear to do it gleefully). Murdoch and others own basically our entire media apparatus: don't do what they say, and you're destroyed in said media. It's absolutely wild the power they've been given.
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Good luck with that under Usenet/IRC.