Comment by 20after4
7 months ago
It's ridiculous to say that a bad law is better than no law at all. If the law has massive collateral damage and little-to-no demonstrated benefit then it's just a bad law and should never have been made.
It seems far too common that regulations are putting the liability / responsibility for a problem onto some group of people who are not the cause of the problem, and further, have limited power to do anything about the problem.
As they say, this is why we can't have nice things.
> responsibility for a problem onto some group of people who are not the cause of the problem
You don't think Meta, TikTok etc are the cause of the problem ?
I appreciate that Lfgss is somewhat collateral damage but the fact is that if you're going to run a forum you do have some obligation to moderate it.
The "collateral damage" you're talking about represented the UK's best answer to Meta - a UK-run collection of online communities that people were choosing to use instead of foreign alternatives. If they ban running them domestically then everybody will use American ones...
> some obligation to moderate it
"some"?
> The Act would also require me to scan images uploading for Child Sexual Abuse Material and other harmful content, it requires me to register as the responsible person for this and file compliance. It places technical costs, time costs, risk, and liability, onto myself as the volunteer who runs it all... and even if someone else took it over those costs would pass to them if the users are based in the UK.
There is no CSAM ring hiding on this cycling forum. The notion that every service which transmits data from one user to another has to file compliance paperwork and pay to use a CSAM hashing service is absurd.
The Act doesn't actually require him to do this. More detailed explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439911
> I appreciate that Lfgss is somewhat collateral damage but the fact is that if you're going to run a forum you do have some obligation to moderate it.
Lfgss is heavily moderated, just maybe not in a way you could prove to a regulator without an expensive legal team...
True, we absolutely couldn’t allow a place that people can voluntarily participate in to say things to exist without a governing body deciding what is and isn’t allowed to be said