Comment by chris_wot
4 months ago
Apparently the law is dreadfully written. I was reading the lobste.rs thread and wow, it’s like they took a programming course in goto and it statements and applied it to the law…
4 months ago
Apparently the law is dreadfully written. I was reading the lobste.rs thread and wow, it’s like they took a programming course in goto and it statements and applied it to the law…
I had the complete opposite impression from that thread. It seemed like people were politically motivation to interpret the law in a certain way, so they could act like they were being coerced.
These closures are acts of protest, essentially.
I agree with @teymour's description of the law. It is totally normal legislation.
Not only is this law terrible, there are several other laws like this that have existed for years.
People saying criticism is politically motivated (ignoring the fact that this law was drafted by the Tories and passed by Labour...so I am not exactly clear what the imagined motivation might be) ignore the fact that the UK has had this trend in law for a long time and the outcome has generally been negative (or, at best, a massive waste of resources).
Legislation has a context: if we lived in a country where police behaved sensibly, I could reasonably see how someone could believe this was sensible...that isn't reality though. Police have a maximalist interpretation of their powers (for example, non-crime hate incidents...there is no legislation governing their use, they are used regularly to "question the thinking" of people who write critical things about politicians, usually local, or the police...no appointed authority gave them this power, their usage his been questioned by ministers...they register hundreds of thousands of a year still).
Btw, if you want to know how the sausage is made: security services/police want these laws, some event happens, and then there is a coordinated campaign with the media (the favour is usually swapped for leaks later) to build up "public support" (not actual support, just the appearance of support), meetings with ministers are arranged "look at the headlines"...this Act wasn't some organic act of legislative genius, it was the outcome of a targeted media campaign from an incident that, in factual terms, is unrelated with what the Act eventually became (if this sounds implausible, remember that May gave Nissan £30m on the back of SMMT organising about a week's worth of negative headlines, remember that Johnson brought in about 4m migrants off the back of about two days of briefing against him by a six-month old lobbying group from hotels and poultry slaughterhouses...this is actually how the govt works...no-one reads papers apart from politicians).
Giving Ofcom this power, if you are familiar with their operations, is an act of literal insanity. Their budget has exploded higher (I believe near a quarter of a billion now). If you think tech companies are actually going to enforce our laws for us, you are wrong. But suggesting that Ofcom with their new legions of civil servants is supposed to the watchdog of online content...it makes no sense, it cannot be described as "totally normal" in a country other than China.