Comment by aimazon
4 months ago
I have read every post, every article, every piece of guidance. I’m asking for specifics, not hand waving. What are the actual compliance costs?
4 months ago
I have read every post, every article, every piece of guidance. I’m asking for specifics, not hand waving. What are the actual compliance costs?
> I have read every post, every article, every piece of guidance.
Prove it. I’m asking for specifics, not hand waving.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
Last month.
“ We’ve heard concerns from some smaller services that the new rules will be too burdensome for them. Some of them believe they don’t have the resources to dedicate to assessing risk on their platforms, and to making sure they have measures in place to help them comply with the rules. As a result, some smaller services feel they might need to shut down completely.
So, we wanted to reassure those smaller services that this is unlikely to be the case“
“If organisations have carried out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment and determined, with good reason, that the risks they face are low, they will only be expected to have basic but important measures to remove illegal content when they become aware of it. These include:
easy-to-find, understandable terms and conditions; a complaints tool that allows users to report illegal or harmful material when they see it, backed up by a process to deal with those complaints; the ability to review content and take it down quickly if they have reason to believe it is illegal; and a specific individual responsible for compliance, who we can contact if we need to.”
Your turn. Where are these compliance costs?
It's right there in your post.
>they will only be expected to have basic but important measures to remove illegal content when they become aware of it. These include:
>easy-to-find, understandable terms and conditions; a complaints tool that allows users to report illegal or harmful material when they see it, backed up by a process to deal with those complaints; the ability to review content and take it down quickly if they have reason to believe it is illegal; and a specific individual responsible for compliance, who we can contact if we need to.”
3 replies →
"We pinky swear to totes not enforce the law as written [unless and until we decide, with no notice or warning, to do so] up to and including criminal penalties". Not as reassuring as you claim it to be.
6 replies →
I'll remind you of two thing which a lot of people often forget with hobbies/volunteering and may make this argument moot for you: Just because someone gives time for free doesn't mean that time doesn't cost them or can easily be increased without significantly impacting the giver. Secondly that some parts of a hobby can be work that is required for the fun part of the hobby and changing the ratio of fun:work can kill any motivation for the hobby.
To your point even your extract from the link there are compliance costs.
>So, we wanted to reassure those smaller services that this is *unlikely* to be the case
Your source admits there are extra costs that will likely cause some small services to have to shutdown if the costs are to burdensome for them, they are just saying that they hope the costs are small enough that it doesn't put most small services in that position.
Even in your quote it explicitly lists extra costs. i.e. the cost of a compliant compliance tool. Obviously the government isn't going to implement it or spend the time moderating reports or abuse of reports. Which means the cost of extra hours moderating and setting it up are on the service provider.
"Must have an individual responsible for compliance". So either employ someone to take this risk or take on the risk and responsibility yourself and the associated due diligence costs (lawyers in the UK are only free if you're already losing hours of your life to the court system).
These costs will definetly push some people over the line to not wanting to host such services. Especially when the wording is so wide that you need to moderate out insults in your forum.
Jesus Christ! Your comment would probably be flagged as foreign propaganda to soft peddle broken UK policies, that is if the US had such rules. My comment should be flagged because that could be an insulting insinuation or the expletive at the start of this paragraph could be stirring up religious hatred by being needlessly blasphemous. And a moderator has to read the entire post to get to the non compliant part.