Comment by captainbland
7 days ago
Strictly speaking the law was passed under the conservatives, albeit in collaboration with Labour (it's bi-partisan). But I would agree that the drive is more authoritarian and it just uses moralistic arguments to shame people into siding with it.
The law could mandate that retail device OSs ship with a turnkey child safe mode complete with app and extensive site whitelists and run an educational campaign on the subject. But instead they've gone the needlessly invasive route which is telling about the true motives.
It has broad public support.
The law was passed in 2023 by the tories, and Ofcom has concluded what the tories asked them to do -- write the statutory instruments that implement the law.
The Labour government would have to repeal the law (really unlikely; governments don't usually rip down their predecessors' laws because if they did no progress would occur) or set the statutory instruments aside.
I think the "true motives" are what the law says. I don't think they will ban VPNs (which would support an alternative reading of motive).
I also, again, encourage US readers to understand that your own supreme court has rubber-stamped a law that requires US porn firms to do all this and more for the benefit of Texas, and there are 24 more state laws that have similar impacts.
Pretending this is just something crazy we Brits are doing out there on our own is disingenuous at best and often hypocritical and whiny at worst.
The problem to me is this thing is full of holes. It basically just sets up ID checks but it can only do that on accountable websites who self select to do so. It can't stop people sharing extreme content on WhatsApp groups for example which are one of the modes of communication increasing in popularity the fastest.
As it happens I am from the UK and have no particular love for the way the US handles things either. In fact one of my biggest problems is that it encourages us to send extra PII to some of the most odiously associated US companies out there.
But in general I don't think doggedly pursuing this route where children get access to the full internet sans some self-selecting sites with ID checks is the way to go. There's too much out there which is outside the realms of accountability. If everyone installs VPNs (which appears to be what's going on, especially given that far more than just pornography is being blocked this way) then guess what happens when the child borrows the shared family device?
People want a magical solution which exonerates caregivers from having to worry about this and shifts the burden elsewhere but unfortunately one doesn't exist and the online safety act certainly isn't it. Education and turnkey child proofing of devices are the only thing that will really help.
> Education and turnkey child proofing of devices are the only thing that will really help.
Strongly agree. It kills me that nobody is seriously discussing robust, industry-standard childproofing.
Even if you require a driver's license, how hard is it really to swipe your mom's ID from her purse and write down the serial number? There is no solution to this problem that doesn't require parents to actually parent their children a bit and lock down their devices.
I don’t support this legislation, but I think your argument is weak because everything relating to age checks is full of holes in all kinds of contexts. People under 18 can obtain alcohol and cigarettes without extraordinary difficulty, for example. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the laws requiring age checks for these items should be repealed.
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It has broad public support.
Preventing children from accessing porn has broad public support (as we might hope). That is very different to saying the OSA has broad public support though.
The YouGov survey results that have been much discussed in the past week came from three questions - one about age restrictions for porn, one about whether the new measures would be effective, and one about whether the person had heard of the new measures before the survey. The answers were essentially that the majority hadn't heard of the measures, almost everyone supported preventing kids from accessing porn, but the majority didn't think these measures would be effective in achieving that. Probably none of those results is very surprising for HN readers.
What is notably missing from the debate so far is any evidence about whether the public support the (probably) unintended consequences of the actual implementation of the OSA - which are what almost all of the criticism I am seeing is about. As with any political survey the answers probably depend very much on how you ask the questions and it's easy to get people to say they support "good" measures if you gloss over all the "bad" parts that necessarily go along with them.
> I think the "true motives" are what the law says.
Oh yeah? How's that anti-terrorist legislation working out?
Requiring device side child safe modes would be far further reaching and likely mean your cannot run your own software anymore. Requiring providers of adult content to check id is much more limited in scope.
Not if it is enabled by the buyer, which I took to be the point.
Mobile phone subscriptions in the UK go the other way: By default they filter some content. If you tell the phone company to turn it off, they do. It's less invasive than this law because you don't need to tell them why you want it turned off, but still more draconian than if we could turn on a child safe mode that e.g. then required a pin or something to disable.
The requirement that such functionality be available is likely to preclude FOSS. e.g. in the US, California has a bill[0] that would require anyone distributing software to ensure it hooks into an age verification API in the operating system, and requires device manufacturers to provide such an API, which appears to me to say computer manufacturers can't let you install Linux and developers of any software including FOSS must do these checks.
I can't imagine that it would pass as-is since on its face it seems to apply to all computers and all software including things like nginx or nftables that the entire modern economy relies on, but who knows?
[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
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This is 1000000% where we are going between Google moving away from AOSP and Samsung removing the ability to unlock bootloaders altogether.
There is a conspiracy and it's being rolled out. There was already some country that declared anyone running non-standard OSes on their phones are highly suspect.