Comment by exasperaited
8 days ago
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.
I think this sounds similar on the surface but the nature of the distribution of physical goods and digital media are so different that the premise doesn't actually hold up. Age verification has a meaningful impact in the physical world because supply of goods is limited by physical process and marginal costs of supply/production. Reproduction and sharing of digital media, especially illicit digital media, is essentially free and limitless, and can be done by anyone and even be done anonymously or pseudonymously. You can't just link hundreds of people to a single unregulated bottle of beer you found out about but you can do that to a site hosting some adult content. The dynamics are totally different.
3 replies →
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?