Comment by cft
1 day ago
If the UK orders a Wikipedia block to its ISPs, it would be a good thing, to raise public awareness of the OSA. Wikipedia should do nothing and wait.
1 day ago
If the UK orders a Wikipedia block to its ISPs, it would be a good thing, to raise public awareness of the OSA. Wikipedia should do nothing and wait.
From about ten years ago, ISPs were required to block web sites which were unsuitable for children by default. Any ISP's customer (the person paying for internet access, who would therefore be over 18) could ask for the block to be removed. Requiring individual web sites to block access was unnecessary if the intention was to prevent children accessing those sites.
My understanding is that the default "block" just worked through the ISP's DNS servers. So that only works if the parents know to restrict the ability of their kids to change their DNS servers on their local devices (which is not set up by default) and the kids don't know how to get around it.
>Requiring individual web sites to block access was unnecessary if the intention was to prevent children accessing those sites.
Hmm. So Reddit, Youtube, etc. would be blocked by ISPs by default?
Which is why they will not do it. Nothing popular will be blocked or shut down.
I'm no longer convinced that nothing popular will be shut down, assuming that includes voluntarily withdrawing from the UK market. A couple of days ago, this popped up:
> The Science Department, which oversees the legislation, told companies they could face fines if they failed to uphold free speech rules.
> A spokesman said: “As well as legal duties to keep children safe, the very same law places clear and unequivocal duties on platforms to protect freedom of expression.
> “Failure to meet either obligation can lead to severe penalties, including fines of up to 10 per cent of global revenue or £18m, whichever is greater.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/09/social-media...
They seem to be putting social media platforms between a rock and a hard place, particularly as political debate in the UK is starting to heat up somewhat. I suppose the best to hope for at this point is that fines for infringing free expression never materialize.
Porn is popular!
True, but its not going to get blocked. AFAIK all the big porn sites are happily implementing age verification. Why not? Its an excuse to gather data, to increase numbers of registered users or some other form of tracking, and to raise a barrier to entry to smaller competitors.
Other aspects of the OSA have similar effects on other types of sites such as forums vs social media.
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Only privately though. No politician is going to admit to watching porn. Any campaign to save porn isn't going to attract many public supporters.
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