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.
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.
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.
Because only 10% of visitors actually do it. It might not be as bad as this because probably anyone who was actually going to pay for the porn would be ok with giving them their credit card number anyway. Bad for advertising income though.
Some are not, an ironically, Ofcom's website now provides a handy list of websites you can visit without age verification (in their list of companies they are investigating)
> AFAIK all the big porn sites are happily implementing age verification
I don’t know what you had in mind by “big porn sites”, but the biggest one I know of (Pornhub) is not doing that.
They decided to voluntarily withdraw from the US markets where age verification became required (TX, GA, etc.), and wrote a pretty good blog post explaining their rationale (which revolved around the idea that letting third parties to just receive and process ID documents just so that users could watch porn was both not secure at all and absurd).
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.
> Why not?
Because only 10% of visitors actually do it. It might not be as bad as this because probably anyone who was actually going to pay for the porn would be ok with giving them their credit card number anyway. Bad for advertising income though.
Some are not, an ironically, Ofcom's website now provides a handy list of websites you can visit without age verification (in their list of companies they are investigating)
> AFAIK all the big porn sites are happily implementing age verification
I don’t know what you had in mind by “big porn sites”, but the biggest one I know of (Pornhub) is not doing that.
They decided to voluntarily withdraw from the US markets where age verification became required (TX, GA, etc.), and wrote a pretty good blog post explaining their rationale (which revolved around the idea that letting third parties to just receive and process ID documents just so that users could watch porn was both not secure at all and absurd).
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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.
https://news.sky.com/story/neil-parish-mp-accused-of-watchin...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12535038
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Not many people are going to say this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7yIlGlUZac