Comment by nickslaughter02
1 day ago
Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind.
Remember the "Repeal the Online Safety Act" petition? It has gotten over half a million signatures and the response from the government was a loud "no".
> The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.
Those petitions aren't really worth anything - governments have ignored ones with over six million signatures before.
And they also ignored this one a few years back that had just under 700,000 signatures to "make verified ID a requirement for opening a social media account":
https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/575833
Ironically, the primary reason they gave for rejecting it was:
> However, restricting all users’ right to anonymity, by introducing compulsory user verification for social media, could disproportionately impact users who rely on anonymity to protect their identity. These users include young people exploring their gender or sexual identity, whistleblowers, journalists’ sources and victims of abuse. Introducing a new legal requirement, whereby only verified users can access social media, would force these users to disclose their identity and increase a risk of harm to their personal safety.
The other point is that recent polls suggest the British public are overwhelmingly in support of this legislation [0], which is not reflected in most of the narrative we see online. Whether they support how it has been implemented is a different matter, but the desire to do something is clear.
[0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
It's sadly an example of terrible leading question bias, to the point where I'm surprised that it even got a 22% oppose rate.
The percentages would change dramatically were one to write it as, "From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring adults to upload their id or a face photo before accessing any website that allows user to user interaction?"
Both questions are factually accurate, but omit crucial aspects.
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People constantly cite this poll as it is proof that British people want this.
You cannot trust the YouGov polling. It is flawed.
> Despite the sophisticated methodology, the main drawback faced by YouGov, Ashcroft, and other UK pollsters is their recruitment strategy: pollsters generally recruit potential respondents via self-selected internet panels. The American Association of Public Opinion Research cautions that pollsters should avoid gathering panels like this because they can be unrepresentative of the electorate as a whole. The British Polling Council’s inquiry into the industry’s 2015 failings raised similar concerns. Trying to deal with these sample biases is one of the motivations behind YouGov and Ashcroft’s adoption of the modelling strategies discussed above.
https://theconversation.com/its-sophisticated-but-can-you-be...
Even if the aforementioned problems didn't exist with the polling. It has been known for quite a while that how you ask a question changes the results. The question you linked was the following.
> From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material?
Most people would think "age verification to view pornography". They won't think about all the other things that maybe caught in that net.
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As always, the devil is in the details. Very careful wording:
>do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material?
"may" is doing the heavy lifting. Any website that hosts image "may" contain pornograohic content. So they don't associate this with "I need id to watch YouTube" it's "I need ID to watch pornhub". Even though this affects both.
On top of that, the question was focused on peon to begin with. This block was focused more generally on social media. The popular ones of which do not allow pornography.
Rephrase the question to "do you agree with requiring ID submission to access Facebook" and I'd love to see how that impacts responses.
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Odd - they also believe it wont be effective
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
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> Whether they support how it has been implemented is a different matter, but the desire to do something is clear.
Isn't this the whole story of government policy? The stated policy so rarely actually leads to the hoped-for result.
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Follow-up question is big lulz: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
"And how effective do you think the new rules will be at preventing those younger than 18 from gaining access to pornography?"
-> 64% "not very effective / not at all effective"
Ok and how about if it was phrased;
"Are you in favour of requiring ages verification for Wikipedia and other websites"
"Are you in favour of uploading your ID card and selfie each time you visit a site that might contain porn"
Why are we conflating pornography and Wikipedia?
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The curtain twitcher/nanny state impulse is pretty strong
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A good reminder that certain circles are just the vocal minority and under the surface society is mostly just NPCs.
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Would-be democratic countries should have petitions with actual teeth - that is ones that get enough signatures mean the issue is no longer up to the representatives but will be decided in a referendum.
>These users include young people exploring their gender or sexual identity
And who would they need to hide from?
School bullys, parents, friends, community members, church leaders and many others I imagine. The idea was that it would have your real name and it was verified by your ID.
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From people who would harm them?
Oh you're that anti-games, anti-porn guy, best to ignore anything you say.
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I wish that we didn't always have to phrase things like this. Yes, it's true that the aforementioned folks may likely have more of a need for anonymity than I do as someone who isn't a member of any protected class; but that doesn't mean I don't have a legitimate right to it too. And, if this is the way we phrase things, when a government is in power that doesn't care about this (i.e. the present American regieme), the argument no longer has any power.
We shouldn't have to hide behind our more vulnerable peers in order to have reasonable rights for online free speech and unfettered anonymous communication. It is a weak argument made by weak people who aren't brave enough to simply say, "F** you, stop spying on everyone, you haven't solved anything with the powers you have and there's no reason to believe it improves by shoving us all into a panopticon".
Totalitarian neoliberalism sucks; your protest petition with six million signatures is filed as a Jira ticket and closed as WONTFIX, you can't get anyone on the phone to complain at, everyone in power is disposable and replaceable with another stooge who will do the same thing as their predecessor. Go ahead and march in the streets, the government and media will just declare your protest invalid and make the other half of the population hate you on demand.
Every totalitarian regime sucks, be it corporate, religious or socialistic.
It's quite right that petitions are (mostly) ignored in Parliamentary matters, IMHO.
MPs are elected to Parliament, they get input from their constituents. Bills are debated, revised, voted on multiple times. There are consultations and input from a board range of view points.
A petition is in effect trying to shout over all that process from the street outside.
It's a good deal more complicated than that.
MPs belong to political parties - consider what happens if an MP's constituents and an MP's party disagree?
They might be allowed to vote against the government, if their vote will have no effect on the bill's passage - but if they actually stop the bill's passage? They're kicked out of the party, which will make the next election extremely difficult for them.
MPs are elected for reasonably long terms - and that means they regularly do things that weren't in their party manifesto. Nobody running for election in 2024 had a manifesto policy about 2025's strikes on Iran, after all!
That flexibility means they can simply omit the unpopular policies during the election campaign. A party could run an election campaign saying they're going to introduce a national ID card, give everyone who drinks alcohol a hard time, cut benefits, raise taxes, raise university tuition, fail to deliver on any major infrastructure projects, have doctors go on strike, and so on.
Or they can simply not put those things in their manifesto, then do them anyway. It's 100% legal, the system doing what it does.
Don't be ridiculous. MPs get their input from their party superiors, and their party superiors get their input from the people who buy them.
It's been decades since the UK had any genuine bottom-up policy representation for ordinary people.
Petitions are the only mechanism which produces some shadow of a memory of a that.
Is it quite right that the public gets ignored all the time?
How do you force your representatives to actually represent their constituents?
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Yeah who do these peasants think they are?
You vote for someone who says "I will create more jobs"
They instead propose a bill that will cut jobs
There's deliberation, but a lot of other people want to cut jobs
Is you shouting "hey, that is not what I voted for!" yelling and disrupting process, or calling out the fact that you were lied to and your representative is in fact not representing you?
They did do that once,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative
That was part of a widespread protest against proposed bipartisan internet legislation in America.
On that occassion, it was very effective at getting the American government to back down.
Sounds like a pretty much identical situation to this. Maybe it would cause the UK government to back down on this stupid law.
Yet this looks nothing like their reaction to SOPA and PIPA. They even explicitly state that Wikimedia is not against the legislation on the whole.
> The Wikimedia Foundation shares the UK government’s commitment to promoting online environments where everyone can safely participate. The organization is not bringing a general challenge to the OSA as a whole, nor to the existence of the Category 1 duties themselves. Rather, the legal challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.
---
I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did their conscience go?
> Where did their conscience go?
Aaron Swartz is no longer with us.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Opposition_to_the...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Death
The old generation of idealists grew up and we raised no one to replace them. I know because I'm in that emotionally and ideologically stunted generation.
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>I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did their conscience go?
I absolutely abhor the "Kids these days" sort of argument, but it does seem the case that we lowered the barrier of entry sufficiently in the tech sector that people who simply dont give a shit, or actively want to harm our values, now outnumber us greatly.
What has happened previously was we would rally around corporations and institutions that would generally work in our best interests. But the people driving those social goods in those entities are now the villains.
Not to mention all the mergers and acquisitions.
In Australia, during the internet filter debate, we had both a not for profit entity spending money on advertising, but also decently sized ISP's like iiNet working publicly against the problem. The not for profit was funded by industry, something that never happened again. And iiNet is now owned by TPG who also used to have a social conscience but have been hammered into the dust by the (completely non technical, and completely asinine bane of the internets existence and literal satan) ACCC and have no fight left in them for anything. When Teoh leaves or sells TPG, it will probably never fight a good fight ever again.
Its the same everywhere. We cant expect people to fight for freedom when the legislation just gets renamed and relaunched again after the next crisis comes out in the media. We lost internet filtration after christchurch, for absolutely no justifiable reason. And we lost the Access and Assistance fight despite having half the global tech industry tell our government to suck eggs.
The only real solution is to prep the next generation to fight back as best as possible, to help them ignore the doomsayers and help the right humans into the right places to deal with this shit.
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"suddenly"? Wikipedia has always supported fascist initiatives
I share your general frustration, but as an unabashed Wikimedia glazer, I have some potential answers:
1. They lost this legal challenge, so perhaps their UK lawyers (barristers?) knew that much broader claim would be even less likely to work and advised them against it. Just because they didn't challenge the overall law in court doesn't mean they wouldn't challenge it in a political sense.
2. The Protests against SOPA and PIPA[1] were in response to overreach by capitalists, and as such drew support from many capitalists with opposing interests (e.g. Google, Craigslist, Flickr, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Wordpress, etc.). Certainly Reddit et al have similar general concerns with having to implement ID systems as they did about policing content for IP violations, but the biggest impact will be on minors, which AFAIK are far from the most popular advertising demo. Certainly some adult users will be put off by the hassle and/or insult, but how many, and for how long?
3. Wikimedia is a US-based organization, and the two major organizers of the 2012 protests--Fight for the Future[2] and the Electronic Frontier Foundation[3]--are US-focused as well. The EFF does have a blog post about these UK laws, but AFAICT no history of bringing legal and/or protest action there. This dovetails nicely with the previous point, while we're at it: the US spends $300B on digital ads every year, whereas the UK only spends $40B[4]. The per-capita spends are closer ($870/p v. $567/p), but the fact remains: the US is the lifeblood of these companies in a way that the UK is not.
4. More fundamentally, I strongly suspect that "big business is trying to ruin the internet by hoarding their property" is an easier sell for the average voter than "big government is trying to ruin the internet by protecting children from adult content". We can call it fascism all we like, but at the end of the day, people do seem concerned about children accessing adult content. IMHO YouTube brainrot content farms are a much bigger threat to children than porn, but I'm not a parent.
The final point is perhaps weakened by the ongoing AI debates, where there's suddenly a ton of support for the "we're protecting artists!" arguments employed in 2012. Still, I think the general shape of things is clear: Wikimedia stood in solidarity with many others in 2012, and now stands relatively alone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA
[2] https://www.fightforthefuture.org/
[3] https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-cases
[4] https://www.salehoo.com/learn/digital-ad-spend-by-country
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[flagged]
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Possibly naive question, why should Wikimedia do anything at all? Do they have a legal presence in the UK?
If not, why not just say "we aren't a UK based organization so we have no obligations under this law"
Let the UK block Wikipedia.
IANAL, but I assume this could open Wikimedia leadership to charges of contempt and eventually lead to needing to avoid visiting the UK or other extraditing countries and potentially pave the way for asset seizures. You generally don't want to antagonize world power governments.
That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not wikimedia’s responsibility to ensure people from the UK don’t hit their servers by typing wikipedia.org into the browser bar.
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The UK isn't a world power.
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If Wikimedia blocks access from UK it has control over response page and can write there accurate description of the reasons why access is blocked.
Yes. HTTP 451 "Unavailable For Legal Reasons" was made for this moment.
No, they should block with a very visible message, tailored to the british public. I know what that status message means, you know it, but the general public doesn't. They need the black page with big letters they used before with sopa/pipa/etc.
You can return a 451 error with a descriptive page, same as how sites have custom 404 pages
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As ridiculous or absurd as this idea might seem, it's probably the most succinct and likely effective response to this kind of situation. The UK is betting the rest of the world doesn't reciprocate.
Not ridiculous, the only way to stop injustice is to fight.
I wish all non-UK entities which may be affected by this law just dropped the UK. But unfortunately it seems they have too much money invested in not doing that.
But I'm sure even if that happened, the public consensus would just be "good riddance".
This is an absolutely bizarre country to live in.
This after the gaffe with the postal services, we are going to see some innocent folks being branded.
In general, I think we need a shift in society to say "yea, screw those kids". We don't put 20km/h limits everywhere because there's a non-zero chance that we might kill a kid. Its the cost of doing business.
Having privacy MEANS that it is difficult to catch bad people. That is just the price. Just swallow it and live with it.
> "yea, screw those kids".
Well, at the very least, the American government is already aiming for that
Problem with Wikipedia specifically going all-in on a UK block is, due to the licence, there's nothing to stop someone circumventing the block to make a OSA-compliant Britipedia mirror with minimal effort.
Except the effort and money needed to be OSA compliant. As the whole enwiki is permissively licensed everyone is welcome to do it though.
Fairly easy, just make it a read-only mirror.
And Wikipedia continues on without having to worry about UK regulations. What's the downside for Wikipedia?
Anyone suggesting a block doesn't actually want Wikipedia to pull out of the UK, it's a negotiating position to extort concessions.
Does WP do this anywhere else?
I wonder what happens if they simply don't comply. Will the UK at any point ask ISPs to ban Wikipedia?
I think just getting blocked is no big deal, but they'll probably get fined as well, that is the problem
What mechanism does the UK government have to extract fines from Wikipedia?
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Probably, my understanding is theyve already implemented IP blocking to other sites.
they should indeed. The rest of the world should not have to suffer for draconian & fascist laws in the UK
Problem is that all that most people want out of Wikipedia is ingested in LLMs and for unfathomable reasons people now go to those first already. So the general public might not even notice Wikipedia being inaccessible.
I thought people here didn’t like when American companies tried to strongarm democratic governments abroad?
1) There are multiple posters on this site, they sometimes have contradictory opinions.
2) Lots of people like it when a company does an obviously good thing, and dislike it when a company does an obviously bad thing. I guess you’ve made a happy discovery: it turns out the underlying principle was something about what the companies were trying to accomplish, rather than some reflexive “American companies are bad” silliness.
> the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
I'd like to add, it's fine and dandy to have the stance that huge corporations in general shouldn't throw their weight around to shape politics, that's still not the world we live in and that must be acknowledged.
Even if I'd rather have Wikipedia stay put, it does matter to me if they push for something I support as opposed to something that I'm against.
Not to dismiss bee_rider's sibling comment, like at all, but: Wikimedia's nature and purpose might be distinguished from your generic "American" tech "company".
one of the good ones right
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There is more than one poster on this site; it's safe to assume there's more than one opinion.
It turns out reductionism is stupid and people have different opinions
> Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind.
It is a gamble. If people increasingly get their “encyclopedic” information via AI, then it might make almost no noise and then the govt will have even more leverage.
I commented basically the same and also got down voted. Do people just down vote comments that make them sad?
In the age of AI chatbots having consumed all of Wikipedia, its relevance has waned. So I don't think they have the same pull as they did before.
In the recent ChatGPT 5 launch presentation, ChatGPT 5 answered a question about how airplane wings produce uplift incorrectly, despite the corresponding Wikipedia page providing the correct explanation and pointing out ChatGPT’s explanation as a common misconception.
AI chatbots are only capable of outputting “vibe knowledge”.
Yeah, but even so people use that nonsense, not checking if anything is correct. I suspect not enough people would notice that Wikipedia is inaccessible, sadly.
What is this corresponding Wikipedia page?
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Wikipedia is a moving target. Content today is not the content of yesterday or tomorrow. This is like saying all knowledge that humanity can gain has already been accomplished.
My personal test usage of AI is it will try to bull shit an answer even when you giving known bad questions with content that contradicts each other. Until AI can say there is no answer to bull shit questions it is not truly a viable product because the end user might not know they have a bull shit question and will accept a bull shit answer. AI at it's present state pushed to the masses is just an expensive miss-information bot.
Also, AI that is not open from bottom to top with all training and rules publicly published is just a black box. That black box is just like Volkswagen emissions scandal waiting to happen. AI provider can create rules that override the actual answer with their desired answer which is not only a fallacy. They can also be designed to financially support their own company directly or third party product and services paying them. A question about "diapers" might always push and use the products by "Procter & Gamble".
Its relevance has absolutely not waned, more relevant than ever. Models need continuous retraining to keep up to date with new information right?
Despite having consumed all of Wikipedia, it still can't accurately answer many questions so I don't think it's relevance or value has waned. AI has not got anywhere near becoming an encyclopedia and it never will whilst it can't say I don't know something (which Wikipedia can do) and filter the fact from the fiction, which Wikipedia does uses volunteers.
Doesn't AI essentially use the concept of volunteers as well with RLHF?
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Besides the fact that LLMs still make up stuff?
Yea great, make everyone even dumber by forcing them to use AI slop
> Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind.
Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
I'm quite critical of the implementation of this legislation but the idea of an American company throwing their weight around trying to influence policy decisions in the UK gives me the ick.
Fair enough if the regulations mean they just don't want to do business there but please don't block access to try and strong arm the elected government of another nation.
Well, that would be tricky, since Wikipedia is not a business, and is nor is it specifically American. (Other than a foundation in the US that runs the servers) . There are Wikipedias in many of the world's languages!
If the UK effectively bans public wikis above a certain size (even if by accident), then it is the law of the land that Wikipedia is banned. Or at least the english wikipedia, which is indeed very large. And if it is banned, then it must block access for the uk, under those conditions. Depending on the exact rules, possibly the uk could make do with the Swahili wikipedia?
That said, the problem here is that it is a public wiki of a certain size. One option might be for Wikipedia to implement quotas for the UK, so that they don't fall under category 1 rules.
Another option would be to talk with Ofcon and get things sorted that way.
By Wikipedia I meant the foundation of course. I'm not sure localisation automatically makes them a multinational entity. Windows is available in Chinese but we both understand that Microsoft is not a Chinese company.
It is fair to say it's not a business, but essentially there's no difference to my feeling that private entities from other countries shouldn't be throwing their weight around in local democracy.
Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the letter of the law? If so why is there a question of it continuing to operate there?
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> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
Blocking, making it clear why your blocking and that you will continue to block until it changes is respecting the decision.
As others have noted, blocking /is/ respecting the democratic decisions of the UK. It would bring them into full compliance with the law.
You call it strong arming, I call it malicious compliance. Wikipedia hosts images, it "may contain pornographic material". Make anyone trying to search up a top 5 website see it before their eyes on how this isn't just a way to affect pornhub.
>respect the democratic decisions
Let the peope have a say in the going ons instead of lying to get elected, and maybe we can call it democratic again.
Or they should not do business in them. To me this means block access. If you don't then they're supposed to block access to you anyway so who is strong arming who?
As I said in my first comment: if it makes doing business in the UK unpalatable then they are of course free to halt their operations. I was specifically responding to the suggestion above that they should do so as a bargaining move to force the government's hand.
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> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
Well, the OSA was put into law by the Tories in 2023. The democratic decision of the UK was that they resoundingly rejected what the Tories were doing in the landslide win for Labour in the 2024 GE. I'd quite like UKGOV to respect the democratic decisions of the country and if they won't, I'm quite happy for other people to push back via the courts, public opinion, etc.
Your framing is misleading.
Most people weren't aware of the Online Safety Act. I would argue it wasn't even any of the policies.
The Tories were in power for 14 years previously. During that time we had 5 prime ministers all of which were seen as weak and ineffective. People were sick of the Conservative party. This includes some of their most ardent supporters.
People were sick of the Conservative party, this includes people that had previously voted for the Conservatives.
The election had low voter turn out. It wasn't that Labour won, it was more like the Conservatives lost and by default Labour took power because they were the only other choice.
That's not how democracy works. When there's a change in government they don't just abandon all laws the previous one passed.
The current government is more than able to use their democratic mandate to appeal or change the law.
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The Tories' loss had nothing to do with what anybody thought of the OSA, a bill which most people hadn't heard of until last week.
But you already knew that.
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The bill had broad cross party support and passed without opposition from the Labour party.
> Or they could respect
Blocking is respecting the law!
> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
In what way would blocking access from the UK be not respecting the law?
Also, that won't necessarily do anything. Russia forked wikipedia into Ruwiki after the invasion of Ukraine and it worked out for them.
> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
They do that by staying out of such countries. Many US companies don't want to work with EU GDPR and just block all european IPs, wikipedia has full right to leave UK. They are under no obligations to provide service to them in the same was as pornhub is under no obligation to provide services in eg. a country that would require them to disclose IP addresses of all viewers of gay porn, etc.
Saying that it was a democratic decision without people actually being asked if they want that (referendum) is just weaseling out instead of directly pointing out that it's a bad policy that very few brits actually wanted. Somehow no one uses the same words when eg. trump does something (tarifs, defunding, etc.), no one is talking about democratic decisions of americans then.
Wikipedia has the full right to say "nope, we're not playing that game" and pulling out, even if an actual majority of brits want that.
I know that and I've been clear about it several times. If business subs unpalatable they gave every right to withdraw. I was responding to the suggestion above that they should do so explicitly as a bargaining chip.
And parliamentary representative democracy is still very much democratic even without referenda on every little issue.
Is it "democratic" when both parties agree on everything of substance and elections don't change anything no matter who wins? Because that's how "democracy" has worked in the UK for at least as long as I've been alive.
Also, no-one asked for this bill, both parties support it, it received basically no debate or scrutiny and was presented as a fait accompli. Where's the democracy exactly?
There are any number of criticisms I would happily join you in directing at the British parliamentaey system but I don't think relying on American businesses to pressure the government would actually be the win for democracy you seem to suggest?
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The Brexit referendum ought to have shut up the “your vote doesn’t make any difference” folks forever (regardless of whether or not they were in favor of Brexit). But they tend to have short memories.
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