6 ms·

They can fine all they want, if the company doesn't have any entity in said territory they can just ignore it. What Ofcom succeeded to achieve though is to dete

They can fine all they want, if the company doesn't have any entity in said territory they can just ignore it. What Ofcom succeeded to achieve though is to deter more and more foreign IT companies to ever expand and create jobs in the UK.

crimsoneer 10mo ago
I mean, while this might be true, I'm not sure democracies being totally incapable of regulating the internet is a good place to be. I'm not sure a race to the bottom (if you attempt to regulate us in anyway we'll leave/go complain to the US president) is really a great outcome here. "Porn websites should check your age" is not some radical totalitarian demand I think?
- brainwad 10mo ago
  I think it actually is a radical totalitarian demand, if the only accepted form of age verification is government ID scans or selfie face capture. People should have a right to serve content without having to deal with the SPII of their clients.
  - crimsoneer 10mo ago
    ... but they specifically don't have to, right? You can just use a third party verification company. Or you can not, if you'd prefer not to. You just have to do something vaguely meaningful that isn't just "Pinky swear you're 18".
    - mzajc 10mo ago
      How do they perform age checks?
    - debugnik 10mo ago
      > You can just use a third party verification company. That will ask for a government ID scan or selfie face capture. It solves the company-side problem only.
- zettabomb 10mo ago
  The alternative to the OSA is not "being totally incapable of regulating the internet". There's a wide, wide gap between complete lack of regulation and what the UK has done.
- IlikeMadison 10mo ago
  Do you really believe Ofcom and the UK establishment in general really care about the children or terrorists when they are pushing for mandatory digital ID and age-verification in every aspect of our digital lives or are you playing naive?
  - crimsoneer 10mo ago
    Controversially, I think most people I know in politics really are actual humans, who got into politics to stop bad things happening, and think that children having ready access to pornography is A Bad Thing.
    - squeefers 10mo ago
      Search Molly Russell in the Uk.... that case sums up online child safety, parents letting emotion take the lead over intellect. That girl was suicidal, you cant blame a fuckin search engine if she was the one looking for suicide content. But whos going to tell those parents theyre wrong? Instead, now a laws been passed and every website now has to be a part time parent/teacher to all children in the uk.
    - hopelite 10mo ago
      What you or your politician friends may not understand is that “good people stopping bad things” is a very easily manipulated group, because it often is emotion based and reactionary. It is how America has been dismembered, little by little over the decades, good people doing good to stop the bad. A maybe as clear as possible example of this is the Patriot Act, even though it’s now 24 years old. It was so easy to manipulate people being emotional and thinking they were doing good and stopping bad, when in reality they were doing the opposite. I won’t even bother listing several other examples because people are still very deeply invested in those manipulations, because no one wants to believe a) they were so easily fooled and b) what they were raised to believe was just manipulative lies and actually bad, while being told it was good and supporting it made them good. It’s far easier thinking of oneself as good…which is the easily manipulated part. It’s all very standard psychological manipulation stuff, it just takes on whole other self-fulfilling characteristics when it ascends to a complete majority scale, because things can’t be bad if everyone believes… was trained on it all their lives… right?
- mittensc 10mo ago
  > . "Porn websites should check your age" is not some radical totalitarian demand I think? How would that work? do you want to provide government id to watch porn? And how is this helping since it's not going to work overall (other sites, torrents, etc)
  - VBprogrammer 10mo ago
    If you take as a given that consenting adults should have access to sexually explicit material generated by other consenting adults; the potential for harm to adults is huge with the current implementations. Can't wait for the headlines when the entire watch history of some famous person is released after someone recognises them in their "age verification scan". It's about the only good thing which could come out of digital ID. Being able to proved proof of age in a double blind way.
- sam-cop-vimes 10mo ago
  Everyone disagreeing with this poster, are you okay with living in a society where anything goes? Do we give up trying to minimise harms because it is hard to do? The effort to regulate this sort of access has to start in some shape or form and then improved. Come up with a better solution, provide a proof of concept and yes regulatory agencies / governments will take notice. People like us work in these agencies. Let's propose better ways of achieving the same goal of reducing porn exposure to minors - not keep bashing the initiative taken.
  - arccy 10mo ago
    Why is that even a good goal in the first place? Must children grow up in a sterile environment coddled by a nanny state?
    - sam-cop-vimes 10mo ago
      I don't know if you are a parent, but this is a ridiculous question. The unrestricted Internet is a cesspool. For the same reason you wouldn't allow a child to go play in an open sewer, you cannot allow them access to the unrestricted Internet.
      - squeefers 10mo ago
        > For the same reason you wouldn't allow a child to go play in an open sewer, you cannot allow them access to the unrestricted Internet. fair enough, but legislate this? why cant you just stop your own kid going on the internet? Id argue youre overblowing it but you cant ever remove the emotional/hysterical aspect when dealing with a parent
        sam-cop-vimes 10mo ago
        > why cant you just stop your own kid going on the internet? May I ask if you are a parent? Because every parent knows that kids will try to cross any boundary set (which is how they learn, not a problem). If there is additional friction at each step before they access something which is harmful for them, chances are they would have matured well enough to prepare them before they are exposed to harmful content.
- aesh2Xa1 10mo ago
  This law demands a surveillance architecture, not just porn regulation. Once the norm and mechanism to de-anonymize content use exists, it can be expanded to any content, including political dissent, and for both accessing AND contributing to content (like, for example, on HN). The line should be drawn here. The vague potential harm of sex doesn't justify the concrete harm of abolishing digital privacy. Further, it's just sex. Equating imagery of legal, natural activity with physical danger is an error. It is blatantly dangerous to justify stripping citizens of their anonymity. The lawmakers who proposed this are oppressors. They are the danger to our children.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- Okawari 10mo ago
  I think the "surveilance capitalism" and centralization of companies like Meta, Google etc has made many of us very sensitive to any systems that will leave traces of us against our will, be it porn, flock cameras or anything else that is similar. I think we would have a lot less of a pushback against such policing efforts if governments had done a better job at reigning in tracking on the internet from the start. "Porn websites should check your age" is not that radical, but in a world where it doesn't feel unrealistic that much of the information about you is correlated and processed in ways that are not in your personal best interest, then it becomes another loop in the proverbial noose that can be used to hang us all.
- hopelite 10mo ago
  That’s what’s so pernicious about this manipulative tactic; you’re protecting the children, after all, right? The real motivation behind this effort is not protecting children (the signal for that is all over the place), it’s about interrupting and conditioning society for a total surveillance state that controls or suppresses speech and thought. As always, the “think of the children” is just a typically cynical, narcissistic manipulation of people’s natural instincts to protect children. Of course the underlying motivation is totalitarian. What, do you think they’re just going to come out and say “ok, peasants, we are not going to implement totalitarianism now”? No, they always sneak it in little by little, just as they always have, to the point that people still don’t understand what is going on in spite of things being as bad as they already are. This is basically grooming, and no, the van does not have candy in it, kid. If they actually cared about kids, they would have not banned and controlled adults from engaging in legal things freely, or they would have banned pornography as a clear societal ill. They could have also barred children from the open internet in general by allowing children only on a white/allow list; which is exponentially easier to implement, there is government justification, they are not full legal persons, and it can be enforced and penalized with existing child endangerment laws… you give access to a child, you are punished, just like if you, e.g., give children access to alcohol or any number of things. What they choose to implement instead was that adults have to reveal their identity, essentially digital “show me your papers!” The ruling class even constantly, openly talk about how they want everyone to have to provide their real identity on the internet to speak. They’re narcissists; all you have to do is listen to what they do and say to the audience they seek admiration from to see through the manipulation and lies directed towards you. The dots are right next to each other and are labeled A and B. I am always a bit confused why so many people cannot, maybe don’t want to connect obvious dots; maybe because of what it means, not wanting to face reality because it causes discomfort in what they believe about things and themselves? “I supported them and voted for them/this system. How could they be totalitarian? I would never vote for totalitarian control over myself, because I am smart and good. Therefore their intentions and motivations must be pure”. It’s a common abuse trap. It is also the underlying psychological manipulation mechanics of other cults and con artists, not just contemporary politicians.
- IAmBroom 10mo ago
  The alternative is that people have a venue to speak that is outside of government intervention. While we can all see potential abuse (yelling FIRE in a crowded theater), surely the IRL abuse by governments is equally clear, with possibly a higher potential for damage.
NitpickLawyer 10mo ago
> they can just ignore it. Eh, maybe? Maybe not? What if years later someone from that company flies through the UK? And if you think you can avoid connecting flights there, what if a flight from NY to CDG has to do an emergency landing and chooses somewhere in the UK?
- roblabla 10mo ago
  If you're that paranoid, you _can_ just chose not to fly. The bigger problem is if the UK has an extradition treaty with the country you live in.
HatchedLake721 10mo ago
> They can fine all they want, if the company doesn't have any entity in said territory they can just ignore it. Try running an online poker site abroad and serve US players and find out how that'll work out for you. Didn't work out well for Lithuanian/Canadian/Israeli Isai Scheinberg founder of Poker Stars, nor Calvin Ayre, the founder of the Bodog, who ended up on the FBI's top 10 list. United States reportedly sought* to seize around $3 billion worth of assets from 3 major online poker companies at the time. https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/457/is-online-poker-legal-or-not-in-the-united-states https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/457/is-online-poke... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
- squeefers 10mo ago
  [dead]
- iamnothere 10mo ago
  This is the UK we’re talking about, not the US. Watch out, they might send you a strongly worded email, then they’ll follow it up with a D-notice to prevent the media from telling everyone how you embarrassed them.
- IAmBroom 10mo ago
  You're missing the point. If the US has legal* authority to seize those assets, then by definition the corporation had assets in the US jurisdiction. * Stop laughing. It's a hypothetical, wherein the US government only does internally lawful acts.

crimsoneer 10mo ago

I mean, while this might be true, I'm not sure democracies being totally incapable of regulating the internet is a good place to be. I'm not sure a race to the bottom (if you attempt to regulate us in anyway we'll leave/go complain to the US president) is really a great outcome here. "Porn websites should check your age" is not some radical totalitarian demand I think?

brainwad 10mo ago
I think it actually is a radical totalitarian demand, if the only accepted form of age verification is government ID scans or selfie face capture. People should have a right to serve content without having to deal with the SPII of their clients.
- crimsoneer 10mo ago
  ... but they specifically don't have to, right? You can just use a third party verification company. Or you can not, if you'd prefer not to. You just have to do something vaguely meaningful that isn't just "Pinky swear you're 18".
  - mzajc 10mo ago
    How do they perform age checks?
  - debugnik 10mo ago
    > You can just use a third party verification company. That will ask for a government ID scan or selfie face capture. It solves the company-side problem only.
zettabomb 10mo ago
The alternative to the OSA is not "being totally incapable of regulating the internet". There's a wide, wide gap between complete lack of regulation and what the UK has done.
IlikeMadison 10mo ago
Do you really believe Ofcom and the UK establishment in general really care about the children or terrorists when they are pushing for mandatory digital ID and age-verification in every aspect of our digital lives or are you playing naive?
- crimsoneer 10mo ago
  Controversially, I think most people I know in politics really are actual humans, who got into politics to stop bad things happening, and think that children having ready access to pornography is A Bad Thing.
  - squeefers 10mo ago
    Search Molly Russell in the Uk.... that case sums up online child safety, parents letting emotion take the lead over intellect. That girl was suicidal, you cant blame a fuckin search engine if she was the one looking for suicide content. But whos going to tell those parents theyre wrong? Instead, now a laws been passed and every website now has to be a part time parent/teacher to all children in the uk.
  - hopelite 10mo ago
    What you or your politician friends may not understand is that “good people stopping bad things” is a very easily manipulated group, because it often is emotion based and reactionary. It is how America has been dismembered, little by little over the decades, good people doing good to stop the bad. A maybe as clear as possible example of this is the Patriot Act, even though it’s now 24 years old. It was so easy to manipulate people being emotional and thinking they were doing good and stopping bad, when in reality they were doing the opposite. I won’t even bother listing several other examples because people are still very deeply invested in those manipulations, because no one wants to believe a) they were so easily fooled and b) what they were raised to believe was just manipulative lies and actually bad, while being told it was good and supporting it made them good. It’s far easier thinking of oneself as good…which is the easily manipulated part. It’s all very standard psychological manipulation stuff, it just takes on whole other self-fulfilling characteristics when it ascends to a complete majority scale, because things can’t be bad if everyone believes… was trained on it all their lives… right?
mittensc 10mo ago
> . "Porn websites should check your age" is not some radical totalitarian demand I think? How would that work? do you want to provide government id to watch porn? And how is this helping since it's not going to work overall (other sites, torrents, etc)
- VBprogrammer 10mo ago
  If you take as a given that consenting adults should have access to sexually explicit material generated by other consenting adults; the potential for harm to adults is huge with the current implementations. Can't wait for the headlines when the entire watch history of some famous person is released after someone recognises them in their "age verification scan". It's about the only good thing which could come out of digital ID. Being able to proved proof of age in a double blind way.
sam-cop-vimes 10mo ago
Everyone disagreeing with this poster, are you okay with living in a society where anything goes? Do we give up trying to minimise harms because it is hard to do? The effort to regulate this sort of access has to start in some shape or form and then improved. Come up with a better solution, provide a proof of concept and yes regulatory agencies / governments will take notice. People like us work in these agencies. Let's propose better ways of achieving the same goal of reducing porn exposure to minors - not keep bashing the initiative taken.
- arccy 10mo ago
  Why is that even a good goal in the first place? Must children grow up in a sterile environment coddled by a nanny state?
  - sam-cop-vimes 10mo ago
    I don't know if you are a parent, but this is a ridiculous question. The unrestricted Internet is a cesspool. For the same reason you wouldn't allow a child to go play in an open sewer, you cannot allow them access to the unrestricted Internet.
    - squeefers 10mo ago
      > For the same reason you wouldn't allow a child to go play in an open sewer, you cannot allow them access to the unrestricted Internet. fair enough, but legislate this? why cant you just stop your own kid going on the internet? Id argue youre overblowing it but you cant ever remove the emotional/hysterical aspect when dealing with a parent
      - sam-cop-vimes 10mo ago
        > why cant you just stop your own kid going on the internet? May I ask if you are a parent? Because every parent knows that kids will try to cross any boundary set (which is how they learn, not a problem). If there is additional friction at each step before they access something which is harmful for them, chances are they would have matured well enough to prepare them before they are exposed to harmful content.
aesh2Xa1 10mo ago
This law demands a surveillance architecture, not just porn regulation. Once the norm and mechanism to de-anonymize content use exists, it can be expanded to any content, including political dissent, and for both accessing AND contributing to content (like, for example, on HN). The line should be drawn here. The vague potential harm of sex doesn't justify the concrete harm of abolishing digital privacy. Further, it's just sex. Equating imagery of legal, natural activity with physical danger is an error. It is blatantly dangerous to justify stripping citizens of their anonymity. The lawmakers who proposed this are oppressors. They are the danger to our children.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
Okawari 10mo ago
I think the "surveilance capitalism" and centralization of companies like Meta, Google etc has made many of us very sensitive to any systems that will leave traces of us against our will, be it porn, flock cameras or anything else that is similar. I think we would have a lot less of a pushback against such policing efforts if governments had done a better job at reigning in tracking on the internet from the start. "Porn websites should check your age" is not that radical, but in a world where it doesn't feel unrealistic that much of the information about you is correlated and processed in ways that are not in your personal best interest, then it becomes another loop in the proverbial noose that can be used to hang us all.
hopelite 10mo ago
That’s what’s so pernicious about this manipulative tactic; you’re protecting the children, after all, right? The real motivation behind this effort is not protecting children (the signal for that is all over the place), it’s about interrupting and conditioning society for a total surveillance state that controls or suppresses speech and thought. As always, the “think of the children” is just a typically cynical, narcissistic manipulation of people’s natural instincts to protect children. Of course the underlying motivation is totalitarian. What, do you think they’re just going to come out and say “ok, peasants, we are not going to implement totalitarianism now”? No, they always sneak it in little by little, just as they always have, to the point that people still don’t understand what is going on in spite of things being as bad as they already are. This is basically grooming, and no, the van does not have candy in it, kid. If they actually cared about kids, they would have not banned and controlled adults from engaging in legal things freely, or they would have banned pornography as a clear societal ill. They could have also barred children from the open internet in general by allowing children only on a white/allow list; which is exponentially easier to implement, there is government justification, they are not full legal persons, and it can be enforced and penalized with existing child endangerment laws… you give access to a child, you are punished, just like if you, e.g., give children access to alcohol or any number of things. What they choose to implement instead was that adults have to reveal their identity, essentially digital “show me your papers!” The ruling class even constantly, openly talk about how they want everyone to have to provide their real identity on the internet to speak. They’re narcissists; all you have to do is listen to what they do and say to the audience they seek admiration from to see through the manipulation and lies directed towards you. The dots are right next to each other and are labeled A and B. I am always a bit confused why so many people cannot, maybe don’t want to connect obvious dots; maybe because of what it means, not wanting to face reality because it causes discomfort in what they believe about things and themselves? “I supported them and voted for them/this system. How could they be totalitarian? I would never vote for totalitarian control over myself, because I am smart and good. Therefore their intentions and motivations must be pure”. It’s a common abuse trap. It is also the underlying psychological manipulation mechanics of other cults and con artists, not just contemporary politicians.
IAmBroom 10mo ago
The alternative is that people have a venue to speak that is outside of government intervention. While we can all see potential abuse (yelling FIRE in a crowded theater), surely the IRL abuse by governments is equally clear, with possibly a higher potential for damage.

NitpickLawyer 10mo ago

> they can just ignore it. Eh, maybe? Maybe not? What if years later someone from that company flies through the UK? And if you think you can avoid connecting flights there, what if a flight from NY to CDG has to do an emergency landing and chooses somewhere in the UK?

roblabla 10mo ago
If you're that paranoid, you _can_ just chose not to fly. The bigger problem is if the UK has an extradition treaty with the country you live in.

HatchedLake721 10mo ago

> They can fine all they want, if the company doesn't have any entity in said territory they can just ignore it. Try running an online poker site abroad and serve US players and find out how that'll work out for you. Didn't work out well for Lithuanian/Canadian/Israeli Isai Scheinberg founder of Poker Stars, nor Calvin Ayre, the founder of the Bodog, who ended up on the FBI's top 10 list. United States reportedly sought* to seize around $3 billion worth of assets from 3 major online poker companies at the time. https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/457/is-online-poker-legal-or-not-in-the-united-states https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/457/is-online-poke... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg

squeefers 10mo ago
[dead]
iamnothere 10mo ago
This is the UK we’re talking about, not the US. Watch out, they might send you a strongly worded email, then they’ll follow it up with a D-notice to prevent the media from telling everyone how you embarrassed them.
IAmBroom 10mo ago
You're missing the point. If the US has legal* authority to seize those assets, then by definition the corporation had assets in the US jurisdiction. * Stop laughing. It's a hypothetical, wherein the US government only does internally lawful acts.