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Storm cloud approaching rapidly

Accepted submission by owl at 2024-12-21 17:08:30
Digital Liberty
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/12/storm-cloud-approaching-rapidl.html [antipope.org]

By Charlie Stross [antipope.org]

This, from Techcrunch, seems like a good summary of a bad situation facing this blog: Death Of A Forum: How The UK's Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities [techdirt.com].

This blog is just that: my personal blog, with comments.

Over the past two decades a lively community has evolved in the discussion threads. However, the Online Safety Act threatens to impose impossible hurdles on the continuation of open fora in the UK. The intent is officially to protect adults and children from illegal content [www.gov.uk], but ... there's no lower threshold on scale. A blog with comments is subject to exactly as much regulatory oversight as Facebook. It applies to all fora that enable people in the UK (that would be me) to communicate with other people in the UK (that's a whole bunch of you), so I can't avoid the restrictions by moving to a hosting provider in the US. Nor am I terribly keen on filing the huge amounts of paperwork necessary to identify myself as the Trust and Safety officer of an organization and arrange for commercial age verification services (that I can't in any event integrate with this ancient blogging platform). And the penalties for infractions are the same—fines of up to £18M (which is a gigantic multiple of my gross worth).


Original Submission