Online Safety Act Tries to Accomplish the Impossible
Hubris. Dumb politicians and dumb policies that are hard to enforce effectively:
Somebody (MinceR) asked me in IRC about the UK’s Online Safety Act, which may or will apply to me. To quote him, "what's the concern anyway? minors being able to use the Internet for anything? like, anything at all?"
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a lobby-driven take on it (i.e. the usual) and my initial reaction to the above question/s was: "i didn't follow that closely or saw what "content" they deem harmful, but i generally agree with the sentiment that 1) there is a lot of crap online; 2) that crap has worse effect for a person with less life experience; see what australia does about under 16s right now" (informal, IRC). Prior to that I said "it tackles a real issue the wrong way [as] the concern is legit, the solution is not".
An associate of ours is questioning the "underlying process within the EFF which led to the decision to have [this article] written", so we're doing our own.
So let's start with the basics.
What is the UK’s Online Safety Act? The premise is, we need to "protect" young people and adults online from "bad" things online (not limited to "content").
Who does this "protecting"? What are the criteria for "harms"?
Therein lies a key problem. Once implemented, those things can change. For instance, it can be asserted that some site critical of the government must be blocked. Also, what's deemed unsuitable for young people (how young?) will also be classified as unsuitable for adults.
So what are the solutions to "bad" things (whatever counts as bad) online? Blocking? Warnings? Delisting?
For sure this isn't a new problem. The media (like radio) has long dealt with those sorts of issues. In some cases, in order to get certified (or licensed) a channel or station or newspaper or whatever would have to meet some quality criteria.
Why is the Web (or the Net in general) any different? Could little kids not manage to get their hands on some Playboy Magazine (or even pornography) before the Web? Nonsense. Regarding grooming*, there are already laws against that, the Online Safety Act would introduce nothing unprecedented in that regard.
Regarding kids and pornography, Ryan calls this "I'm doing this because I know I'm not supposed to." He says: "Children have a tendency to rebel."
See, aside from VPNs and all sorts of means for bypassing restrictions, kids were always able to circumvent censorship and the challenge gave some of them an extra "thrill".
In my personal view, the UK Government - due to its lack of consultation with the right stakeholders - is trying to accomplish something that's close to impossible and would be expensive to enforce.
All I can say is, "good luck with that!"
The same is true for encryption in the UK. I use encryption in my communications every day; I don't care if the government likes it or not and I don't use GAFAM. █
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* "I have a comment on things that are harmful to minors," Ryan says in IRC. "When I was about 14 years old, there was a guy in South Bend, Indiana who told me his name was "Joey" I can't remember how he spelled his last name, but I can remember what it was phonetically "Shafer" maybe. Anyway, he started trying to groom me and was sending me naked pictures of himself through email and AOL Instant Messenger. He said that he had a teenage boy that was 15 that he "had sex with", and eventually "Joey" told me he was 38 years old. The local police department had no idea what to do about it because they had no clue what to do about things that happened on the internet, even though it was in the same state. A lot has changed since then, and there's still disgusting people who are sending nudes to kids. But it's over things like Instagram and Facebook and whatever they're using, where it's practically guaranteed they'll be caught just for sending it because the system is set up to spy on people already. Plus those companies log everything so if they don't get caught right away, they will as soon as the kid screams to their parents there's some gross guy on the internet or, when the "child" turns out to be the police. It's not a state secret that the police are a LOT better at catching these people today than they were in the late 90s and people still do it. There will always be plenty of "dumb ones" to catch because all the dummies out there who are gross and like kids don't think they'll be caught. There's probably no class of criminal that the police want to bust more. It justifies there being a "police department" even when most of what they do is bullshit. They have to do some legitimate public safety work because if they did none at all, nobody would tolerate them. So the police pitch themselves as "Hey at least we're keeping gross people away from kids." "