The UKs Online Safety Act is going to soon be enforced. That has resulted in a number of small websites shutting down.
Among the arguments we’ve heard over the years supporting bad and dangerous bills is that the criticism is exaggerating the consequences. Specifically, the results of the various pieces of legislation won’t really result in swaths of websites getting shut down. It hasn’t before and it’s not about to start now. If anything, such arguments is just “shilling for Big Tech”. The problem is that the arguments against such bills is grounded in the facts of how the internet works and the text of the bill itself. This as opposed to the arguments for such bills being grounded in gut feeling and personal vibes at most (or, more commonly, outright disinformation and propaganda being fuelled by the surveillance and censorship industrial complex).
The thing is, reality doesn’t care about your personal beliefs. It does what it does. What’s more, there are already plenty of examples out there today where bad bills that became law resulted in the shuttering of websites or web services blocking certain regions.
One famous example is SESTA/FOSTA, an American bill pretending to crack down on human trafficking, shutting down legitimate web services such as dating websites and tools used for sex workers to help keep themselves safe. This because despite the legitimacy, the legal hoops you have to jump through are too onerous to comply with, meaning that shutting down was the only option despite never really breaking the law.
A second example is age verification laws being implemented in multiple US states resulting in sites like Pornhub blocking the IP addresses of those states. Again, despite the legitimacy of such sites today, complying with such terrible legislation is excessive and blocking those IP addresses is simply a tool to protect the privacy and safety of the users more than anything else.
In Canada, the Online News Act has resulted in Meta dropping news links on their service. This despite linking to news sources is not actually an illegal act. Instead, it made financial sense to simply block those links on their platforms given that so little of their business relies on such links. This has resulted in numerous news sites going bankrupt across Canada as an indirect consequence of the Online News Act.
The bottom line is this: bad laws are already causing real harm to the open internet and it’s only getting worse. Another law that we have raised alarms about in the past is the UK Online Safety Act. The law requires website to implement onerous measures to remain in compliance with the law. On the leadup to the bills passage, Wikipedia threatened to leave the UK. Telegram, for their part, also threatened to leave if they are required to break their encryption.
Like other bad laws out there being pushed by lawmakers who have little to no understanding of the internet (or simply don’t care to understand it), all the warnings went ignored and the bill passed anyway to become law. As a result, the consequences of the UKs actions are already being felt. A year after OFcom released it’s proposal for implementing the Act, owners of various online communities are being forced to announce that they will be shutting down. This because compliance is too onerous (big surprise). From TechDirt:
We’ve been warning for years that the UK’s Online Safety Act would be a disaster for the open internet. Its supporters accused us of exaggerating, or “shilling” for Big Tech. But as we’ve long argued, while tech giants like Facebook and Google might be able to shoulder the law’s immense regulatory burdens, smaller sites would crumble.
Well, it’s already happening.
On Monday, the London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed (LFGSS) online forum announced that it would be shutting down the day before the Online Safety Act goes into effect. It noted that it is effectively impossible to comply with the law. This was in response to UK regulator Ofcom telling online businesses that they need to start complying.
This includes registering a “senior person” with Ofcom who will be held accountable should Ofcom decide your site isn’t safe enough. It also means that moderation teams need to be fully staffed with quick response times if bad (loosely defined) content is found on the site. On top of that, sites need to take proactive measures to protect children.
While all of this may make sense for larger sites, it’s impossible for a small one-person passion project forum for bikers in London. For a small, community-driven forum, these requirements are not just burdensome, but existential.
But it’s not just the LFGSS that’s shutting down, but also Microcosm, the open source forum platform underlying LFGSS which was apparently created by the same individual and offered similar local community forums for others beyond just the London biking community.
Apparently, Microcosm is hosting approximately 300 small communities, all of which will either shut down or have to migrate within three months.
What I find incredibly ironic is that those pushing these bills are saying that they are doing so to hold “Big Tech” accountable. Instead, all this does is cement their position by shutting down their competition. If you think their market dominance is bad before, just think how much worse it’s going to be when people who want to run things differently are forced to call it quits because the new laws make it impossible to survive. The Online Safety Act is a huge gift to “Big Tech”, not holding them accountable, and anyone who says otherwise is a complete idiot. The results above speak for themselves.
What’s more, this is only going to encourage users who don’t like using Facebook deeper underground to avoid the pervasive tracking and endless microtargeting advertising. Whether that is to offshore third party services or deep into a more encrypted web. This while others are forced to help further grow the userbases of the likes of Facebook and Twitter or face being completely cut off from their own communities. This brings a whole host of issues including making crime harder to track.
Moreover, there is the practical pitfalls of all of this. Instead of people in the UK owning a small business, benefiting the local economy, those people are going to get run out of business while offshore services reap the benefits of their competitors being forced to shut down. It’s a loss for the economy, government, and the wider local community – all because of an ignorantly pushed bad law.
Even worse is that all signs point to politicians ignoring the warnings of a bad law is only going to increase from here on out. This under the basis of, “Well, country “X” jumped off an economic cliff, I guess we have no choice but to follow suit and comply with the global standard of our country jumping off the economic cliff as well. It’s either that or risk getting left behind with all that pesky prosperity no one wants these days.”
All we can do is watch the ensuing chaos and destruction and report what we can with our highly limited resources right up to the point where they come after us next.
