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The Online Safety Act is a hideous piece of legislation. I hope Wikipedia block the UK. (I am a UK citizen).
by MattPalmer1086 1y ago
The Online Safety Act is a hideous piece of legislation. I hope Wikipedia block the UK.
(I am a UK citizen).
- slaymaker1907 1y agoAct like an authoritarian regime, get treated like other authoritarian regimes.
- catlikesshrimp 1y agoChina is doing great. Not saying the UK will do well, just that authoritarian regimes can be successful as states although not great for the commoners.
- FredPret 1y agoChina only started doing great when they relaxed their ultra-centralized economic rules a little bit in the 1990s. Read business books and news from the 80's - 90's, and they almost never mention China - it's all Germany, UK, Japan, USA. The stats tell the same story - China spent half a century going nowhere fast. After liberalizing their economy, China spent the 90's quietly growing, and only started making real waves in the news around 2000. All this to say that economic authoritarianism has never worked and there's no reason to suppose that the social kind is going to fare any better for anyone either.
- denkmoon 1y agoEconomic liberalism isn't really relevant to the question of social authoritarianism. While an enterprising individual in guangzhou can sell whatever he wants to the world without much state involvement, he can't really go around discussing Tibetan sovereignty for example.
- FredPret 1y agoMy current theory is that one leads to the other but we’ll see how that works out for our friend in Guangzhou. My point is centralization doesn’t work, so maybe social authoritarianism has deleterious cultural effects that will show up generations from now.
- anikom15 1y agoIt doesn’t lead to the other. Data point: Hong Kong.
- HPsquared 1y agoSuccess of authoritarian regimes depends on the competence (and alignment) of the leadership. Not something we have much of here.
- MattPalmer1086 1y agoFor the record, I'm not actually against age verification for certain content. But it would have to be: 1) private - anonymous (don't know who is requesting access) and unlinkable (don't know if the same user makes repeated requests or is the same user on other services). 2) widely available and extremely easy to register and integrate. The current situation is that it's not easy, or private, or cheap to integrate. And the measures they say they will accept are trivially easy to bypass - so what's the point? I worked in a startup that satisfied point 1 back in 2015. The widely available bit didn't come off though when we ran out of runway.
- nemomarx 1y agothere's some irony that the EU is set to have a fairly anonymous solution like next year. they could have waited or tried to use similar tech for this, in theory
- MattPalmer1086 1y agoInteresting - do you have a link to it?
- nemomarx 1y agohttps://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-digital-identity_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-... It's anonymous to the sites or companies you use it with and not to the government, but that would still be more robust than the uks checks so far. it's only end of 26 though, I thought it was at the end of this year instead.
- MattPalmer1086 1y agoAnd that really shows the difference in how the EU operates Vs the UK. They see a general need which the market cannot easily satisfy on its own - it needs standardisation to be cheap and interoperable, and it needs an identity backed by a trusted authority. So they establish a framework and legislation to make that possible. The UK instead just states it's illegal not to do it, but without any private and not-trivially bypassed services available. Proactive vs reactive. It is often said that legislation tends to lag behind technology. At last, the UK is beating the world by legislating ahead of it!
- jeroenhd 1y agoYou mean have companies and organization comply with regulations and having their complaints ignored? I think that's what's happening right now.
- codedokode 1y agoLeaving the market never works - in Russia, once another Western site or app gets blocked, several local competitors instantly pop out. That's how the market works, there are always people hungry for money.
- ronsor 1y agoThe Russian market is artificially distorted.
- codedokode 1y agoChina has the same story - all Western companies are successfully replaced with no issues (except for CPU and GPU vendors).
- Tadpole9181 1y agoThen let them? And the UK gets a dogshit ripoff Wikipedia. Authoritarian supporters suffer, that's the hard lesson people need to understand. This costs Wikipedia nothing - they are not funded by ads. And, in exchange, they don't get sued or any of their employees arrested.
- asah 1y agoWon't users just go to AI summaries ?
- EasyMark 1y agoI think the better option is wikipedia to pull all operations out of the UK that might be there and NOT block UK IP addresses. Stand up for the British people, thumb their nose at the British government. Let the UK put up a "Great Firewall of Great Britain" so the British people understand how close their government is flirting with fascism, while they still have time to remove the fascist leaning politicians.
- alt227 1y agoUnfortunately, pretty much all politicians from all parties supported this law. They are as easy to scare with the 'think of the children' argument as the rest of the population are.
- blibble 1y agoif they block the UK, 20 UK specific copies will spring up overnight it will achieve absolutely nothing, except to destroy their "market share"
- Aloisius 1y agoIt would shield them from legal liability which is more than nothing. That is the primary reason to ban UK visitors. They do seem to be considering banning only users after the 7 millionth - 1 visitor every month to avoid being classified as category 1 instead. That would let them avoid some of the most onerous parts of the OSA that would require stripping anonymity from editors and censoring whatever Ofcom says is "misinformation" and "disinformation."