8 ms·

We do not have sufficient links to the UK for Online Safety Act to be applicable

295 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

jamesbelchamber 1y ago
> Speaking of which, the memo implies that “significance” in this context is interpreted as being relative to the population of the UK, not relative to the user base of the service. We have seen risk assessments that take the other interpretation and consider their UK user base to be “significant” because it makes up a large portion of their overall user base, but the advice we received suggests we should not use this interpretation. Interesting - this implies that the vast majority of niche communities are not considered to be in scope, so long as they're not on a service like Discord I guess.
- delichon 1y ago
  The frog wants a plan for when they inevitably turn up the heat by reinterpreting significance. The time to hop out may be now.
- kelnos 1y ago
  Perhaps, but this sort of thing is a part of the problem: the law itself is written vaguely enough that Ofcom could at any time change their interpretation and decide that previously out-of-scope communities are now in-scope, and go after them. It's just a variation of selective enforcement.
  - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    Laws in general tend to leave a bit of room for interpretation, and then those are to be cemented in specific contexts/scenarios by precedents, that's how I understand many systems of law at at least, maybe it works differently where Libera.chat and Ofcom are based.
    - bawolff 1y ago
      I think its more about the degree. Some level of flexibility makes sense. That leaves room to enforce the intent instead of the technicalities. However if its too broad, then you've basically thrown away rule of law. If everyone is arguably in violation but a government official decides who to enforce, esentially you just have justice by decree.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- HotGarbage 1y ago
  Does that mean a significant population of Britbongs are on 4chan?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
Really grateful that a project like this took on the task to ask for legal advice, and extra kudos for actually releasing a statement based on their understanding of the legal advice. Hopefully will be useful to lots of similar organizations. Libera.chat seems to say that even if Ofcom thinks they have a case, they don't as Libera's user base doesn't have enough UK users: > The exact fraction of the UK’s online population that must use a given service to be considered “significant” is unknown, but based on our counsel’s observations of Ofcom’s previous regulatory actions, it appears to be much higher than our internal estimates of how large our UK user base is. Related submission with 788 comments from ~1 week ago: "4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614148
- blibble 1y ago
  significant can mean anything ofcom want it to their entire post is sophistry and wishful thinking, neither of which will work if ofcom decide to go after them the intention of the OSA is to attempt to regulate user-to-user communications services, of which IRC is one they're probably right that they're near bottom of the list though (at least until this blog post ends up on their desk monday morning)
  - Daviey 1y ago
    If they were persued, I assume they'd shut down. At the same time, a new IT service called "freechat" or "librenode" would start up.
  - NoboruWataya 1y ago
    > significant can mean anything ofcom want it to You're right in the sense that they can pursue whomever they want based on whatever interpretation of "significant" they may hold. But it is not Ofcom that ultimately decides on the meaning of the term, that is for a court to decide and that court would likely rely on the same authorities and principles that Libera's lawyers did in their advice.
    - 1y ago
consumer451 1y ago
For anyone who read the post title incorrectly, as I did initially: Libera.chat: an IRC network LibreChat: an open-source chat application that supports multiple AI models and provides a UI similar to ChatGPT I was only familiar with the latter, which is a very cool and useful project. Currently reading up on the prior.
- Telemakhos 1y ago
  It used to be that a lot of free and open source developers would hang out on Freenode IRC to communicate with users; then things happened, and Libera was forked from Freenode.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- immibis 1y ago
  I guess you're one of today's 10,000 learning about IRC. It used to be as well known as HTTP. How times have changed.
  - consumer451 1y ago
    I used to run a BBS out of my parents house as a kid. I'm old enough to know what IRC is, but in my experience it was that thing you'd get booted from as soon as you tried to access it, lol.
kelnos 1y ago
I was expecting/hoping that the legal advice was that an IRC network isn't subject to the law, but it seems like the only advice here was "you're based in Sweden and have only trivial ties to the UK, so the UK/Ofcom can't reasonably go after you". That feels like a kinda "duh" thing? Even though the UK believes they can enforce this law abroad, if I were running a service outside of UK jurisdiction that would otherwise be subject to the Online Safety Act, I certainly wouldn't comply with it.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  If you step foot in the UK, you would be arrested on the spot.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    There’s a lot of non-UK world to walk around in.
  - iamnothere 1y ago
    That seems like not a big deal? I never intend to travel to Russia either, or even go near its airspace.
    - dalmo3 1y ago
      What if you're flying to France and your plane has to make an emergency landing in the UK? Genuine question.
      - iamnothere 1y ago
        After what happened to Durov I’m not so eager to travel there either. Frankly, given the escalating hostility of the EU to technological freedom, it’s becoming a no-go zone for me. Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and NZ are still nice to visit, though. It’s a big world.
      - tcfhgj 1y ago
        Only a small minority of people use planes in the first place
busymom0 1y ago
> TL;DR: the legal firm we’ve engaged has sent us a memo indicating that in their opinion we can reasonably argue we do not have sufficient links to the UK for the Online Safety Act to be applicable to us. They also believe we would be at low risk of attempted enforcement action even if Ofcom does consider us to be in-scope for the OSA. We will continue to ensure that this is the case by keeping internal estimates of our UK user base and by continuing with our current efforts to keep Libera.Chat reasonably safe. We have no plans to institute any ID requirements for the forseeable future. Is it just me or is this not super confidence inspiring for what happens in the future? This just seems like an arbitrary time in future when they either have enough UK users or if Ofcom suddenly lowers or entirely removes the arbitrary "size" estimate, OSA will become applicable? As far as I can tell, we don't even know what this arbitrary "size" estimate is?
- toast0 1y ago
  Sure, but if you're forward looking, the rules could change and it's not predictable. This kind of a memo is a useful CYA. An interpretation of the current situation and likely risk factors, and when the situation changes in the future, an artifact that justifies their current non-compliance. Will Ofcom/courts accept it and not require compliance if the situation changes? No, but it might eliminate or reduce penalties for non-compliance.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  I think the goal is not to provide confidence (at least not artificially so). The situation is just not great. This letter: * At least reassures their users that they are doing their best, at least, even though that might not be much. * Emphasizes the difficulty of the situation that the UK created. * Shares, at least, a description of the advice they got (properly caveated that they or their lawyers weren’t giving anybody actual legal advice).
portaouflop 1y ago
> end result is the same: a denial of service to people in the UK solely because of the country they live in. This would also probably help sway the public opinion in the UL to stop electing representatives that come up with laws like this - so a win either way.
- hexbin010 1y ago
  Are you making a common mistake of assuming laws like this don't represent public opinon? https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-age-checks-are-sceptical-effectiveness-and-unwilling-share-id https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-... Middle England is conservative and authoritarian.
  - rcxdude 1y ago
    Yeah, sadly the average thought on this law starts and ends with "think of the children" and "it's just like buying alcohol"
  - jamesbelchamber 1y ago
    To steel-man this - the public have become more wary of the internet's influence on society generally: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/technology/trackers/how-optimistic-or-pessimistic-are-brits-about-the-influence-of-the-internet-on-society https://yougov.co.uk/topics/technology/trackers/how-optimist... If you consider all we know about the excesses and influences of big tech companies, and then blunt that down to a more lay perspective, it's pretty easy to understand why we've landed up here. People have lost faith in us.
    - NanoCoaster 1y ago
      > People have lost faith in us. That's a very powerful way to sum up what I've been feeling for a while. People did lose faith, and to be honest, I can't really blame them. From a layman's perspective, it's not obvious that there's a distinction between "Big Tech" and other so-called "providers of services" (the term itself feels kind of icky) in the internet. Throw the "Tech Bro" term in there and things get even more difficult. I'm guessing a lot of people never really knew about forums, chat communities and other things like that existing outside of the big social media companies' mostly-walled gardens. Maybe they heard some scary things about 4chan, well, that'll help. To many of them, it's the little man vs. the big tech companies that skirted regulations for way too long. That there's a possible third party (or rather, category) involved is not obvious from the outside.
donohoe 1y ago
Not a lawyer but from depths of GDPR meetings and implementation work years ago, my understanding was if you do not have any exposure in a given jurisdiction (typically office or employees etc) then you can tell them to get lost. UK should not be able to regulate nature of photons being sent from outside of their borders. What am I missing?
- rogerrogerr 1y ago
  I’ve wondered why more people don’t talk about this approach. Is it because you might get arrested if you ever do step foot in the UK?
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    It comes up in every thread about this sort of thing. It is basically true, although keep in mind that the UK is basically a “friendly” country to most of the other countries that are in the sort of… liberal/capitalist/democracy clique, so hypothetically it wouldn’t be that surprising if some of our countries ended up with some reciprocity some day for the fines or whatever.
- sys_64738 1y ago
  If you physically transit through UK jurisdiction then they could arrest you through a Commonwealth wide warrant. Say, you go to the Bahamas then your name might pop up on the computer and you get collared and deported to Britain. If you're an executive then they will happily grab you.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  There’s no reason to assume that a totally different law in a different country works the same way as GDPR does.
arresin 1y ago
I really don’t get it. Just blanket block all UK ips. All sites should be doing this—large or small. I’m going to on my small blog even.
- gary_0 1y ago
  The Internet no longer interprets censorship as damage and routes around it[0]. Instead, it is interpreted it as an opportunity to raise the barrier of entry for competitors, and embraced. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)#Activism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)#Activi...
- antihero 1y ago
  There's like 70m of us and most people will just use competitors as opposed to bothering with VPNs. So you're shooting yourself in the foot, financially.
  - denkmoon 1y ago
    Sucks for people trying to make money then, but that’s hardly a sympathetic case. Sounds like the UK are the ones truly shooting themselves in the foot. Again.
  - FlameRobot 1y ago
    There is a huge amount of UK infra now that is dependant on US companies either directly or indirectly (AWS, Microsoft/Azure). Code, data and infra is locked into US platforms. When US-EAST-1 when down last week, it halted our whole operations at our workplace. Looking at freelancer groups I am part of (whatsapp, slack etc), they had the same experience. The UK being blocked from the outside won't happen anyway. The large tech giants will just either cut a deal (this already happen with Apple/iCloud), or they will comply with the new acts. The sites that don't comply won't be big enough for anyone to care in normie land and thus there will be no real pressure on the UK gov.
  - loeg 1y ago
    Oh no, our websites will only be accessible by 99.15% of the world's population and 97% of its economy. Irreparable financial harm.
IshKebab 1y ago
> We have a few servers in the UK, but they can be migrated on short notice. You should do that as soon as possible. You don't escape past "violations" by dealing with them when they are discovered. Plus the presence of servers in the UK is easily enough for Ofcom to go after you, even if they ultimately lose their case. There's no benefit to keeping those UK servers. > we can reasonably argue we do not have sufficient links to the UK for the Online Safety Act to be applicable to us. > keeping internal estimates of our UK user base The fact that you know you have UK users is also almost certainly enough for Ofcom to go after you. Did 4chan have any stronger links to the UK? I don't think so. I'm not saying they should give in and follow the OSA but I think they're being pretty naive about how reasonable Ofcom is.
calvinmorrison 1y ago
What a waste of limited resources. What happened to the libre anti copyright hackers and piraters from the 90s? It's effete, getting a lawyer. Better to draw a picture of Steimer covered in feces and fax 10000 copies to parliament
- immibis 1y ago
  What happened is that governments successfully figured out how to police the internet. Except for Tor. For some reason though, we're still not layering everything on top of Tor.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  I don’t really think libera has or has ever had that kind of ethos or aesthetic. It is used by a lot of serious people and projects that are not directly involved with copyright politics and have no interest in cosplaying as ThePirateBay.
  - calvinmorrison 1y ago
    the 150,000 or so people who still actively use IRC networks absolutely have a major crossover with these.
    - School-Cotton 1y ago
      Sure, no argument there.
tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
There is an interesting sentence in the post that shows why you want to ask actual lawyers, even if the law actually meant what one would think based on a common-sense reading of the text (it often doesn't) and you could read it (you often can't, because you might not know about a second law that also applies): > For the time being, services like ours do not appear to be Ofcom’s priority. Lawyers don't just tell you how the law is interpreted, but also how it's applied in practice. Often, bad law is worked around by the legal system rather than fixing it, and while one could rightfully lament this, if your goal is to get something done rather than fix the country's legal system... ask a lawyer and you might find yourself unblocked, or be told about a way to avoid the issue, or at least have a better understanding how big the risk is in practice, allowing you to make an informed decision.
- renewiltord 1y ago
  Yeah, the purpose of regulators applying law differently in practice is so that government administrations can play kingmaker and receive appropriate rewards.
ExpertAdvisor01 1y ago
I'm pretty sure they can't visit the UK right ? As the UK has jurisdiction over them , if they are physically there.
CGamesPlay 1y ago
Several comments here are interpreting this as the common "we just don't care about the UK's jurisdiction". That is not what Libera.chat is saying. They have staff in the UK, users in the UK, and are, in their interpretation, abiding by the terms of the OSA. Their interpretation is that the ID verification requirement doesn't apply to their service, for the reasons they outline in the article.
isaacremuant 1y ago
That's great, what about when Europe does the same? https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-verification https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver... It's a corporate lobbyst push and UK/Australia are just the canaries in the coalmine. You won't escape it by being "they didn't quite come for me yet".
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

295 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

> Speaking of which, the memo implies that “significance” in this context is interpreted as being relative to the population of the UK, not relative to the user base of the service. We have seen risk assessments that take the other interpretation and consider their UK user base to be “significant” because it makes up a large portion of their overall user base, but the advice we received suggests we should not use this interpretation. Interesting - this implies that the vast majority of niche communities are not considered to be in scope, so long as they're not on a service like Discord I guess.

delichon 1y ago
The frog wants a plan for when they inevitably turn up the heat by reinterpreting significance. The time to hop out may be now.
kelnos 1y ago
Perhaps, but this sort of thing is a part of the problem: the law itself is written vaguely enough that Ofcom could at any time change their interpretation and decide that previously out-of-scope communities are now in-scope, and go after them. It's just a variation of selective enforcement.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  Laws in general tend to leave a bit of room for interpretation, and then those are to be cemented in specific contexts/scenarios by precedents, that's how I understand many systems of law at at least, maybe it works differently where Libera.chat and Ofcom are based.
  - bawolff 1y ago
    I think its more about the degree. Some level of flexibility makes sense. That leaves room to enforce the intent instead of the technicalities. However if its too broad, then you've basically thrown away rule of law. If everyone is arguably in violation but a government official decides who to enforce, esentially you just have justice by decree.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
HotGarbage 1y ago
Does that mean a significant population of Britbongs are on 4chan?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

Really grateful that a project like this took on the task to ask for legal advice, and extra kudos for actually releasing a statement based on their understanding of the legal advice. Hopefully will be useful to lots of similar organizations. Libera.chat seems to say that even if Ofcom thinks they have a case, they don't as Libera's user base doesn't have enough UK users: > The exact fraction of the UK’s online population that must use a given service to be considered “significant” is unknown, but based on our counsel’s observations of Ofcom’s previous regulatory actions, it appears to be much higher than our internal estimates of how large our UK user base is. Related submission with 788 comments from ~1 week ago: "4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614148

blibble 1y ago
significant can mean anything ofcom want it to their entire post is sophistry and wishful thinking, neither of which will work if ofcom decide to go after them the intention of the OSA is to attempt to regulate user-to-user communications services, of which IRC is one they're probably right that they're near bottom of the list though (at least until this blog post ends up on their desk monday morning)
- Daviey 1y ago
  If they were persued, I assume they'd shut down. At the same time, a new IT service called "freechat" or "librenode" would start up.
- NoboruWataya 1y ago
  > significant can mean anything ofcom want it to You're right in the sense that they can pursue whomever they want based on whatever interpretation of "significant" they may hold. But it is not Ofcom that ultimately decides on the meaning of the term, that is for a court to decide and that court would likely rely on the same authorities and principles that Libera's lawyers did in their advice.
  - 1y ago

consumer451 1y ago

For anyone who read the post title incorrectly, as I did initially: Libera.chat: an IRC network LibreChat: an open-source chat application that supports multiple AI models and provides a UI similar to ChatGPT I was only familiar with the latter, which is a very cool and useful project. Currently reading up on the prior.

Telemakhos 1y ago
It used to be that a lot of free and open source developers would hang out on Freenode IRC to communicate with users; then things happened, and Libera was forked from Freenode.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
immibis 1y ago
I guess you're one of today's 10,000 learning about IRC. It used to be as well known as HTTP. How times have changed.
- consumer451 1y ago
  I used to run a BBS out of my parents house as a kid. I'm old enough to know what IRC is, but in my experience it was that thing you'd get booted from as soon as you tried to access it, lol.

kelnos 1y ago

I was expecting/hoping that the legal advice was that an IRC network isn't subject to the law, but it seems like the only advice here was "you're based in Sweden and have only trivial ties to the UK, so the UK/Ofcom can't reasonably go after you". That feels like a kinda "duh" thing? Even though the UK believes they can enforce this law abroad, if I were running a service outside of UK jurisdiction that would otherwise be subject to the Online Safety Act, I certainly wouldn't comply with it.

deadbabe 1y ago
If you step foot in the UK, you would be arrested on the spot.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  There’s a lot of non-UK world to walk around in.
- iamnothere 1y ago
  That seems like not a big deal? I never intend to travel to Russia either, or even go near its airspace.
  - dalmo3 1y ago
    What if you're flying to France and your plane has to make an emergency landing in the UK? Genuine question.
    - iamnothere 1y ago
      After what happened to Durov I’m not so eager to travel there either. Frankly, given the escalating hostility of the EU to technological freedom, it’s becoming a no-go zone for me. Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and NZ are still nice to visit, though. It’s a big world.
    - tcfhgj 1y ago
      Only a small minority of people use planes in the first place

busymom0 1y ago

> TL;DR: the legal firm we’ve engaged has sent us a memo indicating that in their opinion we can reasonably argue we do not have sufficient links to the UK for the Online Safety Act to be applicable to us. They also believe we would be at low risk of attempted enforcement action even if Ofcom does consider us to be in-scope for the OSA. We will continue to ensure that this is the case by keeping internal estimates of our UK user base and by continuing with our current efforts to keep Libera.Chat reasonably safe. We have no plans to institute any ID requirements for the forseeable future. Is it just me or is this not super confidence inspiring for what happens in the future? This just seems like an arbitrary time in future when they either have enough UK users or if Ofcom suddenly lowers or entirely removes the arbitrary "size" estimate, OSA will become applicable? As far as I can tell, we don't even know what this arbitrary "size" estimate is?

toast0 1y ago
Sure, but if you're forward looking, the rules could change and it's not predictable. This kind of a memo is a useful CYA. An interpretation of the current situation and likely risk factors, and when the situation changes in the future, an artifact that justifies their current non-compliance. Will Ofcom/courts accept it and not require compliance if the situation changes? No, but it might eliminate or reduce penalties for non-compliance.
bee_rider 1y ago
I think the goal is not to provide confidence (at least not artificially so). The situation is just not great. This letter: * At least reassures their users that they are doing their best, at least, even though that might not be much. * Emphasizes the difficulty of the situation that the UK created. * Shares, at least, a description of the advice they got (properly caveated that they or their lawyers weren’t giving anybody actual legal advice).

portaouflop 1y ago

> end result is the same: a denial of service to people in the UK solely because of the country they live in. This would also probably help sway the public opinion in the UL to stop electing representatives that come up with laws like this - so a win either way.

hexbin010 1y ago
Are you making a common mistake of assuming laws like this don't represent public opinon? https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-age-checks-are-sceptical-effectiveness-and-unwilling-share-id https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-... Middle England is conservative and authoritarian.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  Yeah, sadly the average thought on this law starts and ends with "think of the children" and "it's just like buying alcohol"
- jamesbelchamber 1y ago
  To steel-man this - the public have become more wary of the internet's influence on society generally: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/technology/trackers/how-optimistic-or-pessimistic-are-brits-about-the-influence-of-the-internet-on-society https://yougov.co.uk/topics/technology/trackers/how-optimist... If you consider all we know about the excesses and influences of big tech companies, and then blunt that down to a more lay perspective, it's pretty easy to understand why we've landed up here. People have lost faith in us.
  - NanoCoaster 1y ago
    > People have lost faith in us. That's a very powerful way to sum up what I've been feeling for a while. People did lose faith, and to be honest, I can't really blame them. From a layman's perspective, it's not obvious that there's a distinction between "Big Tech" and other so-called "providers of services" (the term itself feels kind of icky) in the internet. Throw the "Tech Bro" term in there and things get even more difficult. I'm guessing a lot of people never really knew about forums, chat communities and other things like that existing outside of the big social media companies' mostly-walled gardens. Maybe they heard some scary things about 4chan, well, that'll help. To many of them, it's the little man vs. the big tech companies that skirted regulations for way too long. That there's a possible third party (or rather, category) involved is not obvious from the outside.

donohoe 1y ago

Not a lawyer but from depths of GDPR meetings and implementation work years ago, my understanding was if you do not have any exposure in a given jurisdiction (typically office or employees etc) then you can tell them to get lost. UK should not be able to regulate nature of photons being sent from outside of their borders. What am I missing?

rogerrogerr 1y ago
I’ve wondered why more people don’t talk about this approach. Is it because you might get arrested if you ever do step foot in the UK?
- bee_rider 1y ago
  It comes up in every thread about this sort of thing. It is basically true, although keep in mind that the UK is basically a “friendly” country to most of the other countries that are in the sort of… liberal/capitalist/democracy clique, so hypothetically it wouldn’t be that surprising if some of our countries ended up with some reciprocity some day for the fines or whatever.
sys_64738 1y ago
If you physically transit through UK jurisdiction then they could arrest you through a Commonwealth wide warrant. Say, you go to the Bahamas then your name might pop up on the computer and you get collared and deported to Britain. If you're an executive then they will happily grab you.
School-Cotton 1y ago
There’s no reason to assume that a totally different law in a different country works the same way as GDPR does.

arresin 1y ago

I really don’t get it. Just blanket block all UK ips. All sites should be doing this—large or small. I’m going to on my small blog even.

gary_0 1y ago
The Internet no longer interprets censorship as damage and routes around it[0]. Instead, it is interpreted it as an opportunity to raise the barrier of entry for competitors, and embraced. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)#Activism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)#Activi...
antihero 1y ago
There's like 70m of us and most people will just use competitors as opposed to bothering with VPNs. So you're shooting yourself in the foot, financially.
- denkmoon 1y ago
  Sucks for people trying to make money then, but that’s hardly a sympathetic case. Sounds like the UK are the ones truly shooting themselves in the foot. Again.
- FlameRobot 1y ago
  There is a huge amount of UK infra now that is dependant on US companies either directly or indirectly (AWS, Microsoft/Azure). Code, data and infra is locked into US platforms. When US-EAST-1 when down last week, it halted our whole operations at our workplace. Looking at freelancer groups I am part of (whatsapp, slack etc), they had the same experience. The UK being blocked from the outside won't happen anyway. The large tech giants will just either cut a deal (this already happen with Apple/iCloud), or they will comply with the new acts. The sites that don't comply won't be big enough for anyone to care in normie land and thus there will be no real pressure on the UK gov.
- loeg 1y ago
  Oh no, our websites will only be accessible by 99.15% of the world's population and 97% of its economy. Irreparable financial harm.

IshKebab 1y ago

> We have a few servers in the UK, but they can be migrated on short notice. You should do that as soon as possible. You don't escape past "violations" by dealing with them when they are discovered. Plus the presence of servers in the UK is easily enough for Ofcom to go after you, even if they ultimately lose their case. There's no benefit to keeping those UK servers. > we can reasonably argue we do not have sufficient links to the UK for the Online Safety Act to be applicable to us. > keeping internal estimates of our UK user base The fact that you know you have UK users is also almost certainly enough for Ofcom to go after you. Did 4chan have any stronger links to the UK? I don't think so. I'm not saying they should give in and follow the OSA but I think they're being pretty naive about how reasonable Ofcom is.

calvinmorrison 1y ago

What a waste of limited resources. What happened to the libre anti copyright hackers and piraters from the 90s? It's effete, getting a lawyer. Better to draw a picture of Steimer covered in feces and fax 10000 copies to parliament

immibis 1y ago
What happened is that governments successfully figured out how to police the internet. Except for Tor. For some reason though, we're still not layering everything on top of Tor.
School-Cotton 1y ago
I don’t really think libera has or has ever had that kind of ethos or aesthetic. It is used by a lot of serious people and projects that are not directly involved with copyright politics and have no interest in cosplaying as ThePirateBay.
- calvinmorrison 1y ago
  the 150,000 or so people who still actively use IRC networks absolutely have a major crossover with these.
  - School-Cotton 1y ago
    Sure, no argument there.

tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago

There is an interesting sentence in the post that shows why you want to ask actual lawyers, even if the law actually meant what one would think based on a common-sense reading of the text (it often doesn't) and you could read it (you often can't, because you might not know about a second law that also applies): > For the time being, services like ours do not appear to be Ofcom’s priority. Lawyers don't just tell you how the law is interpreted, but also how it's applied in practice. Often, bad law is worked around by the legal system rather than fixing it, and while one could rightfully lament this, if your goal is to get something done rather than fix the country's legal system... ask a lawyer and you might find yourself unblocked, or be told about a way to avoid the issue, or at least have a better understanding how big the risk is in practice, allowing you to make an informed decision.

renewiltord 1y ago
Yeah, the purpose of regulators applying law differently in practice is so that government administrations can play kingmaker and receive appropriate rewards.

ExpertAdvisor01 1y ago

I'm pretty sure they can't visit the UK right ? As the UK has jurisdiction over them , if they are physically there.

CGamesPlay 1y ago

Several comments here are interpreting this as the common "we just don't care about the UK's jurisdiction". That is not what Libera.chat is saying. They have staff in the UK, users in the UK, and are, in their interpretation, abiding by the terms of the OSA. Their interpretation is that the ID verification requirement doesn't apply to their service, for the reasons they outline in the article.

isaacremuant 1y ago

That's great, what about when Europe does the same? https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-verification https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver... It's a corporate lobbyst push and UK/Australia are just the canaries in the coalmine. You won't escape it by being "they didn't quite come for me yet".

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