"The United Kingdom wants to become the safest place for children to grow up online" is the first line of this article. Not presented as a quote, or a claim made by a source in the article. Just a fact.
From that point it just gets worse. There's basically no description of what terms like "protecting kids online" actually means.
The actual description of the law is extremely vague and doesn't answer basic questions about how the law would work. Would it only involve social media (published) content, or would it cover private text messages as well? Can providers simply ban children from using their platform, or will the law hold them accountable even for unauthorized users?
These are the details one might expect answers to in a reasonable article, but I'm not sure if this is a journalistic exercise or some sort of PR puff piece.
The UK as a whole leans fairly authoritarian and has had successive paternalistic governments for probably as long as anyone alive can remember (some people will call this the 'nanny state'). These fanciful proposals are created and supported by both Conservative (right, centre right) and Labour (left, centre left) parties alike.
As cynical as it sounds, this kind of legislation is rolled out practically every year and you could probably set your watch by it. Sometimes the law is implemented, quite often it's put on the backburner and resurrected the next year when there needs to be a distraction from something else.
You can ask, "how will this work in practice?" and few people will be able to claim they've actually thought as far as that.
There were many people who thought about that with Brexit but sadly the vote went the way it did. I remember Boris and Gove looking rather horrified when they found they had won.
you could make the argument that late-stage capitalism and the emergence of neufeudalism has reduced the state from an arbiter and partner in creating a thriving and successful society for its people, to a paul blart mall cop. well thought legislature is the purvey of the private sector, as is trade law and most of the sovereignty of the internet.
but realistically Boris Johnson himself was notorious for using dead-cat legislature to draw attention away from serious problems in his own government and serious issues the nation faces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy
chances are great we're seeing this bit of legislation to help people lose focus on the slow-rolling dumpster fire of brexit.
And government machinery is decrepit.
Governments of yesterday had the brains to plan and implement major projects - interstate highway system, moon landings, etc.
todays governments can't find their way out of a paper bag.
Their only capability is to hand out money to a neofeudal lord and hope for results.
Isn’t that peak “liberal libertarian”? The government staying out of the “market” to avoid any distortion, it’s only legitimate move to be staying out of the ways as much as possible, occasionally cleaning up the mess with generous subsidies and debt fueled capital injections?
In Techno feudalism govt doesnt exist. Its just the techlord buffoon class and the serfs (ie people enslaved by their phones). The govt will keep giving Mario Savio speeches and they will end up just like Mario.
> you could make the argument that late-stage capitalism and the emergence of neufeudalism
Just because someone made up some words doesn't mean you have to use them. There's nothing late about the capitalism (it's not going anywhere) nor neo about the feudalism (the UK's terrible land use policies are AFAIK all historical).
Although the opposition have now just announced they're going to make everyone poorer, which would be a weird policy and I suppose anti-capitalist, except it's already been happening since 2005-ish.
?? What about not using GDP as a primary indicator of economic/social health is making everyone poorer. GDP as a measure was invented as a wartime metric, at the time it made sense. However later even it's "inventor" Kuznets warned about it's use as primary metric. Let's not even get into the complexity of calculating it (the UN instructions come to >700 pages).
GDP already isn't used as the only indicator of economic health (don't know about "primary"). But some British people invented a philosophy called degrowth as a way of explaining how their country's falling real incomes are good actually, and calling for it to be the official policy is pretty worrying.
This is different from America, where people briefly got into degrowth after reading The Population Bomb, but mostly got it out of their system after noticing none of it actually came true.
(Economic growth does not actually use more resources like the idea implies. That's not efficient since you have to pay for the resources. It uses the same ones more productively.)
No, productivity is good. For an example of the reverse, as the UK's economy has been shrinking in recent years, carwashes have been de-automating and replacing machines with handwashing.
Luckily, humans are never satisfied and continue demanding new things, so making things cheaper doesn't reduce the total market.
But also, those new things can be services or digital goods or 100% recycled, which is why the US uses less water per year and emits less CO2 per year in 2023 than it did in the 60s. (No, that's not because we outsourced it to China.)
neufeudalism is just a natural evolution of neoliberalism.
It's where your become a modern equivalent of medieval serf, your bionic eyes become obsolete and unsupported [1], all contracts between you and corporations are extremely one-sided, you own no property and no land.
You may think you own your TV and your car. But fixing 'your' car without paying the Lord is a crime - because of IP law and DMCA.
Actually someone at Samsung wakes up one day and decides that your TV, car, or front door should stop working today. Your have no right and no recourse. Or you have theoretical rights that can only enforced with a 10-year long court battle costing millions of dollars. However any offense against the lord, er, I mean, corporation, is prosecuted by the king, I mean state, for free.
The lord to collects the 30% Apple tax. The Lord himself does not pay any tax. The lord pledges loyalty to the king, and provides the king with access to it's territory and resources - the king may access information held by any serf on OneDrive, ICloud, Buttcloud, etc. the Kings must compete with one another to woo the Lord to their. The Kings of China and US constantly battle for territorial access to different lords.
Recently some plebs petitioned Lord Elon to remove filthy Russian peasants from his kingdom by disabling all Teslas in Russia. [3]
> In modern usage, late capitalism often refers to a new mix of high-tech advances, the concentration of (speculative) financial capital, post-Fordism, and a growing income inequality.
I think that definition is at least meaningful, and seems to align with how I've heard people use the phrase.
> Roberts said that the term’s current usage departs somewhat from its original meaning. “It’s not this sense that things are getting so bad that the revolution is going to come,” he told me, “but rather that we see the ligaments of the international system that socialists will be able to seize and use.”
Late stage to me indicates that some sort of optimal state has been reached, not that the thing will be gone soon. Late stage construction is a nearly complete building for instance. Late stage capitalism is certainly used in this manner as it's meant to refer to the end result of poor incentives being applied over a long period of time.
A consequence of not having a Bill of Rights with a First Amendment, something routinely mocked on the one side of the Atlantic. The point is that intentionally overbroad restrictions on speech or content are a lot more difficult in the US.
This is true. We're frequently reminded growing up in Canada that despite what we'd gather from the tv/film we consume, we don't have the same freedom of speech laws that our friends in the south do. People are sent to jail for hate speech in Canada, both online and in-person, something I'm not aware of happening in the states.
Our Charter provides us with a "freedom of expression" for which the government is allowed "reasonable" grounds for censorship and speech restriction. For better or worse, there are many, many websites hosted in the US which would never fly in Canada.
> We're frequently reminded growing up in Canada that despite what we'd gather from the tv/film we consume, we don't have the same freedom of speech laws that our friends in the south do.
Why not simply get those rights? Looking at the brain flow to and from the US, there are a lot of Canadians voting with their feet...
Americans did about 250 years ago.
To me, the Canadian political system has always been a source of amazement and quite an enigma. The constitution of that country simply wasn't signed by a third of the population, and this is considered normal over there. Could anyone here in America imagine that?
No need to imagine. The slaves and indigenous people in America had no vote or representation in the drafting of the Constitution or bill of rights, either. The southern states chose to wage war rather than address the hypocrisy of owning slaves in a "free country".
The U.S. Constitution was signed by 0% of living Americans, and only a few dozen people that were alive when it was signed. It only came into effect when ratified by 3/4 of states. What 1/3rd are you talking about?
I'm actually living in NYC on a TN visa at the moment, so in a way, I've begun the voting process. If everything goes as planned, I hope to spend the next few decades with ample time in both countries, like my folks do.
I've come to realize there's a lot I love and appreciate about either, despite their flaws. We here in North America are very, very lucky.
Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides us nothing as at any point federal or provincial government can say fuck you and we will do as we please using that infamous notwithstanding clause. Examples of this already exist. Look at Ford or Legault for example. I think this notwithstanding clause is our disgrace and makes a mockery of our rights.
> Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides us nothing as at any point federal or provincial government can say fuck you and we will do as we please using that infamous notwithstanding clause.
Honestly the same paradigm exists in the US. As long as one branch of federal government can get another to agree to a Constitution-violating law or policy, the protections in the Constitution carry as much weight as a travel brochure. Similar shenanigans apply with regard to state and federal law conflicts. For example, for better or for worse, state level legalization of cannabis flies in the face of the Supremacy Clause, but that gets overlooked because the laws are something the federal government tacitly approves of (but can't get its act together to give formal blessing).
I am in Canada. The fact that it screwed up in the US does not make me feel any better. For what it worth I still think that basic freedoms protections are still better in the US.
In fact I am not aware of any restriction on what the house of commons can vote with a simple majority. On one hand it's the longuest continuously functioning democracy, so it deserves some credit. On the other hand it's a terribly dangerous system.
Sometimes you'll see British news discuss "constitutional" issues in politics. Since they don't have a written constitution, this is clearly cope, like when they pretend the food comes in colors other than brown.
Although some of it is written down; specifically it's written in an anonymous letter to the Times.
"Under a further change to the bill, video footage that shows people crossing the Channel in small boats in a “positive light” will be added to a list of illegal content that all tech platforms must proactively prevent from reaching users."
I can guarantee no tech exec will ever end up in prison under this law. At most, they will get a fine and happily file this under operational costs.
Very few MPs seem to understand how the internet works, and there is virtually no opposition against some of this madness. There are only demands to make it even stricter to "protect the kiddies". Most of these "kiddies" know how to use a VPN or are at least smart enough to borrow their father's phone to watch juicy content.
very few MPs seem to understand how the internet works
Perhaps, or then again maybe there are very few technologists that understand how politics works (in reality, not as a beautiful ideal where everyone is honest and dedicated to the public good).
The UK is particularly bad at this. All recent PMs have studied
Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. At least Germany had a chancellor who studies physics (Angela Merkel).
So if I write a nasty note on a paper Airplane and throw it at you, might the manufacturer of the paper and pen get in trouble? ‘No, that’s absurd.’ Fine, what about an unpleasant email? Should an email provider auto screen potentially harmful messages?
None of this seems very logically consistent and just seems to stem from a desire to fix a problem (people being nasty to each other) in the most heavy handed and legally clumsy way imaginable.
Amazingly, the above story happened in the UK, the UK's health system is failing totally, the NHS has under-invested in mental health services on a massive scale for decades (for example, all the gambling addiction clinics in the UK were funded by gambling companies until 2020), and this happens and people immediately round on...Twitter?
It is genuinely very confusing that a mental health problem has turned into tech regulation. Particularly when mental health treatment is so obviously lacking (and part of the reason why no-one asks the question about the NHS is due to lobbying, the NHS has the most powerful lobbying group in British politics).
Btw, just anecdotally, the people pushing for this are (imo) the worst people in British politics. Bill Cash, all the Brexit hardliners (who, btw, were regarded as too incompetent and mad by the people who can the Vote Leave campaign). These people sit in safe seats, there is no risk from deselection, and they just sit there and come up mad ideas year after year (the person above who points out that British politicians tend towards authoritarianism are correct...this is being led by the furthest right portion of the Tories).
I don't think it is about that because these controls don't apply to non-children. But I think we are certainly heading in this direction.
One major thing in the UK is that politicians complain often about people criticising them on Twitter. They read out the hateful tweets they receive with ill-disguised glee, and suggest direct moderation (already happening to a certain extent, in line with EU regs). Celebrities also push this line heavily, milking social media for advertising cash and complaining that their critics should be removed from the platform.
...I just don't get it. If you are interested in parallels, there is an interesting parallel with the introduction of the printing press to England. This spurred massive growth in political pamphlets which offered all kinds of fictitious nonsense about prominent people. Attempts at censorship failed, and that industry grow into news. We have been here before, we lucked out last time, we may not be able to do so again (censorship in China certainly indicates that govts have the resources to censor more effectively than ever before).
> I don't think it is about that because these controls don't apply to non-children.
But they do. In order to “comply” with these types of regulation, legal content is either put behind identity verification (which is both expensive and invasive), or is just removed completely. This absolutely affects non-children.
If you created a system (whether it's human or computer matters not a whit) that took incoming paper airplanes on one side and decided, based on the content of the messages written on them, who to send them to, and that system had a tendency to shower vulnerable people with harmful crap, yeah, of course you should get in trouble. Like, super-obviously, yes. If at any point you knew it was happening and didn't put the brakes on the whole project, probably lots of trouble.
>>So if I write a nasty note on a paper Airplane and throw it at you, might the manufacturer of the paper and pen get in trouble?
That's not really the correct analogy. A more accurate one would be:
>>What if I went out of my way to gather up every single nasty note ever written about you, and made it my business to make sure you saw every one of them?
>Being responsible for a system that feeds anyone (let alone a child) who looks at images of self harm or suicide more of the same deserves to be in jail.
But that's what I want? I'm looking at it in the first place for a reason.
I suspect the original article is about UK's "Online Safety Bill" which was discussed at length on HN[1] with some very good discussion about why it's a bad idea. (Which is something a few commenters on this thread are failing to grasp.)
The politician responsible for this bill was replaced since that discussion, and the content of the bill has been changed significantly - some of the discussion of 6 months ago is still valid, but you can't rely on what was said then to form your opinion of the bill as is going through Parliament.
The bias starts before the first sentence, with the headline.
I'd like to think any journalism student in their first week would know not to do this. And one with some awareness of tech would know that general-purpose surveillance and censorship are ongoing battles, and at least acknowledge that angle.
This looks like a press release.
Maybe Ars Technica should stick to product advertorials, and we on HN should find real reporting around which to consider important societal issues.
This looks like an excuse to be able to beat into submission foreign "evil" tech companies thanks to an intentionally vague and arbitrary law.
Every time I read something about the UK these days it feels like I need to fact check it because it always sounds like something conspiracy theorists here in America would say. And it's almost always real.
I'm still surprised how almost 250 years of separate history shaped radically different nations. And I'm not sure which one is best; but maybe the huge number of Britons here in America should be an indicator of that.
> Every time I read something about the UK these days it feels like I need to fact check it because it always sounds like something conspiracy theorists here in America would say
Quite a lot of it is indeed directly imported from conspiracy theorists in America. Via the rightwing "media" pipeline straight to government.
This isn't about content! There is a real world, and a virtual one. The virtual one is a mere imitation of the real one. We weren't born to live inside a machine.
> "The United Kingdom wants to become the safest place for children to grow up online" is the first line of this article. Not presented as a quote, or a claim made by a source in the article. Just a fact.
> From that point it just gets worse. There's basically no description of what terms like "protecting kids online" actually means.
Based on what I seen in British media, it's keeping children from talking to or knowing that trans people exist. Otherwise children might learn that trans people are humans to or even catch(they are for reals) transness...
As a parent, I can tell you how the current laws work in practice. When you admit you are younger than 18, average website will, with significant probability, lock your account immediately with no way to correct the situation and no way to setup new account with the same email address. After this happens a few times, you learn to dutifully tell all websites that you are 18.
I fear the mandatory age checking tech/laws. Being a kid is becoming increasingly illegal.
How about equal access laws for children before passing any new laws that encourage websites to block all children?
Yeah. Kids only put in their real age once. After they get burned they know they have to say they're over 12 or 18 or whatever the site is asking about for a threshold.
Worse than that, the proof of identity is making it impossible to use the safest option - anonymity. If a kid gets bullied or harassed or targeted by bad actors they can't simply delete their account and create a new one. These laws force them to have one or two super high value (to them) accounts that are difficult to abandon.
I was always ~1 middle mouse spin years old on any age gates.
For the anonymity problem there's nothing really requiring that accounts are 1-1 permanently linked with their identities much less publicly linked to them. Just that they're validated as being >=XX years old right?
I think the obvious solution to this is to require websites not ask the visitors age or name. Like, that stuff is private info, and they don't need it to provide whatever service they're providing.
It is however nice to warn younger kids that something scary is ahead. Images of violence can be traumatizing. Attracting adult attention to suspected bullying is also nice.
What's the percentage of those websites hosted in the UK? You aren't achieving anything with those laws. You should rather focus on content filtering on the device.
or if you're going to ask them their age just display age appropriate content. Automatic categorizing of even user generated stuff should be a pretty much solved problem by now
What is "age appropriate" changes by the year, and is not universally agreed upon by everyone. I'm not sure that is a problem that will ever actually be solved.
As for categorizing content in general, I think it's pretty safe to look at Facebook and Twitter for examples of content moderation failing in spectacular ways, just as it is by all of the horror stories of Google accounts being automatically locked for utterly unclear reasons because some automated system picked up some cue and erroneously banned the account.
"The United Kingdom wants to become the safest place for children to grow up online". Or they could actually arrest the people responsible for child rape and prostitution. UK Police ignored the rape of 1400+ kids because they didn't want to be accused of racism. UK criminal justice system and laws are a circus.
Can they perhaps start by jailing execs for crimes that their companies are actively committing? That rarely gets them more than a slap on the wrist, but now failing to do something poorly defined is going to land them in jail?
It's interesting to think about "jailing" an entire company for its crimes. After all, in some legal (US) ways, a corporation is considered a person. If a company is found guilty of committing some crime, penalize it in an analogous way to a human. For example, if a person guilty of X ends up in jail for 30 days, a company guilty of X ends up ... here I'm not sure. Barred from doing business at all for 30 days? Forbidden from communicating with its customers? Cut off from, say, paying its employees? All things an imprisoned human would be unable to do themselves.
I can't tell if the idea makes much sense, but there's a symmetry there, specifically around the personhood of corporations.
Think about who actually suffers if you punish a company in this way: the customers, and the employees, most of whom did nothing wrong. That is not justice.
Punishing people for something they did not do is wrong, period. And collective punishment is widely regarded as a violation of basic human rights -- it's even banned by the Geneva conventions!
Furthermore, the possibility of such a punishment would have a chilling effect on business to an extent that would seriously damage the economy.
For all these reasons, no responsible government would enforce that kind of punishment on a company, and even if they tried, it would be struck down in court.
Punishments for a lot of corporate rule breaking are viewed as a "slap on the wrist" because sometimes the rules that were broken just aren't that important. Similarly, we don't usually put people in prison for speeding.
Sticking with the analogy, there are still others who suffer while one person is punished with jail time or otherwise. If the single earner in a household is locked up, their family suffers in many ways. If they happen to run a business, their business and employees suffer too. And none of them did anything wrong.
The problem is with the scale of punishing an entire company, though. There's a lot of fallout from that, it's true. So the punishment would need to be fair, limiting the offending entity as a whole without unduly harming innocent employees. This could be where the analogy breaks down (which argues towards how unfair the personhood of corporations is, if there's no good recourse for wrongdoing).
As for a chilling effect ... yeah, that's the idea. Employees in a company would be very much more interested in staying on the right side of the law because of the heightened risk to, well, everybody.
I'm reminded of businesses that need to stay accredited, or licensed, or otherwise in legal compliance with something in order to function at all. If one errs enough (criminally, say), it loses that blessing, and could end up folding, and all the innocent employees are out of a job.
A company consists of people. If a company commits a crime, some of those people are responsible for it. That they're not financially liable does not mean they can't be held criminally liable. But of course it's got to be the people in charge, the people who made the decision to do it, allow it, enable it, create a culture that normalised it, who need to be held accountable and liable, not just the person who received the order to do it.
Businesses have been run from the confines of prisons, so I think the analog is all of the employees at the corporation must live and work from jail for the next 30 days.
Might be easier to just jail the employees with real decision making authority. Most companies I know that is a very small subset, most everyone else is just supposed to do what they're told.
I don't disagree, but have noticed that the American justice system seems to obsess on jailing/punishing the people following the orders and completely ignores or treats very gently the people making the decisions and giving those orders.
No rules for the rich and powerful, draconian rules for everyone else.
Lol that would happen if they were actually concerned with exec/elite behavior.
This is not about protecting children. This is about clamping down on civilian rights to control the internet and indeed, civilian ability to communicate freely.
If children are being harmed (and they are, more than we’d like to imagine), the answer is simple: shut down social media.
Seriously. Yes we’d lose time wasting places like this. Yes we wouldn’t be as tuned into media ongoings. I’m sure many here will chime in to say how HN or similar has saved their life.
Don’t care, social media isn’t more important than the health of our children. And these companies have shown they don’t care and that profit is more important.
Thus, they needn’t exist.
But that won’t ever even be on the table. Because they don’t give a flying fuck about children. They want profits and control.
> This is about clamping down on civilian rights to control the internet and indeed, civilian ability to communicate freely.
You're giving them way too much credit. MPs are not evil geniuses, they're highly motivated self absorbed politicians with no understanding of the internet, but the one thing they understand is that "protect the children" and "blame internet for bad stuff" is great for their career and ballot count. Trying to oppose this will get you a soundbite on the evening news with the headline "Tory MP defends online suicide porn". Good luck bouncing back from that.
Hey, if you want to go after that company dumping sewage into the river, just have a child visit their website and get a tracking cookie and send in the cops to get them to stop stalking minors.
So add those sites to the standard blocklists most ISPs already put in place for new customers and let parents decide if they want to remove them, just as they have to for porn and gambling. This is just a gimme for the security services under the "think of the kids" mantra.
Actually means, refusing to provide backdoors, provide user data; or the crime of supporting a different candidate. My personal favorite, collateral damage, no crime committed, arrest as a favor to a competitor.
I hope this causes websites to start blocking UK users. That would cause VPNs to become more common, undermining the government's enforced logging of internet use.
IIRC some of the Snowden leaks alleged that (at least at the time) domestic traffic couldn't be surveilled (but this was solved by mutual assistance across the Atlantic - the British would spy on US citizens and vice versa[1]).
VPNs seem useful to guarantee that your traffic is designated as foreign, so this might be a net gain for the intelligence services rather than a loss - the mandatory collection of ICRs only relates to IP addresses and time of access.
What you're describing as "known" was not known. If you remember, the ACLU attempted to take the government to court over the Presidential Surveillance Program several years before the Snowden Revalations. They lost because they didn't have evidence.
The government had classified evidence of their crimes making possessing evidence of them breaking the law illegal. SCOTUS ruled that they couldn't charge the government of a crime without possessing that evidence.
Snowden gave us that evidence allowing citizens to, once again, bring charges against the government in 2013 and winning the case in 2017.
Some rumors are true. Some rumors are false. Rumors do not a court case make. The Snowden Revalations do.
I'm all for jailing execs who break the law (e.g, HSBC's entire C-suite and board should have probably been in cuffs after the bank was caught laundering money again for terrorists, drug/human traffickers, and general human rights abusers AFTER paying a substantial fine for laundering money on behalf of terrorists, drug/human traffickers, and general human rights abusers [0]).
But the "protect the children" angle is a steep, nebulous, subjective and very slippery slope that will likely target small fry who are not really harming anyone... Unlike the execs running HSBC who enabled money laundering for terrorists, drug/human traffickers, and general human rights abusers.
The ICIJ investigation showed that HSBC reported on a bunch of suspected criminals and it turns out some of them were in fact criminals. There is no law that requires closing accounts after a suspicious activity report, some banks do so after multiple of them but it is not a requirement at all. Generally companies are not penalized for what they report on.
And like what is this?
> The records show HSBC worked with a bank in Tiraspol, within Moldova’s breakaway territory of Transnistria, for four years after the U.S. Treasury Department issued a 2011 advisory warning of the risks of doing business with the Tiraspol bank.
An advisory warning is not binding, is not an act of Congress, does not show up in the Federal Register, and just generally means the bank should monitor customers specified in the notice more, not that they should deny service entirely. These articles never say it directly but they are basically arguing for "derisking" which in practice means excluding large numbers of customers based solely on nationality.
Why do kids need special protections online? How about we jail parents who don't teach their kids how to behave online?
Imagine way-too-young kids printing out their bathing suit pictures and sellotaping them to a tree with their phone number written underneath... is the city (or whoever is responsible for the trees there) guilty if some pedophille calls the number and does something bad? Or have the parents failed in educating the kid on what is good and bad, right and wrong? Replace the tree with instagram (or whatever), and you're there.
The kids will just change their birth date everywhere to something 18+, and online services will ban everyone below. The next step is mandatory government ID for registering to any service online... and everyone laughing at Sunak asking a homeless man if he's "working in business" will get police on their doors.
As the bulk of such services are based in other countries I imagine that the most obvious result would be that the executives of the companies concerned would simply never visit the UK for fear of arrest and nothing else would change. Would other countries, such as China or the US, extradite their own citizens to face prosecution for this?
The only industry the UK government cares about is providing real estate and money-laundering services to Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern despots.
> It now appears that tech company executives found to be "deliberately" exposing children to harmful content could soon risk steep fines and jail time of up to two years.
The subjective definitions of "deliberately" and "harmful" are what makes it problematic.
Also, harmful to what or who? Is the Wikipedia article on the theory of evolution harmful? Probably not. Is it harmful to some people's religious beliefs? Probably.
I'm curious about how extraterritoriality plays with this. Are there any UK-based online platforms or do are they obliging themselves to pursue Zuckerberg, Elon, and whomever runs Reddit?
This is a shitty bill. But the chance of it becoming law is very low. Various leaders from this party have been (very half heartedly) trying to pass it for a decade. If passed it would fail (in dozens of ways). And the problem is more useful to scare voters and whip votes than solving it would get them actual benefits.
This is just the bill going from one committee to another (with some extreme additional parts the other committee will take out, likely leading to deadlock)
Unfortunately I think this time it'll pass (not least because of the exact failure you mention - they are desperate to pass something and it's got cross-party support apart from a few symbolic edge cases). Whether or not it will be fully enacted and then enforced is questionable.
The fact labour will support it (the even crazier version) is why the government will not bring it to a vote. It will die in committee like the last 17 drafts. It's already been sent to the Lords committee with Rishi saying it will be a "long hard journey" (or words to that effect). Given the terrible polls you'd have to be pretty suicidal to risk bringing down your own government and forcing an election. Not to say there are not plenty of crazy tories, just that they're usually more self-interested than that...
Unpopular but I think kids should not be allowed on the public internet at all. Let alone porn or social media, only certain apps like youtube kids or similar with extremely filtered content should be allowed if at all. The danger/addiction is too high and the benefit is really low.
On the other hand I became quite a good programmer since I started tinkering at age 10. But today is a different era than when I was growing up.
While I don’t agree with your reasoning, I do agree with your approach. All of these laws require restricting/removing content or invasive identity verification, in order to “protect” a tiny fraction of internet users. Preventing those people from accessing the internet would be cheaper, more effective, and less problematic for the rest of the population.
The problem is that we’re assuming laws like the Online Safety Bill are about protecting children, which they aren’t.
The Birmingham "Trojan Horse" story was entirely made up.
Real child protection is often difficult to discuss, because it's necessarily anonymous, and we tend to find out what's happened only very late. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11626806
Why not just make a license to get on the “information super highway”?
Obviously this excludes IOT devices but for smart phone, desktop/laptop, tablets, etc maybe a card reader should be installed. The backfacing camera can use facial recognition tech to intermittently check if the correct user is on. Licenses can be renewed every year until 18 years of age.
If needed, licenses can be extended to adults to keep track of certain undesirable behaviors and to maybe even reward prosocial behavior.
Disclosure: I’m not a UK citizen, I would vehemently oppose these ideas if they were ever proposed in the US.
That may be a bit harsh but is not far from what I have been suggesting [1][2] The liability for protecting kids must be on the parents and there are simple technical ways to solve this. In my opinion laws should just require websites to add RTA headers and the most popular ways small children access content must be required to once again read these headers and integrate with parental controls. I say once again because some browsers used to implement this ages ago. If browser devs are opposed to this then it could be done by writing an add-on.
If one or two children are effected it’s the parents fault, when all children are statistically impacted in a negative way it’s systemic and is the fault of organization.
This may be the case but I would rather not spend tax money playing whack-a-mole with businesses thus artificially creating new revenue models for lawyers. I would rather just put a technical solution in place that empowers good parents to have some control over their own devices and let them decide when their small children are somewhat psychologically armed to handle the internet. RTA headers do not require integration with any third party sites and does not add tracking or additional identification.
Sunak and others have been pushing for rules that would require sites to use third party identification sites. This is a non-starter for me personally. It is very obvious to me someones pockets are getting lined by people interested in adding more tracking to the internet. I see this as the UK trying to extend its CCTV system to the rest of the world but perhaps I am a bit skeptical after watching the behavior of governments for many decades. It is also a bit curious that US politicians have also been pushing for this at the same time. These recent events really smell like a startup trying to get funded by multiple governments. Investors love government contracts because they are usually multi-year and get written into policy.
In terms of disciplining parents that neglect their children there is already a system in place for this. The first time should be an infraction that requires the parent to do an online training course. Perhaps under extreme circumstances a misdemeanor and at some point social services step in just like in any other repeat neglect case. In reality this should not affect most parents. There should not be any jail involved unless the parents are intentionally putting the children in harms way such as encouraging the kids to pose nude for strangers and inviting said strangers over.
"Early in my career, I consulted for Coke to ensure sugar taxes failed and soda was included in food stamp funding. I say Coke's policies are evil because I saw inside the room. The first step in playbook was paying the NAACP + other civil rights groups to call opponents racist[...]The conversations inside these rooms was depressingly transactional: "We (Coke) will give you money. You need to paint opponents of us as racist.""
"watched as the FDA funneled money to professors at leading universities - as well as think tanks on the left and right - to create studies showing soda taxes hurt the poor. They also paid for studies that say drinking soda DIDN'T cause obesity."
In my opinion corporations that lobby/bribe to harm people should be handled differently than the internet censorship issue. In those cases I believe that such entities and all related parties should be considered a domestic terrorist and anyone that lobbied for them or any politician that took said bribes should be branded as aiding and abetting a domestic terrorist. There are already laws on the books for handling such people. If the offending company is international then it is no longer just domestic.
Why domestic terrorist? Easy, they are intentionally harming people for profit. The mortality impact is very slow but there is a myriad of scientific data to prove the harm. Just type-2 diabetes alone may bankrupt most first world countries [1].
Putting kid's parents in jail is a surefire way to make sure that kids life becomes a stressful, scary, unsupported nightmare. Parents who let their kids use social media (i.e. almost every parent whose family has access to technology) are a lot better than no parents at all.
The companies build services designed to addict children and make bullying ten times easier. Fuck your politics, this is evil shit and these companies need held accountable. We don’t allow kids to purchase alcohol and blame the parents when they get alcohol poisoning. We make sure companies don’t target alcohol at kids.
My comment was flagged which is basically the kind of response I've come to expect. While this is just one example of what happens when you try to talk about this issue, this is generally the pattern we have to come to expect.
I'm not a direct victim though, so while it upsets me when my girlfriend talks about what happened to her, I don't really care about being called a racist or silenced when discussing this topic. What bothers me is when my partner tries to talk about it she gets the same response so she's learnt to stay silent. No one wants to hear what I said in my comment because it's a difficult thing to hear.
And I kinda get it because when someone is talking about the systematic rape of tens of thousands of children by immigrants it does sound like a racist conspiracy theory... I myself thought that. But turns out it was true, we all just refused to listen.
The same is true of issues like knife crime which is impacting kids in the UK today too. It's one of those issues which is very difficult to talk about honestly, and I'd argue subsequently deal with in an adequate way without acknowledging the demographic realities. But we can't talk about those realities, because they sound bad. So kids will continue to get stabbed because anyone who wants to do something about it would first need to sound racist then implement policies which would risk being perceived as racist. And that was the larger point I was trying to make. This is just an easy way for the government to pretend they care about kids in a country which allows working class to be killed and raped every day because the alternative would risk being called a racist.
From that point it just gets worse. There's basically no description of what terms like "protecting kids online" actually means.
The actual description of the law is extremely vague and doesn't answer basic questions about how the law would work. Would it only involve social media (published) content, or would it cover private text messages as well? Can providers simply ban children from using their platform, or will the law hold them accountable even for unauthorized users?
These are the details one might expect answers to in a reasonable article, but I'm not sure if this is a journalistic exercise or some sort of PR puff piece.