The opposite is true. The new law makes it considerably more risky for large companies because the law is specifically designed to hold them to account for conduct on their platforms. The (perceived) risk for small websites is unintended and the requirements are very achievable for small websites. The law is intended for and will be used to eviscerate Facebook etc. for their wrongs. We are far more likely to see Facebook etc. leave the UK market than we are see any small websites suffer.
A small website operator can keep child pornography off their platform with ease. Facebook have a mountain to climb — regardless of their resources.
> A small website operator can keep child pornography off their platform with ease. Facebook have a mountain to climb — regardless of their resources.
Facebook can actually train AI to detect CSAM, and is probably already doing so in cooperation with NCMEC and similar organisations/authorities across the world.
Your average small website? No chance. Obtaining training material actively is seriously illegal everywhere, and keeping material that others upload is just as bad in most jurisdictions.
The big guys get the toys, the small guys have to worry all the goddamn time if some pedos are going to use their forum or whatnot.
But you shouldnt need to use file uploading services! File upload doesnt require additional services, it has been a well understood part of HTTP for decades. You can do file upload using normal web form submission in your web server/CMS/Rails/Laravel/CGI program without paying a monthly subscription to some service at an exorbitant markup.
Also, those filters are obviously imperfect. Remember the man who got his Google account terminated because he took a photo of his son's rash to send to his doctor? Pedo alert, pedo alert, a child is naked in a photo. My parents must be pedos too, they took a photo of me sitting in the bath when I was a toddler. Call the police.
Have you run a forum, in, say, the last decade? The amount of spam bots constantly posting links to everything from scams to pints to guns is immense - and no, captchas don’t solve it.
“
We’ve heard concerns from some smaller services that the new rules will be too burdensome for them. Some of them believe they don’t have the resources to dedicate to assessing risk on their platforms, and to making sure they have measures in place to help them comply with the rules. As a result, some smaller services feel they might need to shut down completely.
So, we wanted to reassure those smaller services that this is unlikely to be the case“
“If organisations have carried out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment and determined, with good reason, that the risks they face are low, they will only be expected to have basic but important measures to remove illegal content when they become aware of it. These include:
easy-to-find, understandable terms and conditions;
a complaints tool that allows users to report illegal or harmful material when they see it, backed up by a process to deal with those complaints;
the ability to review content and take it down quickly if they have reason to believe it is illegal; and
a specific individual responsible for compliance, who we can contact if we need to.”
>they will only be expected to have basic but important measures to remove illegal content when they become aware of it. These include:
>easy-to-find, understandable terms and conditions; a complaints tool that allows users to report illegal or harmful material when they see it, backed up by a process to deal with those complaints; the ability to review content and take it down quickly if they have reason to believe it is illegal; and a specific individual responsible for compliance, who we can contact if we need to.”
All of those things are buttons to click and ship with every piece of forum software from the last decade. No forum can survive without moderation because of spam so these tools and policies will already be in place on every website with user generated content.
"We pinky swear to totes not enforce the law as written [unless and until we decide, with no notice or warning, to do so] up to and including criminal penalties". Not as reassuring as you claim it to be.
Exactly - the liability risk is huge, and relying on them not enforcing the law because they say they are 'unlikely' to on small sites is not a risk any sane person would take.
That's not what they are saying. What they are saying is that the law as written doesn't require the things that many small sites have been saying will be too expensive to comply with. The law as written only requires those things for large site and sites with elevated risk of certain harms. For most small sites any required changes will just be minor tweaks to things they are already doing.
We don’t need to trust what they say, we just need to engage in a little critical thinking. What’s the benefit for Ofcom in pursuing tiny websites? There’s no political benefit, no financial benefit… the guidance from Ofcom reaffirms the natural conclusion.
There is no political benefit to imposing liability on any online forum operator for content posted by others?
Governments can abuse their power to silence speech it doesn't like. Governments can use agitators to develop pretext for legal action. Governments can make examples out of small-time defendants to send chilling effects. Governments can have prosecutors who may not be evil, but merely overzealous and harmful.
At the end, it is about a default to freedom of speech and content online (short of objectively illegal content) or a default to self-censorship and closing the gates on open forums.
Sorry, but that's foolish beyond belief. The law allows and probably mandates them to do so. You can pretend that's not what the law says but it clearly does. And it was written with intent and advice, so that's what the writers intended as well.
But if it's so simple, volunteer. Take on the criminal penalties yourself and perform the reviews.
I'll remind you of two thing which a lot of people often forget with hobbies/volunteering and may make this argument moot for you: Just because someone gives time for free doesn't mean that time doesn't cost them or can easily be increased without significantly impacting the giver. Secondly that some parts of a hobby can be work that is required for the fun part of the hobby and changing the ratio of fun:work can kill any motivation for the hobby.
To your point even your extract from the link there are compliance costs.
>So, we wanted to reassure those smaller services that this is *unlikely* to be the case
Your source admits there are extra costs that will likely cause some small services to have to shutdown if the costs are to burdensome for them, they are just saying that they hope the costs are small enough that it doesn't put most small services in that position.
Even in your quote it explicitly lists extra costs. i.e. the cost of a compliant compliance tool. Obviously the government isn't going to implement it or spend the time moderating reports or abuse of reports. Which means the cost of extra hours moderating and setting it up are on the service provider.
"Must have an individual responsible for compliance". So either employ someone to take this risk or take on the risk and responsibility yourself and the associated due diligence costs (lawyers in the UK are only free if you're already losing hours of your life to the court system).
These costs will definetly push some people over the line to not wanting to host such services. Especially when the wording is so wide that you need to moderate out insults in your forum.
Jesus Christ! Your comment would probably be flagged as foreign propaganda to soft peddle broken UK policies, that is if the US had such rules. My comment should be flagged because that could be an insulting insinuation or the expletive at the start of this paragraph could be stirring up religious hatred by being needlessly blasphemous. And a moderator has to read the entire post to get to the non compliant part.
Many of the provisions of the act apply to all user-to-user services, not just Schedule 1 and Schedule 2 services.
For example, the site must have an "illegal content risk assessment" and a "children’s risk assessment". And the children's risk assessment is a four-dimensional matrix of age groups, types on content, ways of using the service and types of harm. And it's got to be updated before making any "significant" change to any aspect of a service’s design or operation. It also makes it mandatory to have terms of service, and to apply them consistently. The site must have a content reporting procedure, a complaints procedure, and maintain written records.
Now obviously the operator of a bicycling forum might say "eh, let's ignore all that, they probably don't mean us"
But if you read the law and interpret its words literally, a bicycling forum is a user-to-user service, and a public forum is almost certain to be read by children from time to time.
Reality: the forum has negative 358 posts in the last month. The forum has negative ~2k posts over the last 12 months. The forum is so inactive that they’re deleting posts faster than creating them. 8 people have created accounts in the last year.
Apparently any piece of informational older than a year has no value to you?
Thankfully you aren't writing the laws in my country.
Creating a law that makes internet creators want to delete all historical record for fear of potential prosecution under extremely broad terms -- doesn't seem like it's in the interest of the greater good.
The law has absolutely nothing to do with historic content, it has no provisions for or relevance to content published decades ago. Even in the most cautious response to this law, there is no reason to take content offline.
Counterpoint: I read the law and it seems to me that it absolutely does apply to historic content. Ultimately you may be right, but the fact that there isn't a clear answer means nobody without thousands of dollars to throw at lawyers can take that risk.
this is a strange framing because Britain had internet and content laws before these recent changes and people were just fine with the risk that came with running them.
Let's be real, for most dead sites this is an excuse for old admins to close the thing down because they got tired of running it. For sites with fewer than millions of users you basically needed to add a contact form and report button. These places are just deserted, and instead of having a few angry oldheads screaming at you, you can just blame the government
> Britain had internet and content laws before these recent changes and people were just fine with the risk that came with running them
I think it's equally likely that people didn't take them seriously, but each new law has had increasingly dire consequences AND has been increasingly difficult to decipher. So there's that.
I'm not sure why you're comparing total posts to monthly new posts. The tragedy here is that 2.6 million posts, potentially full of great content, is being deleted.
>The forum is so inactive that they’re deleting posts faster than creating them.
They've been in read-only mode, more or less, for awhile. Primarily, again, due to the (at the time proposed, now passed) law.
Not to mention, this comment is missing the forest for the trees. This is not the only forum or website to shutter operations in the wake of the UK Online Safety Act.
The forum has had less than 100k posts in the last 10 years.
Forums and small websites have been killed off by changing consumer behaviour, the shift to big social media platforms. Using big numbers to suggest that the UK Online Safety Act is responsible for killing off these smaller independent websites is disingenuous.
If you do the same exercise for the other forums, you’ll find they’re all long dead too.
I posted another example in this thread of someone running forums with 275k monthly active users that also decided to shut down. That does not qualify as "long dead".
That's just one other example. I can assure you that it is not just long-dead forums deciding to shut down, despite your preconceived notion.
You’re falling for the big numbers that do not stand up to scrutiny. There’s no such forum shutting down. Are you referring to lfgss? First, it’s not shutting down, second, the user numbers are completely wrong. As is the claim that the platform supports over 300 forums. You’re an order of magnitude off. Go and visit it and look at the activity, it’s clinging to life. 275k active users? Pure fiction.
I'll avoid searching for other examples, as you seem to want to latch onto the example itself rather than the broader message the examples communicate. The fact is that some people are shutting down operations of websites, deleting data, etc. in response to this law.
Just considering that the law is forcing people to think about shutting down operations is a sign that the law is having a chilling effect. Both for existing websites and the potential creation of new ones.
Just because you believe yourself to be the sole arbiter of which websites are valuable and which can be deleted without worry doesn't change the fact that this law is having a negative effect on small websites.
Perhaps with better communication about the law, rather than the hundreds on hundreds of pages of vague guidance, the law could remain as-is and small website operators wouldn't be as concerned. However, that is not the case.
Some people are protesting against this law by threatening to shut down their websites or by deleting content. The founder of lfgss explicitly said they’re against the law on principle.
I think historic content is very valuable which is why I am offended by this absurd response on hacker news where people are conflating the actions of a protest with the consequence of a law.
If someone chooses to protest this law by deleting their website then more power to them but we must be honest about what it is: protest.
People should be considerate about the consequence of the services they release onto the internet. We can debate the specifics of whether certain requirements are reasonable/fair/beneficial but it’s patently absurd to label choices these website owners are making as being caused by this law. The law has zero to do with historic content, there’s not a single risk to anyone who leaves a website online in read only mode as an archive.
obviously some government employees are not providing value for money to the people because that’s just what happens in big organizations (public or private). The point being made by critics of DOGE is not “there’s no waste in the government” it’s that the DOGE goal is to gut government services, whether they’re wasteful or not is immaterial.
I was wondering what happened to micro recently (loved the m3o domain). Sorry to hear it’s over. Have you written a post-mortem? I’d love to hear more about it — if you don’t feel too downbeat about it.
Haven't written a post-mortem but maybe at some point if it felt useful for others. Startups built around open source are generally very hard. About as bad as social consumer products. Both micro.dev and m3o.com are for sale yes.
There has been new information since that blog post which has reaffirmed the "this is much ado about nothing" takes because Ofcom have said that they do not want to be a burden on smaller sites.
"We’ve heard concerns from some smaller services that the new rules will be too burdensome for them. Some of them believe they don’t have the resources to dedicate to assessing risk on their platforms, and to making sure they have measures in place to help them comply with the rules. As a result, some smaller services feel they might need to shut down completely.
So, we wanted to reassure those smaller services that this is unlikely to be the case."
Nothing more reassuring than a vague “we’re unlikely to go after you [if you stay on our good side.]”
It’s clear the UK wants big monopolistic tech platforms to fully dominate their local market so they only have a few throats to choke when trying to control the narrative…just like “the good old days” of centralized media.
I wouldn’t stand in the way of authoritarians if you value your freedom (or the ability to have a bank account).
The risk just isn't worth it. You write a blog post that rubs someone power-adjacent the wrong way and suddenly you're getting the classic "...nice little blog you have there...would be a shame to find something that could be interpreted as violating 1 of our 17 problem areas..."
Changing the code of practice is a years long statutory consultation process, they're not going to be able to change the rules to go after you on a whim.
If you can’t find something to accuse from the SEVENTEEN “areas of focus” they’ve already designated in the law then I would argue you lack the creativity and thirst for power needed to climb the ranks as a politician.
> So, we wanted to reassure those smaller services that this is unlikely to be the case
This is the flimsiest paper thin reassurance. They've built a gun with which they can destroy the lives of individuals hosting user generated content, but they've said they're unlikely to use it.
You can try the digital toolkit and see for yourself if this is a realistic pathway for a small site (such as a blog with a comment function). Personally, I find it puzzling that Ofcom thinks what they provide is helpful to small sites. Furthermore, they make it pretty clear that they see no reason for a purely size-based exemption (“we also know that harm can exist on the smallest as well as the largest services”). They do not explore ways to reach their goals without ongoing collaboration from small site owners, either.
Unless Ofcom actively say "we will NOT enforce the Online Safety Act against small blogs", the chilling effect is still there. Ofcom need to own this. Either they enforce the bad law, or loudly reject their masters' bidding. None of this "oh i don't want to but i've had to prosecute this crippled blind orphan support forum because one of them insulted islam but ny hands are tied..."
The Canadian government did the same thing when they accidentally outlawed certain shotguns by restricting bore diameter without specifying it was for rifles.
A minister tweeted that it didn’t apply to shotguns, as if that’s legally binding as opposed to you know, the law as written.
The democrats wrote a bill to hire 60k new armed IRS agents and promised they wouldn't be used to go after anyone with an income less than 250k. Senator Mike Crapo tried to add an ammendment to put that in the bill but they blocked it. We have a serious problem with politicians lying about the text of bills.
While I certainly would prefer that the IRS first and foremost go after tax evasion perpetuated by the wealthy (if for no other reason than there's likely more bank for the buck there), tax law is tax law. If someone making less than $250k/yr is evading paying taxes, the IRS should go after them just the same as if it was someone making $5M/yr.
Usually people complain that the IRS doesn't go after >250k. I've never heard anyone argue that they don't go after <240k enough. This is why the democrats promised it would only be used to go after >250k.
The problem is the dishonesty, saying the intent is one thing but being unwilling to codify the stated intent.
in order for going after everyone (or whatever arbitrary number we choose) it needs to be economically feasible. it is simple math and should be explained in simple math terms. it cost on average X amount to “go after someone” - if that amount exceeds what potential benefit is based of course on earning then we do it. otherwise it makes no sense. except we make this a political issue (as everything else). any sane person running IRS would do the math and figure out what the number is where it makes sense to go after someone
Getting one persons taxes is not why you enforce, any more than why the police enforce other kinds of laws that don't have anything to do with bill collecting.
Whatever someone who's job and education is to develop such policies says. It's not my profession and it doesn't have to be.
The point is simply that even merely picking 1% or 0.1% of people completely at random to audit keeps 99% of normal people in line, which is far more valuable to society (not just in immediate dollars) than the cost of those few actual audits, regardless what those audits "earn" in collecting a few, or zero, or indeed negative dollars that might have gone uncollected from a random individual. There is no reason an audit should not show that there was an error and the government owes the taxayer, let alone collecting nothing or collecting less than the cost of the audit.
The police's job is not to recover ypur stolen lawnmower, it's to maintain order in general. They expend many thousands of dollars in resources to track down a lawnmower theif not to recover your $400 possession, but to inhibit the activity of theft in general.
Tax audits are, or should be imo, like that.
The actual details of what should be written in the IRS manual are this: Something.
It's a meaningless question since we're not at that level. I'm only talking about the fallacy of treating tax audits as nothing more than a direct and immediate source of income instead of a means to maintain order and a far greater but indirect source of income.
> The police's job is not to recover ypur stolen lawnmower, it's to maintain order in general.
But here's the thing: it's often the case that the theft rate in an area is down to a handful a prolific thieves... who act with impunity because they reckon that any one act of theft won't be followed up.
I'd hope that in most jurisdictions, police keep track of who the prolific thieves/shoplifters/burglars/muggers are, and are also willing to look into individual thefts, etc., because even when it's the thief's first crime, there can often be an organised crime link - the newbie thief's drug dealer has asked them to do a "favour" to clear a debt, or such.
So it can be really useful to track down your lawnmower. Sometimes. And the police don't know if it's worth it or not until they do the work. I can see the parallels in this analogy to tax audits.
"Unlikely," I suppose if you don't have any significant assets to be seized and don't care about ending up in prison, you may be willing to take the chance.
Nothing reassures one as much as a goverment enforcement entity essentially saying "we have full legal right to squash you like a bug but for now we won't because we just don't want to. For now".
You're right. Plus, the overreactions have been walked back or solved in some cases, e.g: LFGSS is going to continue on as a community ran effort which will comply with the risk assessment requirements. Most of the shutdowns are on long-dead forums that have been in need of an excuse to shutter. The number of active users impacted by these shutdowns probably doesn't break 100.
I am glad to see you renamed to forms from blocks :) I am not saying that your work is bad but even if your work is bad you can make money hand over fist so questions of "good" or "bad" are immaterial[1].
As a solo developer walking a well-worn path you're in a fortunate position. You can poach customers from competitors and differentiate based on customer's having direct engagement with you, the founder, and price, because you don't have expensive developers to pay.
Identify a single use-case that your software is good for today, and then spend some time identifying prospective customers based on companies using your competitors for that use-case, then reach out and undercut your competitors based on your values. A competitor's case study / customer stories page is the classic poachers first port of call.
Persistence will pay off. Most of your outreach will fail, most of your ideas will fall flat, most of what you think matters won't matter and most of what you think doesn't matter will matter. That's okay.
Anything can be made into a company. Can you make this into a company? Nobody really knows until you've tried, but the idea has potential and you have the necessary skills to pull it off so there's no reason it shouldn't be possible.
The biggest difference between developers who write software and founders of software companies is a focus on customers. If you're struggling to see a clear path forward, it's a sign that you are probably spending too much time writing code and not enough time thinking about / talking to customers. You'll know you're doing enough business things when you start to feel like you're letting the software slip.
[1] I think it's great but that would undercut my point that it doesn't matter
Travel can be as easy as you want it to be if you are willing to spend money and/or plan. Stay at hotels that are part of a hotel group (e.g: Marriott) and check-in will be seamless. Use airport transfers and someone will be waiting at the airport with a sign and take you straight to the hotel (any reputable hotel will arrange it for you at a fair price). Use a global e-sim that you can activate when your plane lands. The pain you're describing is a choice (a completely reasonable choice to make for many people, but a choice nonetheless).
I am no fan of the UK but "worst weather on the planet"? The UK's greatest fault is that it is mediocre, it is uninspired, it is neither good nor bad, it is a place with so much potential that realises so little of it.
If economic opportunity is your motivation then the U.S. is a much better place to be than the UK, but if you'd just like to live a normal life with healthcare and a house, the UK is a far better place to be than the U.S for most people. "Economic opportunity" as a motivator is itself a U.S. mindset.
Why is it always americans who are caught with being seemingly unaware of the rest of the world? Is it because we all speak their language? I didn't ever see it with Britons or Australians.
A small website operator can keep child pornography off their platform with ease. Facebook have a mountain to climb — regardless of their resources.