@aphyr If there's anything this country's lawmakers love, it's imposing broad bureaucratic regulations and then failing to adequately exemplify compliance.
Bonus points if the penalties for non-compliance might feasibly sink smaller operators and individuals while being either difficult to apply or inconsequential to larger ones.
Sucks that this one actually got through, similar legislation has withered on the vine for lack of feasible implementation detail before.
@aphyr honest question understanding you are not a lawyer: does a blog with no comments section qualify as user-to-user? Isn’t like…the entirety of the internet user-to-user in that case?
@anderson_jon Honestly unclear. IANAL, but I think the hosting provider could be considered a user-to-user service, even if all they do is static HTML pages.
@aphyr that is absolutely insane. The idea I can’t just host my blog and if someone thinks something on it is porn, I can now be fined WAY TOO MUCH for like…a static web page that nobody can interact with, just read.
@aphyr@anderson_jon so as a Hosting Provider I've trying to grapple with how the definition of a user to user service doesn't apply to literally any company whose products allow IP traffic.
However I've decided that at least one of my Hosting companies is an Ancillary Service Provider and not a user-to-user provider due to the difficulties OFCOM would have in shutting down one of our customers if they didn't compel us to do it.
@aphyr So, if the UK/Ofcom starts targeting the Fediverse, server admins have at least three options:
* Geoblock the UK; or * Block every server that allows sexful and other content that kids of UK must be protected from; or * Ignore the #OnlineSafetyAct, and risk legal trouble.
@zenfin We opted to declare ourselves out of scope, but if Ofcom decides instances of our scale *are* in scope, yes, I believe those are essentially our only options. I haven't heard anything from mastodon.social, and they're almost certainly large enough to fall in scope, so right now it looks like they're choosing option C. https://blog.woof.group/announcements/out-of-scope-of-the-online-safety-act
Out of Scope of the Online Safety Act
Woof.group has made extensive efforts to assess the impact of the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA). After working through Ofcom's detailed gu...
@derickr@zenfin I'm not sure about that part. If phpc.social were to be found in scope, I believe you'd have to implement highly effective age assurance and take down public pages/APIs. Right now you can find porn pretty quickly on phpc.social:
Includes videos of the webinar, outlines a couple of major outstanding issues
relating to Mastodon and proportionate enforcement, and suggests what ofcom
might do next.