I'd like to believe that technical people at OFCOM actually know the impossibility of what they're being asked to implement but are just going through the motions, so their bosses/politicians can put out pointless press releases like this.
Trying to restrict access to content on the Internet by requiring "robust" age verification was never going to achieve the goals they stated, and has a number of predictable (and already seen) negative side-effects.
Unfortunately governments all over the place seem intent on continuing this type of regulation, I presume so they can be seen to be doing something. Good time to be in the VPN game, I'd guess.
That is one option, but then you get into the world of Corporate VPNs which are heavily in use and it would seriously cause problems if you banned.
Then you're into "what about all TLS connections" which can be used to send traffic, so you have to do TLS interception at scale, which is a very non-trivial problem to try and solve.
Then you're into non-TLS encrypted protocols, so your only option there is to block anything you can't intercept.....
At that point you've pretty much broken Internet access in your country, might as well just chop the cables :P
They can fine all they want, if the company doesn't have any entity in said territory they can just ignore it. What Ofcom succeeded to achieve though is to deter more and more foreign IT companies to ever expand and create jobs in the UK.
I mean, while this might be true, I'm not sure democracies being totally incapable of regulating the internet is a good place to be. I'm not sure a race to the bottom (if you attempt to regulate us in anyway we'll leave/go complain to the US president) is really a great outcome here. "Porn websites should check your age" is not some radical totalitarian demand I think?
Do you really believe Ofcom and the UK establishment in general really care about the children or terrorists when they are pushing for mandatory digital ID and age-verification in every aspect of our digital lives or are you playing naive?
Controversially, I think most people I know in politics really are actual humans, who got into politics to stop bad things happening, and think that children having ready access to pornography is A Bad Thing.
Everyone disagreeing with this poster, are you okay with living in a society where anything goes? Do we give up trying to minimise harms because it is hard to do? The effort to regulate this sort of access has to start in some shape or form and then improved.
Come up with a better solution, provide a proof of concept and yes regulatory agencies / governments will take notice. People like us work in these agencies. Let's propose better ways of achieving the same goal of reducing porn exposure to minors - not keep bashing the initiative taken.
I think it actually is a radical totalitarian demand, if the only accepted form of age verification is government ID scans or selfie face capture. People should have a right to serve content without having to deal with the SPII of their clients.
... but they specifically don't have to, right? You can just use a third party verification company. Or you can not, if you'd prefer not to. You just have to do something vaguely meaningful that isn't just "Pinky swear you're 18".
The alternative to the OSA is not "being totally incapable of regulating the internet". There's a wide, wide gap between complete lack of regulation and what the UK has done.
Yeah, they didn't really think through the fact they're publishing big lists of sites without effective age verification in all the investigation notices on their website..
I'd like to think somewhere in the newsroom somebody read off the list of websites, nobody admitted to visiting, so they had to conclude none of them had name recognition.
I'd like to believe that technical people at OFCOM actually know the impossibility of what they're being asked to implement but are just going through the motions, so their bosses/politicians can put out pointless press releases like this.
Trying to restrict access to content on the Internet by requiring "robust" age verification was never going to achieve the goals they stated, and has a number of predictable (and already seen) negative side-effects.
Unfortunately governments all over the place seem intent on continuing this type of regulation, I presume so they can be seen to be doing something. Good time to be in the VPN game, I'd guess.
Until governments try to ban VPNs...
That is one option, but then you get into the world of Corporate VPNs which are heavily in use and it would seriously cause problems if you banned.
Then you're into "what about all TLS connections" which can be used to send traffic, so you have to do TLS interception at scale, which is a very non-trivial problem to try and solve.
Then you're into non-TLS encrypted protocols, so your only option there is to block anything you can't intercept.....
At that point you've pretty much broken Internet access in your country, might as well just chop the cables :P
They can fine all they want, if the company doesn't have any entity in said territory they can just ignore it. What Ofcom succeeded to achieve though is to deter more and more foreign IT companies to ever expand and create jobs in the UK.
I mean, while this might be true, I'm not sure democracies being totally incapable of regulating the internet is a good place to be. I'm not sure a race to the bottom (if you attempt to regulate us in anyway we'll leave/go complain to the US president) is really a great outcome here. "Porn websites should check your age" is not some radical totalitarian demand I think?
Do you really believe Ofcom and the UK establishment in general really care about the children or terrorists when they are pushing for mandatory digital ID and age-verification in every aspect of our digital lives or are you playing naive?
Controversially, I think most people I know in politics really are actual humans, who got into politics to stop bad things happening, and think that children having ready access to pornography is A Bad Thing.
Everyone disagreeing with this poster, are you okay with living in a society where anything goes? Do we give up trying to minimise harms because it is hard to do? The effort to regulate this sort of access has to start in some shape or form and then improved.
Come up with a better solution, provide a proof of concept and yes regulatory agencies / governments will take notice. People like us work in these agencies. Let's propose better ways of achieving the same goal of reducing porn exposure to minors - not keep bashing the initiative taken.
I think it actually is a radical totalitarian demand, if the only accepted form of age verification is government ID scans or selfie face capture. People should have a right to serve content without having to deal with the SPII of their clients.
... but they specifically don't have to, right? You can just use a third party verification company. Or you can not, if you'd prefer not to. You just have to do something vaguely meaningful that isn't just "Pinky swear you're 18".
How do they perform age checks?
The alternative to the OSA is not "being totally incapable of regulating the internet". There's a wide, wide gap between complete lack of regulation and what the UK has done.
> . "Porn websites should check your age" is not some radical totalitarian demand I think?
How would that work? do you want to provide government id to watch porn?
And how is this helping since it's not going to work overall (other sites, torrents, etc)
I love the way that the BBC studiously doesn't name any AVS Group Ltd sites in that article.
Funnily, ofcom itself provides a list in the opening text
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/i...
Yeah, they didn't really think through the fact they're publishing big lists of sites without effective age verification in all the investigation notices on their website..
I'd like to think somewhere in the newsroom somebody read off the list of websites, nobody admitted to visiting, so they had to conclude none of them had name recognition.
great news for self employed prostitutes everywhere
1M is nothing.