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Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

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Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#21

Post by yboris »

BurningFrog wrote: post #9
llamataboot wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about intentions, seems like the intention behind a ton of this stuff is to "protect the children", or "fix a problem" etc etc, but there just isn't enough awareness of possible side effects - not unique to tech legislation - just look at the policy ratchet of "you can always run by being tougher on crime, very hard to run on being not as tough" -- and arguably there is also some interaction with tech co…

It's a good mental practice to always be aware that stated intentions and actual reasons are entirely separate things. They do sometimes, mostly by chance, coincide. The advanced level of this is to be aware this applies even to your own actions.

A great book to realize that the reasons people give for what they do are not the real reasons is Elephant in the Brain

https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...

A great book to realize that the reasons you give for what you do are not the real reasons is Strangers to Ourselves

https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Ourselves-Discovering-Adapt...

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#22

Post by hallway_monitor »

llamataboot wrote: post #12
BurningFrog wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good mental practice to always be aware that stated intentions and actual reasons are entirely separate things. They do sometimes, mostly by chance, coincide. The advanced level of this is to be aware this applies even to your own actions.

The super advanced level is to realize it applies to all of your /thoughts/ which is mostly a pattern matching brain and personality built around the ways it found to make sense of some things justifying the chaos in retrospect :D

Correct but this is a different phenomenon. You are talking about post hoc justification for your behavior, where your brain is very good at making up stories that have nothing to do with the original motivation.

I believe GP is referring to the fact that the true aim of much of this legislation had nothing to do with protecting kids from the beginning. They use that rhetoric because it's easy to get people on board and much more difficult to explain the real world implications for security.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#23

Post by com2kid »

dane-pgp wrote: post #3

> What I’ve come to realise since then is it’s not a joke. That’s the intention. Make it too prohibitive, risky, or impossible for public discourse to flow on smaller platforms and services; require the larger ones to become speech police and societal monitors This is, I believe, also the intention behind the calls to repeal Section 230. It takes politics back to the simpler age where there were just a few entities d…

> ended up making social media accounts require annual payments

So, an end to social media companies that are actively hostile to their users? No more psychologically deceptive tactics to force engagement at any cost? No more ad tracking? An end to foreign spam accounts?

Looks like quarterly ARPU is about $12 per US user per month. So a $5 a month subscription would destroy their business model. However go back 6 years and $5 a month was what they were bringing in from ads, and Facebook wasn't exactly suffering as a business 6 years ago.

In Europe, ARPU is just $6 per month right now, though I'd presume UK is higher, since EU is very diverse in terms of country economies.

Of course most people would leave Facebook if it was $5 a month.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#24

Post by philipov »

llamataboot wrote: post #8
dane-pgp wrote: post #3

> What I’ve come to realise since then is it’s not a joke. That’s the intention. Make it too prohibitive, risky, or impossible for public discourse to flow on smaller platforms and services; require the larger ones to become speech police and societal monitors This is, I believe, also the intention behind the calls to repeal Section 230. It takes politics back to the simpler age where there were just a few entities d…

I don't know about intentions, seems like the intention behind a ton of this stuff is to "protect the children", or "fix a problem" etc etc, but there just isn't enough awareness of possible side effects - not unique to tech legislation - just look at the policy ratchet of "you can always run by being tougher on crime, very hard to run on being not as tough" -- and arguably there is also some interaction with tech co…

That's not intent, that's pretext. Pretext is the justification you tell people to get them to agree with your plan. Intent is the effect you actually want it to achieve, which you don't tell people. It is important to distinguish between the two. I think the intent of most laws is "Get me reelected," and that is where we need to discuss Perverse Incentives of professional politicians. Reelection pressure is clearly not working as an incentive for keeping politicians focused on the public good.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#25

Post by dane-pgp »

Zak wrote: post #10
dane-pgp wrote: post #3

> What I’ve come to realise since then is it’s not a joke. That’s the intention. Make it too prohibitive, risky, or impossible for public discourse to flow on smaller platforms and services; require the larger ones to become speech police and societal monitors This is, I believe, also the intention behind the calls to repeal Section 230. It takes politics back to the simpler age where there were just a few entities d…

> [Preventing public discourse] is, I believe, also the intention behind the calls to repeal Section 230 What do you think about calls to remove platform immunity from algorithms that have an editorial effect?

If the goal is to prevent the ambiguous harm of "editorial effect", then I don't think it is fair to remove all platform immunity and punish the platform every time it fails to implement the correct, government-approved "editorial effect" instead of its own.

It seems like the proponents of such a rule change are being underhanded, thinking "We can't ban companies from having a political bias, so we'll say that if the company has a political bias (i.e. any editorial/content policy), it becomes liable for any libel, or scams, or threats (written in any language) that appear anywhere on its platform".

I might support a narrow form of this, though, which says that if a platform doesn't let you opt out of (legal content) filtering/re-ordering of content, then the platform has profited from you receiving messages with an unwanted bias (i.e. commercial speech), and therefore owes the user a small amount of statutory damages each time the user suffers some harm.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#26

Post by noduerme »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #11

My belief is that the open internet began to pose a threat to those in power, they now seek to divide the internet back up along national boundaries via absurd regulations in order to for the traditional institutions to maintain their power. We are already seeing it with many sites being unwilling to deal with the compliance headache of GDPR and just blocking European users, plus it seems like half the internet is of…

No post body was provided.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#27

Post by mike_hearn »

With respect to the politicians not turning up, it's worth noting that at least some of the candidates for PM are against the Online Safety Bill and want to scrap it. So for them, campaigning to become the next leader may actually be a more useful way to spend time than hearing what they already know.

It appears the OSB has become a victim of incoherent requirements specifications. It's grown enormously during its gestation period and is now trying to do way too much, including things that are self-contradictory. Some politicians recognize this, for example Kemi Badenoch:

https://order-order.com/2022/07/11/watch-badenoch-slams-onli...

but I recall others saying similar things. I just can't find the references right now.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#28

Post by 9dev »

yrgulation wrote: post #20
hyperman1 wrote: post #15

As someone from the EU, with no money or anuthing coming in from the UK, why would I even care about this? The GDPR has teeth only because the EU is big enough to make companies care. It is a watered down version from some privacy rights compared to the old laws in my country. But the old laws were ignorde by US tech because why wouldn't they. So as the UK left the EU, they are now a small country in the computer wor…

> So as the UK left the EU, they are now a small country in the computer world. Umm yeah no. Perhaps regulation wise but no, the uk is not a “small” country in the “computer world”.

What else would it be? There's about 67 million people living in the UK, compared to the 447 million in the EU - depends on your definition of "small", but our company will likewise ignore any specific UK regulations. The handful of customers there isn't worth any additional overhead compared to the EU+US.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#29

Post by _fat_santa »

If this applies to every site that hosts user generated content then that's nuts. When the internet first started, part of the appeal is that you could just make stuff without people looking over your shoulder, asking for forms, etc. Seems that the internet we created today is technically the same as the one from before, but now with governments throwing up red tape at every corner.

Makes me wonder what a site like HN would have to do in order to stay in compliance. While on the one hand HN could make the argument that the site is not geared towards children so this kind of stuff is not a concern, regulations will say: well TECHNICALLY a child could use HN, and TECHNICALLY a predator could message with them, and therefore there is TECHNICALLY a risk, so please pay up $20k/yr for compliance costs.

I use HN as a stand in example for many many sites and services out there. IMO, I don't think it will be that enforceable. Sure the big tech companies will comply, anyone that runs a smaller service outside the UK will just tell the UK govt to kick rocks if they come knocking (what can they do besides blocking the site in the UK).

If this bill gets passed were going to get the following:

- Big tech company scandal over CSAM.

- A heartbreaking story over some small time website owner facing prison time over non-compliance.

- Opinion pieces from the tech community about how it's a terrible idea all around.

- Puff pieces from non-tech outlets that praise the legislation without fully understanding the technical ramifications.

- Flame war between techies and non-techies over competing puff pieces.

Re: Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill

#30

Post by nsteel »

9dev wrote: post #28
yrgulation wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So as the UK left the EU, they are now a small country in the computer world. Umm yeah no. Perhaps regulation wise but no, the uk is not a “small” country in the “computer world”.

What else would it be? There's about 67 million people living in the UK, compared to the 447 million in the EU - depends on your definition of "small", but our company will likewise ignore any specific UK regulations. The handful of customers there isn't worth any additional overhead compared to the EU+US.

Perhaps we should be counting computers, rather than people, in the "computer world". Although I am not saying you'd come to a different conclusion.
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