Online Safety Act: What went wrong?

I agree with the preface that the online safety act is a big dumpster fire. Regulators and lawmakers can and often do fail to effectively regulate.

I disagree that calling it a cultural problem and saying “oh well, can’t do anything” is a legitimate conclusion. I mean governments aren’t supposed to attack cultural problems, only protect the safety and wellbeing of its citizens. Nobody wants the government telling you what clothes to wear and what shows to watch.

The rhetorical “example” given is just plain false. It’s not like the government sending someone to your house to age check you when you pick up a knife. It’s like them requiring a bouncer at the door of a knife store.

We ID people for purchase of alcohol. It’s not perfect. Older kids get around it. And it’s definitely a “cultural problem” to some degree. But there isn't harm being caused by requiring an age check to purchase.

So often lately I see people letting perfect be the enemy of good.

If you wanted to fix problems with the implementation of the online safety act you would loosen the burden imposed on user content driven communities by exposing the individuals posting to legal liability for their posts rather than imposing unimplementable moderation requirements on the service operators. You would attack institutional porn not message boards where someone uploads a nsfw photo. Regulators don’t understand the stratification of the internet. You’d require sites that fall under regulation to use digital ID documents. You make it illegal for that data to be stored at all and simply tell sites to update a column in the user db “age verified: true”. You would not use IP address-based or credit card based filtering.

There are many ways this could have been not a regulatory dumpster fire and still moved the needle towards sustainable and effective online ID document presentation. One example of failure doesn’t damn the whole concept.

In this instance, though, the online safety act should definitely be repealed and reworked.

Also no parental controls are not readily and widely available nor are they easy to configure and install, not least because of lack of a digital ID story.

Yet none of those far more problematic things comes with an age check, a fence, government controls or any special kinds of locks. We just educate children, and parents pay attention. Children that are too young to understand are put in special places like kindergarten, and even at a later age are often supervised by responsible adults.

I don't see why the internet should suddenly be all of that in reverse: Things like the online safety act require a whole world full of child-safe sites, and a child-impenetrable fence put around the few ones considered unsafe. This is totally ass-backwards.

But the fact remains here that the world's largest porn company is not presenting this as a big civil liberties issue; they have moved on from that.

I think it's important to understand that Ofcom isn't just imposing nonsense policies without any consultation with the very people they are trying to regulate.

They may not be succeeding, and people can disagree with the policy outcome, but there's a huge amount of misinformation suggesting that this is simple thoughtless autocratic censorious wishful thinking, when it is in fact an attempt at a policy of industry self-regulation backed by penalties, which is how the ombudsman system is meant to work.

Also I think a lot of US commentators don't understand that mobile phone providers in the UK block adult content by default and have been moving to that position over the long term because it is the only practical parental control mechanism that exists in a market of devices with different operating systems, menus, and often absence of on-device parental control mechanisms at all.