Seems like the thin edge of a thick wedge. First porn, then what next? Video games? Movies? Netflix?
It seems like another data grab. I’ve not seen the technical specification but presumably porn sites will hold on to a verification token of some sort from the government ID database, which could then be used to correlate your viewing habits (at the porn site end) to your age verification request (and thus ID, at the government end).
I imagine this will drive more and more people to use VPNs. I’ve got to assume someone involved in this has considered that. Maybe this is a prelude to banning VPNs in the UK? (“They’re only used by criminals and people trying to circumvent the age verification system”)?
The (insane) UK trade industry body for Age Verification providers believes every site on the internet should be forced to only carry content suitable for under 13s, or should block all access from VPNs in case anyone from the UK is using them.
They also came out with the absolutely golden statement this week that it's not too bad that this would put vulnerable people in authoritarian countries at risk, because all we had to do was collapse the governments of Russia, China, much of Africa, Poland, Iran, sizable chunks of the Middle East etc etc. Problem solved!
In the UK, this is already the default: adult content is blocked by ISPs, unless you check a box. The percentage of people who have the box ticked roughly correlates with the percentage of households with children. This bill goes further in requiring age-verification to be run by every site serving adult content, or be blocked in the UK altogether. The reasoning is that children can still browse pornography if they are not connected to their home network, and this will stop that happening.
People don’t realize how invasive the UK govt is when it comes to internet monitoring.
Today if you try to access adult content on a UK mobile device you get blocked by age verification. You have to call your mobile provider and prove your age (it’s a once-per-contract thing). One of the ways you can prove your age is with a credit card. But I imagine it’s a large deterrent because not many people want to call Vodafone and ask permission to look at pornography. They’d probably just rather get a VPN.
Brit here. I'm apathetic going on mildly in favour. On the downside it limits the privacy of people who can't be bothered to turn on a VPN. On the plus it may protect kids from being bullied to suicide etc (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11707945/Britain-wa...). I'm in favour of protecting kids and capable of clicking the VPN button.
That said I'm a bit meh as it's unclear how well it will work if at all.
At that time, I was probably listed as requested access to mature content; reasons were not required but a few years ago they were already asking for identification, eg. passports.
What's frightening is how silent everyone is about this.
I hope this causes websites to start blocking UK users. That would cause VPNs to become more common, undermining the government's enforced logging of internet use.
The UK is currently (it's law!) going to impose mandatory online age verification for “adult content”, including IIRC the ability to block non-compliant foreign sites (will they block twitter, tumblr?)
If I was British, I would do anything I could to urge politicians and the public to dismantle this firewall. Our biggest problem, not just in Britain but in all countries, is that the public does not understand how serious this is at all.
I think for the reasons you give this bill is never going to actually get through in its current form, or, if it does, it won't be abided by nor enforced. The reason it's gotten this far is because government ministers don't have any idea how the web works and they've adopted an attitude of ignoring experts so they won't learn. Once ordinary Tory voters start to get irritated by the implications of the law (credit card to view porn?) it'll get quietly scrapped. In any case, I know otherwise-luddite 60 year olds who know how to use VPNs to watch geoblocked TV, so getting around it will be trivial for a sizeable chunk of the population. And there's no way the UK government has the resources and political capital to police the internet on the scale required by this bill.
Virgin Media give you a message for blocked porn, but not the VPNs they stop you accessing.
It's quite insidious - the VPN blocks are textbook government overreach.
If we ever have a written constitution in the UK we need rules stopping the government fucking about with this stuff (As it seems to be the entropic end-state of all policy to protect the children)
Say I run a porn site and a british 14 year old accesses it, and I don't have up these verifications, I just broke the law in the UK and now they can easily extradite me because the US and UK governments are -very- friendly. Seems like a good reason to block UK IP addresses to me...
My first reaction to this was that VPN usage will explode, but I'm not sure how a VPN server hosted in another country would work with their desire to effectively ban encryption.
I feel like the UK is slowly goose stepping its way to a Chinese style firewall.
Given the right's obsession with what I'm ordering on Amazon, and the left being essentially unelectable right now, I'm not really sure where to put my vote at the next election.
The Great Firewall on the Thames.
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