On one hand, I do think we need to do something about the content children have access to online, but I don't understand why the government believe this is their problem.
What content children get exposed to has always been the responsibility of parents. Assuming this bill has honest intentions (I don't believe it does) the issue here is more that parents are giving their children unrestricted access to the internet.
What we need to be doing (if anything) is giving parents more ability to regulate what content their kids have access to rather than simply putting that responsibility on the government and service providers.
ISPs should be making it much easier to for parents to add global content filters and device-specific filters. Both could easily be managed from an app and in my opinion this should be what the government should be focused on.
That said, what this seems to actually be is an attempt to crack down on content and speech the government (and perhaps the public generally) doesn't like.
The UK is an extremely authoritarian place, not because people here are generally authoritarian in nature in that we seek to control the behaviours of others, but because we're excessively conformist and polite. This bill exploits this aspect of our nature because few people in the UK are going to stick their necks out in defence online encryption or adult content.
For context for those who live the in US, in the UK if you're doing something impolite you're generally breaking the law...
Swearing in public? That's a public order offence. Saying something mean online? That's hate speech. Protesting fossil fuels? That's disruptive. And so on...
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.
Mr Cameron tells us that he's terrified of what his children can access online. You'd think with access to some of the UK's most intelligent brains he'd be able to master parental guidance of internet usage without legislating it.
Isn't this just telling parents that the internet will suddenly be safe, a government sanctioned message to that effect is quite a bit stronger than your ISPs salesperson. Of course, the filter will either resemble China or have holes so assuming the latter any responsible parent will still want to monitor their children's usage.
The effect of this law seems to be constrained to making David Cameron (and other not-very-technically-knowledgeable parents) feel that he's a responsible parent, but to be honest I'd rather taxpayers pay for a nanny for him than for this ridiculous law - cheaper and much more effective.
UK Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Secretary of State Nadine Dorries, said her aim with the bill was to "make the internet, in the UK, the safest place in the world for children and vulnerable young people to go online."
People don't realise, but the UK govt think pretty much only about the children and vulnerable young. Legislation begins and end with this question: "how can they make sure everyone is nice and safe?"
Its not that they are using this group as a pretext to shove draconian legislations down our throats, no. /s
My primary concern isn't leaks or shaming. What I really have a problem with is the role of government here. Elections are not perfect, that's why we have separation of powers. But it's hard to see how any government imposed solution can be implemented without upsetting the balance and opening the door to government censorship/manipulation further down the road.
The responsibility to block this content should be with the parents and the free market. As a parent I can already purchase content filtering services. The UK government is meddling in an area it doesn't need to, with potentially disastrous consequences, presumably for PR purposes.
I have a young daughter and I live in the UK. I think this legislation is bloody stupid.
Yes, some people might reasonably not want their children to run across pornographic material on the internet. Here are some other things some people might reasonably not want their children to run across on the internet: Anti-religious material. Religious material. Depictions of violence. Any mention of prejudice against racial minorities, women, etc. Websites offering do-my-homework-for-me services. News about upsetting things like tens of thousands of children starving to death every day in poor parts of Africa.
I hope it's clear that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for all those things. I think it's clear, in fact, that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for any of those things.
Yes, I hope my daughter will learn about sex in better ways than by stumbling across porn on the internet. And I hope she'll learn about those other things in better ways than by stumbling across them on the internet, too. It is not the government's, or my ISP's, job to make that happen by making things harder to find online; it probably won't work, and it will probably break other things (as such filters always have in the past), and it's the wrong way to solve the "problem" anyway.
And I also hope that if in the fullness of time our daughter wants to find porn on the internet, she will be able to, and she won't be (or feel) obliged to disclose the fact to her parents, and doing so without telling us won't require her to seek out dubious illegal channels which are likely to be full of stuff much "worse" than she'd easily have found without all the censorship.
This is genuinely terrible for people living in the UK who care about their privacy and freedom on the internet.
I do wonder whether this bill was caused by sincere misunderstanding of how tech works on the part of the legislators or, more cynically, a government agenda to crush privacy on the internet. Either way, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
This is genuinely terrible for people living in the UK who care about their privacy and freedom on the internet.
I do wonder whether this bill was caused by sincere misunderstanding of how tech works on the part of the legislators or, more cynically, a government agenda to crush privacy on the internet. Either way, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
This is disturbing, and I can't really imagine how they want the ISPs to pull this off.
What counts as a porn site? Who will evaluate it? If I have a photo sharing site and some douche uploads a picture of a naked lady, does that count?
I'm ok with the child protection and all that crap, that should be parent's responsibility to begin with, but I think this is not the answer. They should at least ask everyone about this.
I really feel this is heading towards internet censorship in the UK.
Preventing your children from seeing obscene content is fine.
Deciding that other people are too stupid to be able to do this, and thus those other people need a government mandated filter at the ISP to filter adult content is perhaps a bit authoritarian.
Don't forget that UK mobile providers already filter adult content (T-Mobile have something called "Content lock" - you need to go to the shop with ID to prove age to have it switched off. O2 and the others have something similar.)
And the UK has the Internet Watch Foundation - a quango that has the power to request that ISPs filter some pages and images.
I don't know what the answer to protecting people from extreme imagery is, but I do know a government filter isn't it.
Sadly there wasn't much hope of this bill not making it into law. The opposition parties if anything felt that the law wasn't strong enough and pushed to make it even more draconian. The British public at large are in favour of any law that imposes harsher penalties and regulation on the tech giants. 'Protect the children' is far more emotive than 'But we might eventually lose encryption', and the collateral damage to our freedoms is slow and insidious enough that it's not recognised or appreciated. I think given everything we have to take the governments vague concession of 'when the technology becomes available' as a win, it was the best we were going to get, no way was this bill not going to pass.
We are still in the early Wild West days of the internet, but in the decades ahead bills like this will become more commonplace as governments try to wrestle back control of what citizens can access
This is not censorship. It's an opt-in web content filter, operated by the largest ISPs, with no statutory backing. It's intended to encourage ISPs to provide optional parental controls for every subscriber, and no more.
Frankly, I think this is actually a pretty good outcome, if not deliberately so. It completely kills the arguments for actual Web censorship by eliminating the "think of the children" argument, which is probably the one which the media bang on about most, without imposing any legal requirements or mandatory filtering.
So there are plenty of options for users who don't want to be subject to the filter. Switch to another DNS provider, or don't opt in to the filtering, or even better – switch to one of the ISPs that don't offer this feature and never will.
Ironically, I think that these filters are going to encourage the preservation of Internet freedom in the UK in the long run.
This has everything to do with the Nanny Tory initiative! If you read the article, the point he is making is not that Porn is good, or that O2 are censors, but that: UK Parents are failing at parenthood! And that is exactly the condition that the UK Nanny state is expecting to exploit with such initiatives - and any corporation setting up to serve their government masters is part of the problem. The problem, being, that people do not want to be responsible parents and monitor what their children are doing online.
You much overestimate how politically involved the UK public is. Most people don’t know what this bill is.
In the UK there’s a concept of the “Westminster bubble”. Politicians believe that people care deeply about “online safety”, which is all that matters really.
Through most of history government always has the power, but the
question is whether it has the legitimacy.
In this case it has the legitimacy, but lacks the power.
This is an unusual turn.
We need online safety for kids. The aims of this bill should obtain
widespread support from everyone.
But instead of carefully researching and implementing difficult ideas,
framing it properly and obtaining permission from the people - a remit
to empower us to embrace online safety on our own terms - it's taken a
strictly 20th Century "Mother knows best, think of the children"
approach and made this a battle with Big Tech.
It is laughably "Yes, Prime-Minister" in its clumsiness. We have
anachronistic throwbacks in charge.
Sounds alright to me. Something needs to be done about young children accessing pornographic content, and terrorists and paedophiles using end-to-end encrypted chat systems to cover their tracks. This seems like a reasonable compromise that won't affect most users, while also not mandating any specific technical solution, leaving the implementation up to subject matter experts.
These type of restrictions are always going to be somewhat difficult to fully realise due to the multi-jurisdictional nature of the Internet, but at least the UK is trying to do what's right for its own citizens. Which is quite an unusual yet welcome action for the current Government.
It's on top of the existing measure where if you wanted to access mature content over your internet connection, you had to file a request with your ISP. And I'm sure the UK's big provider porn filter wasn't very good anyway, given how much and how quickly it can pop up.
And the targeted demographic that should be protected - children - will find plenty of ways around it. Reddit and Twitter are easily accessed, Youtube has tons of soft porn that won't get filtered out, VPNs are everywhere - even free ones, like in Opera, and they Know about it - Tiktok has tons of soft porn, the list goes on.
> Whilst we sympathise with the government’s desire to show action in this space and to do something about children’s safety (everyone’s safety really), we cannot possibly agree with the methods.
Respectfully, stop sympathising with authoritarians who want to take away your freedom. They are not good people. Good people aren't nosey. Good people don't deprive others of liberty. Neither do they class a whole group (Internet users and entrepreneurs) as responsible for the actions of a minority. Guilt by association and collective punishment are antithetical to any lover of freedom and life.
Their reasons of 'child safety' and 'online harms' (whatever on earth that means) are simply pretexts. They don't give a shit about children's safety. This bill will do nothing, nothing to improve the safety of children. The perpetrators will simply go after children in other ways. They won't change.
If you, Mr. MP, care about children then ask why are they drawn to bad online content? What's going wrong with families and upbringing? Start with questions that might actually address the problem rather than implicate everyone who uses the Internet!
The trajectory is to increase their power and control over your life. Again, they are NOT good people. They know EXACTLY what they are doing. They love dominating you. It's understandable why some imagine the government as simply well-meaning but misguided, for it makes our helpless subjection easier to accept. But we won't stop getting the boot from the state until we start calling their actions out as morally reprehensible.
This bill (the Online Safety Bill) has a long and politically complicated history. It was originally motivated by the Cameron government's fairly limited desire to mandate that public WiFi had porn filters in place and then seems to have grown over many years to include a huge number of pet projects and power grabs from various career bureaucrats.
I don't think politicians set out to do this but it's been around in some form or other in Whitehall for so long that there's no real responsibility anywhere and it was low priority enough that noone ever thought to properly kill it.
What content children get exposed to has always been the responsibility of parents. Assuming this bill has honest intentions (I don't believe it does) the issue here is more that parents are giving their children unrestricted access to the internet.
What we need to be doing (if anything) is giving parents more ability to regulate what content their kids have access to rather than simply putting that responsibility on the government and service providers.
ISPs should be making it much easier to for parents to add global content filters and device-specific filters. Both could easily be managed from an app and in my opinion this should be what the government should be focused on.
That said, what this seems to actually be is an attempt to crack down on content and speech the government (and perhaps the public generally) doesn't like.
The UK is an extremely authoritarian place, not because people here are generally authoritarian in nature in that we seek to control the behaviours of others, but because we're excessively conformist and polite. This bill exploits this aspect of our nature because few people in the UK are going to stick their necks out in defence online encryption or adult content.
For context for those who live the in US, in the UK if you're doing something impolite you're generally breaking the law...
Swearing in public? That's a public order offence. Saying something mean online? That's hate speech. Protesting fossil fuels? That's disruptive. And so on...
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