UK age verification laws. Question to the admins.

[imsorry3]

I think it's time for all websites based outside the UK to give the British authorities the middle finger and say, "Fuck you, we're going to ignore you."

The British market is not that large or important, and the British authorities' ability to reach anyone outside their jurisdiction is very limited.

What can the British authorities do if the operator of a platform abroad ignores them?

This is

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what they're aiming for.
Pushing away services, cornering them removing country after country

 

[joecoe]

This is

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what they're aiming for.
Pushing away services, cornering them removing country after country

Well, I guess there will be more people in the UK who use VPNs than those who actually verify their age on porn sites. And it will be the same case in all countries that introduce some form of mandatory age verification in the future.

 

[imsorry3]

Well, I guess there will be more people in the UK who use VPNs than those who actually verify their age on porn sites. And it will be the same case in all countries that introduce some form of mandatory age verification in the future.

The problem, which isn't even limited exclusively to pornography, is that this solution relies on the use of VPNs.
VPN services only work as long as there are countries that aren't in the same situation as the UK, and if the goal is to extend this level of control globally, there might no longer be any safe havens to cling to. That’s assuming VPNs will even be allowed in the first place. Given that such major decisions seem to be imposed from above without consulting the population, I suppose there's nothing stopping a state from making VPNs illegal if it really wanted to.

 

[joecoe]

The problem, which isn't even limited exclusively to pornography, is that this solution relies on the use of VPNs.
VPN services only work as long as there are countries that aren't in the same situation as the UK, and if the goal is to extend this level of control globally, there might no longer be any safe havens to cling to. That’s assuming VPNs will even be allowed in the first place. Given that such major decisions seem to be imposed from above without consulting the population, I suppose there's nothing stopping a state from making VPNs illegal if it really wanted to.

Banning VPNs would seriously jeopardize their companies' business. VPNs have many other uses besides bypassing blocks.

I think there will always be at least a few countries in the world that will not implement age verification and porn censorship, and most porn platforms will be formally located there.

 

[imsorry3]

Banning VPNs would seriously jeopardize their companies' business. VPNs have many other uses besides bypassing blocks.

I think there will always be at least a few countries in the world that will not implement age verification and porn censorship, and most porn platforms will be formally located there.

True, for working purposes they can be essential, but that could be regulated too.
Anyway all we can do is stay informed and check how things will evolve.
It wouldn't be a bad idea if the UK did something before these measures are implemented elsewhere in the world, but I'm not too optimistic about it. From what I read here and there they're mostly resigned after collecting that many signs and still receiving the middle finger from the gov. :/

 

[joecoe]

True, for working purposes they can be essential, but that could be regulated too.
Anyway all we can do is stay informed and check how things will evolve.
It wouldn't be a bad idea if the UK did something before these measures are implemented elsewhere in the world, but I'm not too optimistic about it. From what I read here and there they're mostly resigned after collecting that many signs and still receiving the middle finger from the gov. :/

It looks like the current government will get the middle finger from voters in the next election. Of course, this will not be the main reason, because unfortunately too few people care about government censorship and online privacy, and other political issues are much more important to the majority of the population, but there is still hope that the law will be repealed after the elections.

 

[PlayClaritas]

This is a piracy site, so its already illegal in the UK and most countries. There is absolutely no reason to comply with this garbage.

 

[SloppyTurdSlapper]

This is a piracy site, so its already illegal in the UK and most countries.

You don't have to look that deep into the availability. This site gets blocked by your common ad blocker if you install the correct filters.

Regarding Wiki, the authors there are now accountable for future publications, which could be good for individual rights, but I'm curious to know where it's going to really hurt.

 

[swifty91]

This is a piracy site, so its already illegal in the UK and most countries. There is absolutely no reason to comply with this garbage.

Doing nothing to comply is the best thing every site can do. The UK gov can't do anything except tell ISP's to block the site which can be bypassed with DNS over HTTPS (DoH) which is even easier than using a VPN since Chrome/Firefox/etc support this out of the box. So doing absolutely nothing is best for everyone.

 

[Insanatee]

Youtube starts their AI age verification tomorrow, place bets on how long until it fucks up their site so bad they are forced to stopping the new program. I give them 2 months.

 

[SorryMsJackson4eels]

The southern US states are trying to be sneaky as well, it may not go anywhere...yet. But time will tell.

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Last month, age verification laws went into effect in Wyoming and South Dakota, requiring sites hosting “material that is harmful to minors” to verify visitors are over 18 years old. These would normally just be two more states joining the nearly 30 that have so far ceded ground to a years-long campaign for enforcing

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of keeping kids away from porn online.

But these two states’ laws leave out an important condition: Unlike the laws passed in other states, they don’t state that this applies only to sites with “33.3 percent” or one-third “harmful” material. That could mean Wyoming and South Dakota would require a huge number of sites to use age verification because they host any material they deem harmful to minors, not just porn sites.

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to pass an age verification law in the US in January 2023, and since then, most states have either copied or modeled their laws on Louisiana’s—including in Arizona, Missouri, and Ohio, where these laws will be enacted within the coming weeks. And most have included the “one-third” clause, which would theoretically limit the age verification burden to adult sites. But dropping that provision, as Wyoming and South Dakota have done, opens a huge swath of sites to the burden of verifying the ages of visitors in those states.


Louisiana’s law states:

“Any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall be held liable if the entity fails to perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.”

A “substantial portion” is 33.3 percent or more material on a site that’s “harmful to minors,” the law says.

The same organizations that have lobbied for age verification laws that apply to porn sites have also spent years targeting social media platforms like Reddit and X, as well as streaming services like Netflix, for hosting adult content they deem “

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.” While these sites and platforms do host adult content, age-gating the entire internet only pushes adult consumers and children alike into less-regulated, more exploitative spaces and situations, while everyone just uses VPNs to get around gates.

Adult industry advocacy group the Free Speech Coalition

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about Wyoming and South Dakota’s dropping of the one-third or “substantial” requirement on Tuesday, writing that this could “create civil and criminal liability for social media platforms such as X, Reddit and Discord, retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, streaming platforms such as Netflix and Rumble,” and any other platform that simply allowed material these states consider “harmful to minors” but doesn’t age-verify. “Under these new laws, a platform with any amount of material ‘harmful to minors,’ is required to verify the age of all visitors using the site. Operators of platforms that fail to do so may be subject to civil suits or even arrest,” they wrote.


A version of what could be the future of the internet in the US is already playing out in the UK. Last month, the UK enacted the

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, which forces platforms to verify the ages of everyone who tries to access certain kinds of content deemed harmful to children. So far, this has included (but isn’t limited to)

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,

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, social media sites like Bluesky, and certain content

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.


On Monday,

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brought by the Wikimedia Foundation that argued the over-broadness of the new UK rules would “undermine the privacy and safety of Wikipedia’s volunteer contributors, expose the encyclopedia to manipulation and vandalism, and divert essential resources from protecting people and improving Wikipedia, one of the world’s most trusted and widely used digital public goods,”

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. “For example, the Foundation would be required to verify the identity of many Wikipedia contributors, undermining the privacy that is central to keeping Wikipedia volunteers safe.”

"As we're seeing in the UK with the Online Safety Act, laws designed to protect the children from ‘harmful material’ online quickly metastasize and begin capturing nearly all users and all sites in surveillance and censorship schemes,” Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, told me in an email following the alert. “These laws give the government legal power to threaten platform owners into censoring or removing fairly innocuous content — healthcare information, mainstream films, memes, political speech — while decimating privacy protections for adults. Porn was only ever a Trojan horse for advancing these laws. Now, unfortunately, we're starting to see what we warned was inside all along."

 

[SloppyTurdSlapper]

They are now targeting VPNs:

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