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Comment on UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole

abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

UK has a massive federal budget problem…

The UK isn’t a Federal Country. It’s a Unitary state with Devolution. I know it is basically a Federal state in Practice (Holyrood, Cardiff Bay and Stormont all have varying amounts of autonomy) but the distinction is significant.

and they still keep increasing expenditure on surveillance.

This is the fucked up bit though: The OSA doesn’t put the burden of Age gates on the State. They put it on The Service Provider (Websites and services). This is why so many non-porn forums, lemmy instances, and mastodon instances have either had to shut down or geoblock the UK, all the responsibility is on them to institute this lest they get sued out the arse. They can’t afford to get YOTI or whatever, or don’t have the manpower or money to institute their own system, so they shut down.

It’s also why overblocking is a thing: because the OSA’s official defination of what should be blocked is so vague so the two people who decide what get’s blocked are the Service Provider and the Government effectively in that order. This is why Reddit is blocking things that should not be agegated (like support groups), because the law is so fucking vague, and why sites like Twitter are blocking tweets that don’t need to be blocked under the “news” exception (yes, there is an exception for the news).

All of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don’t need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.

And all the other major tech players (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft) are developing “Digital ID” systems as a “solution” which will not only make it easier to track people for them and the government, but also for advertisers, so they aren’t complaining either.

TL;DR, The UK basically put all the pressure on the Websites so their friends can make loads of money.

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PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if this shit starts pushing Scotland to want to be its own country again.

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- abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Oh my sweet summer child:
  
  Pretty much everything that’s happened since 2014 (Brexit, the erosion of Scotland’s autonomy, the nixing of the GRA, The Covid Response, Liz Truss) has pushed Scotland toward Independence. This isn’t even that big a push for us.
  
  The investment firm/think tank, Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, IS HEAD-QUARTERED IN FUCKIN’ DUNFERMLINE.
  
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  - PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Thanks for the info. Now I know.
    
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FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

All of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don’t need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.

Can you link more information about this conflict of interest? I can’t find anything about it.

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- abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The video that lead me down this rabbit hole.
  
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- Soup@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Just a fun fact about “think tanks”, “institutes”, “foundations” and most of those little groups is that when they appear in the news there’s a solid chance that they’re being propped up by corpo money. Every time they appear you need to go double check their bias and you’ll often find that it will be they themselves saying they’re “a conservative think tank” and, if not that, there will likely be a Wikipedia article and a bunch of other sources confirming it. I’m sure there are good ones, but it’s largely just oil companies and banks and big tech funding some corrupt as hell “academics” in order to buy some credibility.
  
  I loved when I got into with one person over climate change and all they could do was send me articles that use oil-backed think tanks and which quoted a climate scientist who’s such a huge liar that whole webpages exist to organize and debunk all his paid-for bullshit.
  
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Wooki@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
How these taxes are applied either reimbursed, taxed directly, or passed on: its still is a tax burden increasing the cost of living. This and previous Government’s have only further worsened the problem. The police state reduces life expectancy.

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- abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The Online Safety Act doesn’t apply any new taxes on anyone. It forces service providers (IE: Private Companies) to institute age checks through either AI Face checks or ID either through an in house solution or buying services from a third party (YOTI or similar). It imposes a cost on a business where they have to either spend money setting up an age verification solution or acquire one from a private company. The government doesn’t impose any new taxes on people on businesses with this bill, but instead makes companies who run services give money to other companies to comply with the law.
  
  In short, the censorship isn’t being done directly by the state, it’s being done by private companies under pain of massive fines by the state. Other than suing websites or dealing with court challenges (which is done in house), all the actual legwork is being done by private companies, some of whom, like YOTI, are making handsome amounts of cash.
  
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  - Wooki@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Read my post, you really didn’t read it.
    
    I’ll spell it out.
    
    State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it’s s state mandated cost aka tax.
    
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    abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it’s s state mandated cost aka tax.
    
    Just because it’s a state mandated cost doesn’t mean it’s a tax. Tax implies the money goes to the government to pay for goods and services. It’s actually worse than that: it’s a levy.
    
    A levy doesn’t go to the government. A levy goes to whatever person provides the good or service. For example: if I tax alcohol based on alcohol content, the amount of money added to the tax goes to the government. If I place a levy based on alcohol content, the amount of money that is added goes to the person/company selling the booze. An example of a levy is the plastic bag levy, which was put in place to reduce plastic pollution. That money you spend on a bag doesn’t go to the government, it goes to the people you got the bag from, and they can do whatever they want with it, keep it, give it to charity, use it to buy Heroin on the deep web, you name it!
    
    What this law has effectively done has made service providers (not just companies, but whoever runs the site) a choice: They can either develop their own age verification system or pay a company (like YOTI) to do it for them. Most service providers do the latter because they do not have the resources to do the latter.
    
    Does the money go to the government? No (except maybe under the table nudge nudge wink wink), it goes straight to the company. What the government has done is force entities to give a private company money.
    
    It’s a tax in the way, let’s say, a hypothetical Right-Libertarian government might tax you, or even an American Homeowners Association might “tax” you: making you give a private company money.
    
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- FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It’s not a tax burden because it’s not any kind of tax. It’s a cost of doing business, like the cost of keeping and filing accounts. Imposing an additional cost on services which are by-and-large ad-funded/freemium does not have nearly the same effects as funding something out of the treasury.
  
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  - Wooki@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It very much is.
    
    Doesn’t matter who or how its recovered. Its still a state mandated cost, aka tax.
    
    Every single piece of legislation costs the population. They all add to the worsening costs of living. In times of economic crisis these costs need to come down not up.
    
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    FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    The requirement to file accounts is not a tax. Call things what they are, not whatever you’ve decided they’re similar to in your mind. To do is either confusing or dishonest, depending on whether people ultimately see through what you’re doing or not.
    
    Opposition to this on the basis of finances requires you to actually have some idea of the fiscal outcome. If the number of British children who end up bypassing the rules and viewing genuinely harmful material is small then it will result in lower costs from children traumatised, mentally ill or killing themselves.
    
    I oppose the act because of incalculable costs to privacy, not because it might mean Facebook has to display 10 more ads to someone to maintain their profit margins.
    
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