UK Online Safety Bill... if it passes, I may have to shutter LFGSS

@skinny lives in Spain now.

Then again he does call things like "mostly rideable" when they're "barely walkable" :D

It's rolling mate.

Well, the downhills are.

Mostly.

:P

Just set up a Facebook group mate .
We’re all in the target age group now.

👍

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/8/23952736/uk-online-safety-act-ofcom-illegal-harms-guidelines

Not looking good

Myspace, you mean

I feel like now is the time I should create some kind of bot that creates forums about (insert random as fuck topic here) and unleash the motherfucker so these areholes spend so much time policing "non-existant" forums they give up.

Also, Facebook is full of kiddy porn, Twitter is full of kiddy porn, http://www.gov.uk is full of kiddy porn... #go

What does the law say about shareholders of foreign companies (sorry, not read it yet)? I know there are limited liability company types here that have very limited capital requirements for starting up and there are shareholders still (or even just one shareholder) so you may not need to relinquish control.

The final law isn't yet online, or wasn't last week.

The guidance runs at 1,500 pages. I still haven't started the books I've bought recently, this is unlikely to get to the top of that reading list.

Could lfgss run as an onion site somehow?

I'm still hoping, and will wait to see, whether they will treat non-corp things differently at all... or charity things, etc.

At the moment, this isn't owned by a corp... it's just lil' 'old me. Is that a good thing? Well, it's helped us a lot as our costs are significantly lower due to not having accountants, and all the overhead of a business. We do well under £10k turnover, and frequently need me to dip in my pocket and top things up, and so it's a loss-maker, an individual thing that's fun to be a member of.

If the individual ownership thing is OK, then great... but the draft originally treated someone like me as no different from someone like Meta / Facebook.

You’re much better looking than Zuckerberg for a start.

Zuckerberg

looks like chatgpt was asked to design a human

Just caught up on this thread. For the Act it doesnt matter where the website is based or how it is run. If you have user2user content and UK users you are covered. What you then need to do depends on the number of users and how "risky" the content is.

So presumably this would plausibly result in UK users being banned from any overseas based sites who CBA to fall foul of UK based legislation? A bit like many US sites just block UK users due to not wanting to comply with GDPR legislation.

A good old British internet for British people. None of that fancy forrin stuff here please

(😬)

Yup.

If a site accepts any user-generated content and they have UK users... then they'd need to consider whether they should even accept the risk. If they do zero business here, or have no users, they can ignore it. But if they have users in the UK then at the least they'd need to figure out risk assessments (paying legal fees to get these done) and a lot of other things, just to be able to determine that they can actually ignore it.

Even for me, the reason I'd have to shutter isn't that I think we have a problem... but that I'd need to get risk assessments done which satisfy OFCOM... meaning I'd need to engage lawyers to understand what is asked by the law, then draw up the risk assessments in a compliant way, and then file those.

It's the cost to comply, for sites like this, which is the issue for me at least... I know we'd be talking £5-10k for a law firm to be involved... which is double what the current donations raise each year.

Well... the legal costs to be ready for it and compliant are one of the two main reasons I'd have to shutter.

The other is the liability placed on me for not then acting in a timely manner, etc... i.e. I've just spent the week travelling for work, barely looked at this place, have hundreds of unread emails... if I miss something and fail to act... hell, if I go on holiday and choose an off-grid place... then I'm suddenly liable for millions in fines? It reads like that... but there's no way I accept that degree of liability (and never needed to under the EU e-Commerce Act, etc)

Is there director liability? Could you set up lfgss ltd and close it down if it got on the radar of the authorities?

Aside from super serious content (eg child sexual absue), the Act is more about systems, processes and documentation and doesn't really care about odd bits of harmful content here and there. Probably still scary stuff but should be less scary than it looks.

British internet for British people.

So, that would be four old, white blokes logging into a bulletin board on 14.4 dial up then?

All Farage speeches and interviews should be preceded by sustained hissing noise, for sure.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/time-for-tech-firms-to-act-uk-online-safety-regulation-comes-into-force/

Any impact on lufgus?

Probably... but they're still calling it firms... so I'll remove mention of old dead company, make it clear that it's an individual, and if they come after me personally I'm afraid I'll just shut everything down.

My other community / philanthropy projects are 100% EU based and don't knowingly have any UK specific appeal or audience, so those will be fine (fediverse websites)... but LFGSS and Microcosm, it sits within the blast radius of collateral damage from the Online Safety regulations.