Tiffs, you've captured the salient points of this abomination of a legislation very well.
This is a total website killer in the UK and potentially anyone that does business (local and international) or affiliated with a UK website.
I've had a look at some of the requirements and it's a real pita I can tell you. I have to look at it properly soon and see exactly what I have to do to stay on the right side of it and then make a decision.
I'm not joking when I say that it has the potential to kill this website, our beloved community. Until I see my way through this, my rebranding project is on hold. Heck, quite a few forums have already closed down directly due to this. Here's just one example:
The announcement that this came from:
It is with huge sadness that the forum has closed on 16th March 2025 due to the requirements of the new legislation - the Online Safety Act. While this forum has always been perfectly safe, we were unable to meet the compliancy. The care guide...
www.thehamsterforum.com
Yes, a forum about harmless little hamsters has had to die directly due to this.
These fines are subjective. They are also extraordinary and would cause anyone in the UK to reconsider having a website.
Yes, quite. I first set up this forum in June 2021 and if this legislation had been in force then, I wouldn't have even started, it's so onerous. It was bad enough when the GDPR crap came in before then, now this is on top of it and is a whole lot worse.
Unfortunately, it's the usual situation of the few spoiling it for the many. While the government geniunely does love a power grab as I've been saying, they've been given all the excuse they need to feed their hidden agenda by relatively few paedophiles committing horrendous crimes by abusing this technology, including encrypted private chats like WhatsApp and Telegram. Yup, it's that tired old trope "for the children", making it very hard to push back against, especially as there's truth to it and here's why:
I saw a three part series recently called "Prime Suspect: Hunting the Predators" on Channel 5 which showed how these pedos would blackmail underage boys and girls into committing horrendous and degrading sexual acts, have them film it all on their smartphones and then send it to them. They've damaged and ruined thousands of lives across the world with their crimes.
Some of them then used forums on the darkweb to trade this illegal material for money and notoriety. It's beyond sick, I tell you. Each episode focused on one particular criminal, showing real police interrogations and how they eventually put them behind bars with long prison sentences of 20-30+ years. The investigations were long term, taking years to complete and bring them to justice. It took a toll on the detectives who had to sit through countless hours of this vile stuff too, with one resigning after she'd finally had enough. After the third episode I was thinking that I couldn't watch anymore, but thankfully the series had finished. Oh and of course, the perpetrators were all men, what a surprise.
You can see the motivation for this legislation and the other one forcing companies like Apple to install backdoors into their encrypted storage, that I posted about the other day:
The UK government has forced Apple to remove Advanced Data Protection, or in other words, allow a backdoor to your encrypted data stored in iCloud. This is bad for lots of reasons, like privacy, gives hackers / bad actors a way into your data and is a first step on the road to a totalitarian government, not too dissimilar with what's happened in America with Trump whom I don't doubt will demand the same thing in time. And of course, the pretexts are things like "protecting" against terrorism and "protecting" the children to justify why they're doing this. However, the real reason is...
Given how these criminals operate underground on the darkweb, I can't see how this will actually stop them by putting onerous conditions on public websites on the regular web. The effectiveness of this remains to be seen and I'm not optimistic.