Big Tech is the only winner of the Online Safety Act
Last Friday at 6:32 am, the sitting MP for Lowestoft visited Pornhub. “To continue,” went a pop-up, “we are required to verify that you are 18 or older, in line with the UK Online Safety Act.”
The Act, which came into force last week, was designed to protect children on the internet. Under it, most online services that host user-generated content must conduct risk assessments and take steps to make sure minors do not encounter explicit content. This means all pornography sites must have in place rigorous age-checking procedures. Ofcom found that 8 per cent of children aged eight to 14 had visited an online pornography site or app over a month-long period.
Fine. But the unintentional by-product is that the most innocuous services might be the worst hit. The Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s non-profit operator, is mounting a legal challenge to the bill, arguing that the changes will compromise the site’s commitment to privacy and freedom of speech. “This is not good news,” said the owner of The Hamster Forum, “Home Of All Things Hamstery,” back in March. “I would probably need a lawyer and team of experts to be able to fully comply with everything… I am going to have to close the forum… I’m suggesting everyone joins Instagram and follows our account on Instagram instead.”
The forum’s owner was quoted £2400 a year to use an external age-verification service in compliance with the Act. This is a big chunk of the average part-time webmaster’s income, but nothing to corporate social media executives, who get by on paid advertising and huge initial injections of venture capital. Annual enterprise costs for Persona Identities, the service used by Reddit and LinkedIn, are reported to start in the lower six figures.
