large companies love this law.

By imposing costs and risk on self hosting, and reducing the number of supplies (because many small and medium companies and organisation will block the UK), it reduces competition.

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iLoveOncall 4 days ago | parent [-]

The reality is the vast majority of users will just not submit their ID and the large companies will lose most of their UK traffic.

There was a study by Amazon [1] that showed that every 100ms of extra load time of a page cost 1% of revenue. How much revenue do you think adding an ID verification that takes 10 minutes to complete cost???

You think PornHub loves this law???

[1] https://www.conductor.com/academy/page-speed-resources/faq/a...

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graemep 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Very possibly. It will be an excuse to gather more user data. Will the lost users be the valuable ones for their business model? Also, once people have registered with a site, it imposes a switching cost, so it does favour incumbents over new entrants.

There must be smaller sites in the same business that will block UK users rather than comply.

So, they very likely do.

What is more important is that the tech giants, and social media in particular does love this law. As I pointed out in another comment, and has been reported many times on HN before, they have already gained users as people switch from independent forums to social media, and in the future it will keep competition out.

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wizzwizz4 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The grapevine says that independent sex workers are struggling as a result of the Online Safety Act. Unless the law has significantly reduced the tendency for UK people to engage with internet porn (which I doubt), then yes, PornHub is benefiting from this law.

	▲	iLoveOncall 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Independent sex workers upload their content on websites that are affected by the OSA, like PornHub and OnlyFans, this is why they are struggling. A lot of PornHub's content comes from independants, not big studios.