I'm not a fan of the OSA but proponents of it will *keep winning* if you *keep misrepresenting it*.

You can, and should, argue about the effects but the core of the OSA and how it can be sold is this, at several different levels:

One, most detailed.

Sites that provide user to user services have some level of duty of care to their users, like physical sites and events.

They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.

They should implement mitigations based on those risk assessments. Not to completely remove all possibility of harm, but to lower it.

For example, sites where kids can talk to each other in private chats should have ways of kids reporting adults and moderators to review those reports. Sites where you can share pictures should check for people sharing child porn (if you have a way of a userbase sharing encrypted images with each other anonymously, you're going to get child porn on there). Sites aimed at adults with public conversations like some hobby site with no history of issues and someone checking for spam/etc doesn't need to do much.

You should re-check things once a year.

That's the selling point - and as much as we can argue about second order effects (like having a list of IDs and what you've watched, overhead etc), those statements don't on the face of it seem objectionable.

Two, shorter.

Sites should be responsible about what they do just like shops and other spaces, with risk assessments and more focus when there are kids involved.

Three, shortest.

Facebook should make sure people aren't grooming your kids.

Now, the problem with talking about " a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored," is where does that fit into the explanations above? How do you explain that to even me, a highly technical, terminally online nerd who has read at least a decent chunk of the actual OFCOM guidelines?

This isn't a new issue, and it predates the internet. There were publishers of magazines containing pornography (or anything else unsuitable for children). These were sold in shops. A publisher had to ensure that the material in the magazines was legal to print, but it wasn't their responsibility to prevent children from looking at their magazines, and it's difficult to see how that would even be possible. That was the responsibility of the people working in the shops: they had to put the magazines on the top shelf, and weren't allowed to sell them to children.

On the internet, people don't get porn videos directly from pornographic web sites, just as in the past they didn't buy porn directly from the publishers. The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops. So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs. And British ISPs are within the UK's jurisdiction.

And before anyone points out that there are workarounds that children could use to bypass controls, this was also the case with printed magazines.

This seems like a misrepresentation of OSA more so than the parent post. It prevents people accessing content they may well need. Look at some of the subreddits being blocked if you want to see how far they go. Subs about periods, sex education, stopping smoking, suicide prevention, lgbtq. Not sure how you justify that nobody under 18 would ever have a need to access these things.

When you have to prove you're a child you have to prove you're and adult. The privacy implications of that are why it's a police state problem. It eliminates the anonymity and allows for perfect personal tracking of any wrongthink you may do.

It's also not the only thing the UK government has done to become a police state by a long shot. UK is 1984 adjacent in quite a few ways.

This is mostly true. It fails to mention "is the user a kid" is unverifiable without imposing identify verification, which implies that all speech (which is already monitored) is now self-censored, effectively turning the state in a surveillance state. You don't need to be throwing people in jail for that, having a credible means of identifying anyone online is enough.

You are covering for a bad law with “concern” because your chosen political party implemented it.

If I put you in a bottle and told you that it was “the fascists” that proposed and implemented this exact law you would be raging.

I personally, would appreciate the intellectual honesty on this. Thank you.

> They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.

The problem is when one group wants to impose their definition of harm on everyone else, saying that everyone else shouldn't be allowed to be 'harmed' even if they don't consider it as such. In the UK this is not unique to the OSA discussion(see the UK's anti-trans turn), and but it is very relevant.