Decentralized social network Mastodon says it cannot comply with age verification laws, like in Mississippi and elsewhere, and says it's up to individual server owners to decide.
That’s already happening, alas, but I suspect things will get very quiet when people realise something like this would affect the bottom line negatively. Look at what happened (twice) with encryption.
Government said they wanna ban encryption.
Starts planning the legislation.
Someone (a civil servant who’s job it is to point out the fucking obvious) points out that Banking and Commerce requires Encryption to function and banning Encryption would crash the Economy.
Plans are quietly dropped.
How it will likely go with VPNs.
Government says they wanna restrict VPNs.
Government Starts planning legistlation (we are here).
Someone points out that Banking, Tech Security, The Military, The Foreign Office and others rely on VPNs to function and getting rid of them will fuck the economy and put national security at risk and risk negatively affecting their pay masters corporate donors.
Plans are quietly dropped.
One of the main purposes of the OSA is to make money for YOTI and the Data brokers, because you and I both know these are the main corporate sponsors, and the MPs and Lords who passed it likely have investments in said companies. Hoovering up IDs and linking them to web activity doesn’t just help the government fuck us, it makes money for MPs, Lords, and their Friends. But here’s the thing: It’ll bite not just US, but them in the arse. So here’s what’s (hopefully) going to happen.
OSA is installed.
Someone important enters their info into a fake age check/Someone important gets age verified for something and the service gets hacked.
The hack gets made public and a lot of important people get burnt.
The Bill gets quietly modified or abolished.
British Politicians are greedy, self serving authoritarian cunts, but they are also remarkably dim. Like sometimes impressively so. Look up this passage in Hansard to see what I mean. It might cause you to have a fucking crisis.
But yes, they do like control, problem is they don’t know what they wish for,
Do you think those debates are for real and not a show that ends with whatever has been decided elsewhere?
If that was the case, then the Lords wouldn’t have blocked the 2016 Disability Bill. You remember the one. I don’t think that was theatre, I think people in the Lords looked at that and went “lol fuck no.” They also wouldn’t have done a lot of shit if it was all planned behind the scenes and some shadowy cabal actually just called the shots.
Here’s the thing: “It’s all planned” is the cornerstone of most conspiracies, from 9/11 to “Covid is a bioweapon” or “Covid isn’t real” to literally every major conspiracy theory. But wanna know something? All of that is a weighted comfort blanket to sooth people, it is soothing to believe that there is someone or something in control and it’s just a case of getting rid of them, and it’s an ego boost to believe that You are part of a club that figured it out. They used to call it being “woke” until the far right took that term as an Alias for “Degenerate” as the Nazis used it.
But the truth is this: There is no man behind the curtain, there is no shadowy cabal who actually control everything. It’s call Capitalism, Sociopaths, and Morons who either want to make money or think they’re doing good.
I have lived through two governments (a Labour one and a Conservative one) that have floated the idea of banning encryption publicly. Both times they quietly dropped the idea when they were told that doing something like that would crash the economy. My parents are both former Civil Servants. My dad watched the Scottish Secretary at the time nearly type “Thatcher is a Bitch” into a Teletype machine that sent out press releases to every major newspaper.
I watched my own MSP (and Leader of the Scottish Lib Dems) address a crowd of mostly transgender mostly leftist people and ask them to applaud Tories who voted for the Gender Recognition Act.
There is shit in Hansard that looks like it came from a bad sitcom. There are people who are in parliament right now who I wouldn’t trust with a fucking Self Scan Checkout, let alone a seat in either of the houses.
Are there scheming bastards, genuinely Machiavellianism Motherfucks in parliament? Yes! Politics attract people who score high in the Dark Triad. Starmer, Streeting, and Farage are all genuinely horrible people. Starmer and Streeting openly want to harm transgender people, Farage wants to fund the fucking Taliban, and if we wanna talk about non-MPs, Boris Johnson stated he’s rather have mass death than another Lockdown and the last government used Covid as a way to Launder Money.
But alongside that, a good chunk of the people in our parliaments are simply fucking morons. They might be good at a collection of specific things, but they are also impressively Moronic on a level that would make the Thick of It and Yes Minister look fucking optimistic. Indeed, some of the more bastardous people I have listed and not listed here are also, weirdly, fucking morons. Look at Trump’s first term for example.
And if you wanna cling to “there’s a puppet master behind all this”, be it Satan or the Illuminati, to save you from the genuinely terrifying thought that the people at the Helm of the ship of state are Francesco Schettino, Yiannis Avranas and Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, fair, but personally, I’m a realist and the only conspiracy I hold is that the “Phillip Killed Diana” conspiracy was invented by the British Press so they wouldn’t face a shitstorm when people realised what the paps did when they got to the crash scene.
If you wanna know what is actually happening here it is:
A Dunfermline based investment firm, charitable trust and think tank (yes you heard) by the name of Carnegie United Kingdom Trust invested money in data collection firms and age verification firms like YOTI, so they lobbied the government and even basically wrote the Online Safety Act. The government sometimes lets outside groups write legislation for them because Corruption, they have other shit to do, and they don’t often know shit about the fucking shite they’re voting for.
Some of those MPs also likely had investments in YOTI and VPNs. When this was presented to the government, some poor sod of a Civil Servant had to sit down the PM/Minister responsible and try convince them that it’s a bad idea, clearly they failed. So, utilising the moral panic around Porn, Extremist Material, Pro-Ana content and the like, they passed this bill, even when a good number of these fucking numbskulls don’t even know what a VPN is, just “we need to do something” and “it’s just common sense™”.
Now not only do they (and future governments, God help us if Reform get in and use this against “woke” content like they’re doing in Kent Libraries) have the ability to age gate literally anything, but the companies they have invested in have got a GOLDMINE of very sensitive Data they can sell to people, be them from the Private, Public or “underground” sectors. Line goes up for the Investment firms, MPs with shares in YOTI and the rest. When it comes down to it, it comes down to Money, Moronity, and Kneejerk reactionism.
A market economy is our politico-economic system. If billionaires conspire to distort the markets against the interest of the people, and unbeknownst to them, then that’s a conspiracy, normalized by calling it Capitalism.
In this case it’s old American money. The idea doesn’t come as an investment opportunity from the trust. They are not creating a better future for children with the age verification as the last missing piece. Conspiracies are not magic. You know how it was implemented but you can only guess why.
If billionaires conspire to distort the markets against the interest of the people, and unbeknownst to them, then that’s a conspiracy, normalized by calling it Capitalism.
That’s not distorting the markets, that is what they are for. The market isn’t some magical deity who’s only been stopped because their will is being misinterpretated by the billionaires, they are the market. They control the market. The purpose of a system is what it does. The “Free” market is as much of a myth as when MLMs say the state will “dissolve away” to produce true Communism with the workers owning the means of production. The moment a “free” market is made, it instantly gets manipulated by people with money and the market stops being free anymore. That’s part of the reason why so many rich cunts babble on about “free” markets, because it gives them power The billionaires fucking with the market and the law isn’t an aberration of the system, it is the system. Once you realise that, everything falls into place.
You know how it was implemented but you can only guess why.
Oh Oh! I can guess why!
The whole reason why the bill was made and written as it was is money. We live in a period of surveillance capitalism where various companies make fuck tonnes of money from your data. Google, Facebook and the like didn’t make their money from merely “running ads”. They took the data you gave them through cookies and your posting and used it to more accurately target ads at you. Then, they started selling your data to other data brokers who then sold it to anyone with enough money. We’ve all heard the story about how target knew a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did, and we all know about Cambridge Analytica, Brexit and Trump. Facebook will literally monitor your emotional state through your posts and target you with ads for loans when they think your emotionally vulnerable.
So, we all know data brokers are hungry for data to sell, and as one Murray Bookchin once said: “Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing”. So guess what? Investment firms saw a load of moral panics and calls for digital ID. They invested in firms like YOTI (they are not required to say who invested in them, nice and convenient) and started doing research for the government through their think tank arms to convince the government that the OSA is a good idea. The bill says that stringent age checks must be done to view certain pieces of content, but not how, so that means websites have to hire YOTI and co to do that for them or do it themselves. If they can’t afford to they either have to shut down because they don’t care about the little guy.
So now data brokers have some very valuable data they can take from you: Your unedited face, your passport/drivers licence (plus all the biometrics that come with that) and (alongside that), your sexual habits, more controversial views, and your neuroses! The government can buy that off them (not that they couldn’t already find that out), but also so can the people with the big bucks, COMPANIES! On Grindr? Well now your health insurer can increase your premiums if they think you are promiscious. Got political views? Well now they can be manipulated for an outcome favourable to large corporations. Your employer can buy your data and see if you have been saying things they don’t like, annorexic people can be given ads for gym memberships and health fads. Oh, and all this can be sold to the government, be it yours or someone else’s.
It’s all money, it’s no shady conspiracy, literally it is business as usual and it sucks.
You know you can just switch to some small instance that’s not blocked and you’re gonna be good? Even in China the small Lemmy instances work while the big ones are obviously blocked
You’d think that, but we’re in a political culture right now that puts kneejerk reactionism before reason, logic, and evidence. “It’s Just Common Sense™” is used to shut down anyone who might have any good points to make from history or reason. There used to be a point where a politician in the ruling government would spitball something in public, and then a civil servant who knew what they were talking about would sit them down and explain to them why their idea was bollocks. The OSA has shown to us that said thing is bollocks, and efforts from groups like Collective Shout have shown otherwise.
We have major politicians here saying shit like We should Pay Taxpayers money to the Taliban to take people they wanna kill anyway. We have a whole section of the population banned from using gendered toilets and government policy written by far right activist groups. We have books being banned from libraries in certain council areas for being “woke” and we have the ever looming shadow of fascism over us from Russia and America.
Payment processors are telling us what we can and cannot buy because a reactionary group pressured them into it and the most widely used OSes on our phones and computers are ready made to basically fuck all of us if it’s profitable.
Russia can flip a switch tomorrow and cut off all access to the outside world under their “Sovereign internet” plan. Shit’ll get worse before it gets better.
and yet they’re doing a fucking terrible job at it (source, I’m using a VPN, something people in the Lords didn’t even know was a thing until it was too late). It would be funny if it wasn’t my reality.
The control isn’t complete until VPNs are controlled. Everybody evading the ban will help to make the case that VPNs have to be regulated, too.
That’s already happening, alas, but I suspect things will get very quiet when people realise something like this would affect the bottom line negatively. Look at what happened (twice) with encryption.
How it will likely go with VPNs.
pay masterscorporate donors.One of the main purposes of the OSA is to make money for YOTI and the Data brokers, because you and I both know these are the main corporate sponsors, and the MPs and Lords who passed it likely have investments in said companies. Hoovering up IDs and linking them to web activity doesn’t just help the government fuck us, it makes money for MPs, Lords, and their Friends. But here’s the thing: It’ll bite not just US, but them in the arse. So here’s what’s (hopefully) going to happen.
British Politicians are greedy, self serving authoritarian cunts, but they are also remarkably dim. Like sometimes impressively so. Look up this passage in Hansard to see what I mean. It might cause you to have a fucking crisis.
But yes, they do like control, problem is they don’t know what they wish for,
Do you think those debates are for real and not a show that ends with whatever has been decided elsewhere?
The houses don’t need to know because they don’t do the planning.
Since the EU does the same thing at the same time, after it was not a problem for years, the origin for these laws must lie elsewhere.
If that was the case, then the Lords wouldn’t have blocked the 2016 Disability Bill. You remember the one. I don’t think that was theatre, I think people in the Lords looked at that and went “lol fuck no.” They also wouldn’t have done a lot of shit if it was all planned behind the scenes and some shadowy cabal actually just called the shots.
Here’s the thing: “It’s all planned” is the cornerstone of most conspiracies, from 9/11 to “Covid is a bioweapon” or “Covid isn’t real” to literally every major conspiracy theory. But wanna know something? All of that is a weighted comfort blanket to sooth people, it is soothing to believe that there is someone or something in control and it’s just a case of getting rid of them, and it’s an ego boost to believe that You are part of a club that figured it out. They used to call it being “woke” until the far right took that term as an Alias for “Degenerate” as the Nazis used it.
But the truth is this: There is no man behind the curtain, there is no shadowy cabal who actually control everything. It’s call Capitalism, Sociopaths, and Morons who either want to make money or think they’re doing good.
I have lived through two governments (a Labour one and a Conservative one) that have floated the idea of banning encryption publicly. Both times they quietly dropped the idea when they were told that doing something like that would crash the economy. My parents are both former Civil Servants. My dad watched the Scottish Secretary at the time nearly type “Thatcher is a Bitch” into a Teletype machine that sent out press releases to every major newspaper.
I watched my own MSP (and Leader of the Scottish Lib Dems) address a crowd of mostly transgender mostly leftist people and ask them to applaud Tories who voted for the Gender Recognition Act.
There is shit in Hansard that looks like it came from a bad sitcom. There are people who are in parliament right now who I wouldn’t trust with a fucking Self Scan Checkout, let alone a seat in either of the houses.
Are there scheming bastards, genuinely Machiavellianism Motherfucks in parliament? Yes! Politics attract people who score high in the Dark Triad. Starmer, Streeting, and Farage are all genuinely horrible people. Starmer and Streeting openly want to harm transgender people, Farage wants to fund the fucking Taliban, and if we wanna talk about non-MPs, Boris Johnson stated he’s rather have mass death than another Lockdown and the last government used Covid as a way to Launder Money.
But alongside that, a good chunk of the people in our parliaments are simply fucking morons. They might be good at a collection of specific things, but they are also impressively Moronic on a level that would make the Thick of It and Yes Minister look fucking optimistic. Indeed, some of the more bastardous people I have listed and not listed here are also, weirdly, fucking morons. Look at Trump’s first term for example.
And if you wanna cling to “there’s a puppet master behind all this”, be it Satan or the Illuminati, to save you from the genuinely terrifying thought that the people at the Helm of the ship of state are Francesco Schettino, Yiannis Avranas and Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, fair, but personally, I’m a realist and the only conspiracy I hold is that the “Phillip Killed Diana” conspiracy was invented by the British Press so they wouldn’t face a shitstorm when people realised what the paps did when they got to the crash scene.
If you wanna know what is actually happening here it is:
A Dunfermline based investment firm, charitable trust and think tank (yes you heard) by the name of Carnegie United Kingdom Trust invested money in data collection firms and age verification firms like YOTI, so they lobbied the government and even basically wrote the Online Safety Act. The government sometimes lets outside groups write legislation for them because Corruption, they have other shit to do, and they don’t often know shit about the fucking shite they’re voting for.
Some of those MPs also likely had investments in YOTI and VPNs. When this was presented to the government, some poor sod of a Civil Servant had to sit down the PM/Minister responsible and try convince them that it’s a bad idea, clearly they failed. So, utilising the moral panic around Porn, Extremist Material, Pro-Ana content and the like, they passed this bill, even when a good number of these fucking numbskulls don’t even know what a VPN is, just “we need to do something” and “it’s just common sense™”.
Now not only do they (and future governments, God help us if Reform get in and use this against “woke” content like they’re doing in Kent Libraries) have the ability to age gate literally anything, but the companies they have invested in have got a GOLDMINE of very sensitive Data they can sell to people, be them from the Private, Public or “underground” sectors. Line goes up for the Investment firms, MPs with shares in YOTI and the rest. When it comes down to it, it comes down to Money, Moronity, and Kneejerk reactionism.
To me, that is a conspiracy. Turning it into a business is the way to remove political oversight, but the profits don’t hurt.
Capitalism isn’t a conspiracy, it’s the current Politico-economic system.
A market economy is our politico-economic system. If billionaires conspire to distort the markets against the interest of the people, and unbeknownst to them, then that’s a conspiracy, normalized by calling it Capitalism.
In this case it’s old American money. The idea doesn’t come as an investment opportunity from the trust. They are not creating a better future for children with the age verification as the last missing piece. Conspiracies are not magic. You know how it was implemented but you can only guess why.
That’s not distorting the markets, that is what they are for. The market isn’t some magical deity who’s only been stopped because their will is being misinterpretated by the billionaires, they are the market. They control the market. The purpose of a system is what it does. The “Free” market is as much of a myth as when MLMs say the state will “dissolve away” to produce true Communism with the workers owning the means of production. The moment a “free” market is made, it instantly gets manipulated by people with money and the market stops being free anymore. That’s part of the reason why so many rich cunts babble on about “free” markets, because it gives them power The billionaires fucking with the market and the law isn’t an aberration of the system, it is the system. Once you realise that, everything falls into place.
This isn’t a conspiracy, this was pretty much done out in the open. To call it a conspiracy suggests there was some amount of subterfuge. Like Carnegie UK published papers on why they think the OSA is a good idea in 2022, the Online Safety Act 2023, plus the additions made in '25, are publicly viewable here. The transcripts of the debates are here on Handsard.
Oh Oh! I can guess why!
The whole reason why the bill was made and written as it was is money. We live in a period of surveillance capitalism where various companies make fuck tonnes of money from your data. Google, Facebook and the like didn’t make their money from merely “running ads”. They took the data you gave them through cookies and your posting and used it to more accurately target ads at you. Then, they started selling your data to other data brokers who then sold it to anyone with enough money. We’ve all heard the story about how target knew a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did, and we all know about Cambridge Analytica, Brexit and Trump. Facebook will literally monitor your emotional state through your posts and target you with ads for loans when they think your emotionally vulnerable.
So, we all know data brokers are hungry for data to sell, and as one Murray Bookchin once said: “Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing”. So guess what? Investment firms saw a load of moral panics and calls for digital ID. They invested in firms like YOTI (they are not required to say who invested in them, nice and convenient) and started doing research for the government through their think tank arms to convince the government that the OSA is a good idea. The bill says that stringent age checks must be done to view certain pieces of content, but not how, so that means websites have to hire YOTI and co to do that for them or do it themselves. If they can’t afford to they either have to shut down because they don’t care about the little guy.
So now data brokers have some very valuable data they can take from you: Your unedited face, your passport/drivers licence (plus all the biometrics that come with that) and (alongside that), your sexual habits, more controversial views, and your neuroses! The government can buy that off them (not that they couldn’t already find that out), but also so can the people with the big bucks, COMPANIES! On Grindr? Well now your health insurer can increase your premiums if they think you are promiscious. Got political views? Well now they can be manipulated for an outcome favourable to large corporations. Your employer can buy your data and see if you have been saying things they don’t like, annorexic people can be given ads for gym memberships and health fads. Oh, and all this can be sold to the government, be it yours or someone else’s.
It’s all money, it’s no shady conspiracy, literally it is business as usual and it sucks.
You know you can just switch to some small instance that’s not blocked and you’re gonna be good? Even in China the small Lemmy instances work while the big ones are obviously blocked
Yeah sure, until they find a way to block that too.
I doubt UK could surpass China and Russia in terms of internet censorship any time soon
You’d think that, but we’re in a political culture right now that puts kneejerk reactionism before reason, logic, and evidence. “It’s Just Common Sense™” is used to shut down anyone who might have any good points to make from history or reason. There used to be a point where a politician in the ruling government would spitball something in public, and then a civil servant who knew what they were talking about would sit them down and explain to them why their idea was bollocks. The OSA has shown to us that said thing is bollocks, and efforts from groups like Collective Shout have shown otherwise.
We have major politicians here saying shit like We should Pay Taxpayers money to the Taliban to take people they wanna kill anyway. We have a whole section of the population banned from using gendered toilets and government policy written by far right activist groups. We have books being banned from libraries in certain council areas for being “woke” and we have the ever looming shadow of fascism over us from Russia and America.
Payment processors are telling us what we can and cannot buy because a reactionary group pressured them into it and the most widely used OSes on our phones and computers are ready made to basically fuck all of us if it’s profitable.
Russia can flip a switch tomorrow and cut off all access to the outside world under their “Sovereign internet” plan. Shit’ll get worse before it gets better.