Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien
It's the Tories who passed the Snoopers Charter and the Online Safety Act. But yes, Labour are no better.
I doubt they'll ban VPNs, too many knock-on effects.
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They could do but I doubt they will.
And yes, although it was the Tories who introduced the OSA Labour have had plenty of opportunity to repeal it, if they did not agree with it (not sure what happened when it was voted on). The fact they haven't done that, even when there have been petitions (none of these ever really achieve anything though) etc to show how unpopular it is, shows they too agree with it.
Honestly I think the idea that sites should have responsibility for content which is posted on it, particularly around trolling/bullying, harm, children etc is a good one in principle. But none of it accounts for the fact that the internet is global, the UK can't realistically pass a law and expect sites in places like the US, Canada, Botswana to abide by it, and even the whole concept of "what's a UK site" is a bit fluffy, especially considering most of the content which could apply is on Meta, X, Reddit etc as opposed to smaller forums like this (which I don't think is even hosted in the UK these days).
I don't like 4chan at all, but their response to the whole thing is totally as expected, in reality there's no enforcement the government or Ofcom or whoever can have on that position, other than ordering UK ISPs to block them, and that has worked well before - most people know how and have the access to evade them.
The only watertight way is to ban ISPs and then set up a state ISP and have them block VPNs. That would be something you'd likely see out of somewhere totalitarian though, like North Korea. I think even China allows VPNs.