Having conquered the larger websites in its free speech and privacy crackdown, Ofcom is now working their way down the digital food chain.
The massively broad crackdown on free speech and privacy is continuing. Ofcom is demanding that websites all over implement age verification systems known to be vulnerable to leaks and hacks – not to mention being highly ineffective in more ways than one.
Nevertheless, Ofcom is charging forward to make the internet less secure and much more heavily censored. Probably the most disappointing aspect of all of this is the fact that the largest web services appear to not even be putting up a fight. Having left their spines back in the SOPA debates, many of these services have cowardly surrendered to the government bullies and sought appeasement with the hopes that this will pay off in the end (spoiler alert: it won’t). These services include Reddit, Bluesky, Discord, and Spotify. As if to prove me right over the years about these autocratic demands, Reddit went so far as to start censoring political speech. So much for this being about stopping minors from viewing “pornography”.
It’s safe to say that this anti free speech rampage by Ofcom is proving to be substantially easier then it really should have been. Still, that doesn’t mean that Ofcom is going to rest on their laurels of having forced the webs largest players to bend at the knee and kiss the ring. They seem to be moving forward to extorting the rest of the entire internet by gradually moving down the internet food chain. They appear to be going after smaller websites for what they say is a failure to implement their faulty technology. As a result, the regulator is launching a probe into the rear ends of these companies, hoping to thrust their business into these unsuspecting companies whether they like it or not. From the BBC:
Ofcom is investigating four companies, operating a total of 34 porn sites, over whether they are complying with its new age check requirements.
The regulator said on Friday more than 6,000 sites allowing pornography and other adult content would start using “highly effective” tools to verify or estimate whether users were over or under the age of 18.
But Ofcom says some sites may be ignoring its new rules – designed to stop children stumbling across porn or other content deemed harmful by lawmakers.
It has opened formal probes into 8579 LLC, AVS Group Ltd, Kick Online Entertainment S.A. and Trendio Ltd, which it says have more than nine million monthly visitors combined across their sites.
“These companies have been prioritised based on the risk of harm posed by the services they operate and their user numbers,” Ofcom said in a press release on Thursday.
The regulator is already investigating a range of platforms over similar suspicions.
It previously opened probes into online message board 4chan and porn provider First Time Videos LLC in June.
No, by all means. Go ahead and smack the 4chan hornets nest and see how that works out for you, Ofcom.
Still, this shows that Ofcom is not slowing down in their crackdown on the wider open internet now that they have successfully roped some of the largest websites into this really bad scheme. If anything, they are speeding things up, seemingly threatening different websites to either comply and pay the “protection fees” to third party providers to prevent the law from coming down on them. It basically amounts to legal extortion in the end and it’s only a matter of time before they go after others in this rent seeking quest.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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speaking of hornets nests at the end. apparently the current US adminstration and huge amount of lawyers led by Ron Coleman (not the bodybuilder of the same name. had to look this guy up and suddenly got a face full of unhealthy leather skin!) are dropping a bunch of lawsuits against the UK for forcing US companies to follow these censorship laws. Honestly if these lawsuits are successful it kneecaps most of Ofcom’s attempts as if they cant bully sites based in the states into submitting there goes 90% of their attempts.
to clarify I doubt this means the states (well, red states at least) are about facing on the topic. they still probably want to enforce censorship laws. they just dont like the ideas of foreign governments forcing American companies to follow non-American laws.