Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act \ stacker news ~tech

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Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjr11qqvvwlo

444 sats \ 4 comments \ @hn 13h tech bot

This link was posted by phlummox 4 hours ago on HN. It received 257 points and 322 comments.

Thus is a bummer.

In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its contributors, undermining their privacy and safety.

The only way it could avoid being classed as Category 1 would be to cut the number of people in the UK who could access the online encyclopaedia by about three-quarters, or disable key functions on the site.

152 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 9h

From the judgement:

I stress that this does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia’s operations. If they were to do so, that would have to be justified as proportionate if it were not to amount to a breach of the right to freedom of expression under article 10 of the Convention (and, potentially, a breach also of articles 8 and 11). It is, however, premature to rule on that now. Neither party has sought a ruling as to whether Wikipedia is a Category 1 service. Both parties say that decision must, for the moment, be left to Ofcom. If Ofcom decides that Wikipedia is not a Category 1 service, then no further issue will arise.

200 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 8h

Seems like "if you're a big enough problem we won't use the law on you." Since the law is entirely hinged on "safety" and "protecting the children" it seems to me that it would have been far better if the law itself made it clear that a website like wikipedia was not under its purview. As it is, this feels like groundwork upon which many future gates to the internet will be built.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 23m

As it is, this feels like groundwork upon which many future gates to the internet will be built.

I think that is already the case. I noticed something in the doc last night:

On 18 March 2024, the Secretary of State was provided with a Submission which made it clear that Category 1 duties were not primarily aimed at pornographic content or the protection of children (which were dealt with by other parts of the Act). Rather, the aim of Category 1 was to capture services that have a significant influence over public discourse...

Now, letting the pitchforks and torches rest for a moment, I assume they honestly aim to prevent virality of misinformation. This is a common theme among many Europeans, but one would expect this to be an especially important subject in a country that exited the EU under questionable information campaigns. So, it makes sense that this is deemed important.

They seem to discount that there is no guarantee that a government is benevolent. Of course every politician self-identifies as benevolent, even when they dispose of democratic instruments like term limits, but it's not really up to them. After all, although there are mornings that I wake up to self-identify as a spacefaring dolphin, I have not been recognized as such by dolphins nor martians.

They also pre-emptively reduce visibility of valid information. While laws like these are often assigned to "progressives", there is nothing progressive about this; on the contrary: this regresses towards total control of the information environment and, precisely as you said, gating the internet in a bid to control the populace - even when the politicians themselves don't see this as control.

Besides the hypocrisy of those same politicians gladly speaking on the limited freedom a Chinese citizen is perceived to have under CCP rules that do exactly the same, the bottom line seems to be that we have no good answers to the freedom that comes with the internet yet. I'd pose that the proposed regression of freedom is a long-term danger as it creates a virtual environment of control and when that collapses, it will be much harder to deal with a population that hasn't known freedom at all to suddenly be liberated.