All kinds of governments are rushing to implement something similar. The Fediverse solves some problems, but not the problem of a site being hosted in a single geographical location (and thus a single government’s jurisdiction). To help with this there are tools like i2p that can obscure a site’s hosting location, and there’s also work on distributed web hosting, but the latter still seems to be in its early stages. One day maybe we’ll have distributed websites that can be resilient against censorship.
Whaddaya mean? A non-UK instance doesn’t have to comply with UK law if it doesn’t operate as an entity in the UK and so it won’t require the face ID for UK visitors. So long as the instance is okay with hosting this content, it would let UK visitors view it. For example, I don’t think the UK has authority or mechanism to ask a Brazil-based instance to do this.
Sure but that means they have to have a mechanism, legal and material to execute this. There must be an gov’t institution that looks for and designates sites to be blocked. Then they have to have legal power to compel UK ISPs to block those lists. Are these things part of this law? I haven’t read enough.
Okay. Yeah that makes sense and in that case hosting on the Fediverse out of the UK would probably unblock it for a long time. If the blocking is not trivial - like one person adding a URL to a list - then they’d have to prioritize and they’d likely be going over bigger fish like international porn sites and such for a long time before they reach communities on the Fediverse that may or may not be self-designated NSFW. If they’re on Reddit on the other hand, they get voluntarily blocked by the platform itself in the UK almost certainly without direction from Ofcom.
Sounds like it’s time for those subreddits to find new homes on non-UK instances of Lemmy.
All kinds of governments are rushing to implement something similar. The Fediverse solves some problems, but not the problem of a site being hosted in a single geographical location (and thus a single government’s jurisdiction). To help with this there are tools like i2p that can obscure a site’s hosting location, and there’s also work on distributed web hosting, but the latter still seems to be in its early stages. One day maybe we’ll have distributed websites that can be resilient against censorship.
That wouldn’t solve anything
Whaddaya mean? A non-UK instance doesn’t have to comply with UK law if it doesn’t operate as an entity in the UK and so it won’t require the face ID for UK visitors. So long as the instance is okay with hosting this content, it would let UK visitors view it. For example, I don’t think the UK has authority or mechanism to ask a Brazil-based instance to do this.
Then it just gets blocked in the uk and you’re back to having to use a vpn.
Sure but that means they have to have a mechanism, legal and material to execute this. There must be an gov’t institution that looks for and designates sites to be blocked. Then they have to have legal power to compel UK ISPs to block those lists. Are these things part of this law? I haven’t read enough.
As I understand it if a site doesn’t comply and fineing them isn’t an option Ofcom can apply for a court order to, indeed, compell ISPs to block them.
Okay. Yeah that makes sense and in that case hosting on the Fediverse out of the UK would probably unblock it for a long time. If the blocking is not trivial - like one person adding a URL to a list - then they’d have to prioritize and they’d likely be going over bigger fish like international porn sites and such for a long time before they reach communities on the Fediverse that may or may not be self-designated NSFW. If they’re on Reddit on the other hand, they get voluntarily blocked by the platform itself in the UK almost certainly without direction from Ofcom.