Why is the UK such a hell hole all the sudden? I’ve never had such a terrible opinion of the place until now with encryption and authoritarian fuckwitism against the last bastion of real democracy on the internet.
All of a sudden?
This is the country where 1984 was written, where they have more cameras than anywhere else, this sort of social surveillance and quiet, polite fascism is normal for the UK.
And almost all those cameras are privately owned and operated, and not integrated into any kind of centralised surveillance apparatus. More typically, they’re in place to deter graffiti or to keep drunks from pissing on the walls outside pubs. Police can and do request footage when investigating crimes, but if a camera owner’s retention policy means the footage has been deleted, that’s the end of the discussion. And such footage is useful if some arsehole has just jammed a broken beer glass into someone else’s face.
The worse forms of authoritarian overreach are the increasingly pervasive number-plate recognition cameras that track the movements of every vehicle, and the inane attempts to regulate the internet and to ban peivate use of encryption.
As for “quiet, polite fascism,” I’ve lived for extended periods in the US and the UK, and so far, despite the seemingly draconian laws, I’ve always found there to be more personal freedom in the UK. The police don’t kill people very often, people tend to ignore the laws and the government can’t be bothered to enforce the most intrusive of them, and there’s far less social pressure towards brainless conformity and mindless obedience than there is in the States.
UK has a massive budget problem and they still keep increasing expenditure on surveillance. That social value is negative at this point as its taking money away from critical services. Well done to the Government continuing the worsen debt, health, and wellbeing of the population. A terrorist will kill 5-10 people, failure to protect the health & well being of population (who needs a roof over their head) it just pales in comparison.
UK has a massive federal budget problem…
The UK isn’t a Federal Country. It’s a Unitary state with Devolution. I know it is basically a Federal state in Practice (Holyrood, Cardiff Bay and Stormont all have varying amounts of autonomy) but the distinction is significant.
and they still keep increasing expenditure on surveillance.
This is the fucked up bit though: The OSA doesn’t put the burden of Age gates on the State. They put it on The Service Provider (Websites and services). This is why so many non-porn forums, lemmy instances, and mastodon instances have either had to shut down or geoblock the UK, all the responsibility is on them to institute this lest they get sued out the arse. They can’t afford to get YOTI or whatever, or don’t have the manpower or money to institute their own system, so they shut down.
It’s also why overblocking is a thing: because the OSA’s official defination of what should be blocked is so vague so the two people who decide what get’s blocked are the Service Provider and the Government effectively in that order. This is why Reddit is blocking things that should not be agegated (like support groups), because the law is so fucking vague, and why sites like Twitter are blocking tweets that don’t need to be blocked under the “news” exception (yes, there is an exception for the news).
All of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don’t need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.
And all the other major tech players (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft) are developing “Digital ID” systems as a “solution” which will not only make it easier to track people for them and the government, but also for advertisers, so they aren’t complaining either.
TL;DR, The UK basically put all the pressure on the Websites so their friends can make loads of money.
How these taxes are applied either reimbursed, taxed directly, or passed on: its still is a tax burden increasing the cost of living. This and previous Government’s have only further worsened the problem. The police state reduces life expectancy.
The Online Safety Act doesn’t apply any new taxes on anyone. It forces service providers (IE: Private Companies) to institute age checks through either AI Face checks or ID either through an in house solution or buying services from a third party (YOTI or similar). It imposes a cost on a business where they have to either spend money setting up an age verification solution or acquire one from a private company. The government doesn’t impose any new taxes on people on businesses with this bill, but instead makes companies who run services give money to other companies to comply with the law.
In short, the censorship isn’t being done directly by the state, it’s being done by private companies under pain of massive fines by the state. Other than suing websites or dealing with court challenges (which is done in house), all the actual legwork is being done by private companies, some of whom, like YOTI, are making handsome amounts of cash.
Read my post, you really didn’t read it.
I’ll spell it out.
State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it’s s state mandated cost aka tax.
State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it’s s state mandated cost aka tax.
Just because it’s a state mandated cost doesn’t mean it’s a tax. Tax implies the money goes to the government to pay for goods and services. It’s actually worse than that: it’s a levy.
A levy doesn’t go to the government. A levy goes to whatever person provides the good or service. For example: if I tax alcohol based on alcohol content, the amount of money added to the tax goes to the government. If I place a levy based on alcohol content, the amount of money that is added goes to the person/company selling the booze. An example of a levy is the plastic bag levy, which was put in place to reduce plastic pollution. That money you spend on a bag doesn’t go to the government, it goes to the people you got the bag from, and they can do whatever they want with it, keep it, give it to charity, use it to buy Heroin on the deep web, you name it!
What this law has effectively done has made service providers (not just companies, but whoever runs the site) a choice: They can either develop their own age verification system or pay a company (like YOTI) to do it for them. Most service providers do the latter because they do not have the resources to do the latter.
Does the money go to the government? No (except maybe under the table nudge nudge wink wink), it goes straight to the company. What the government has done is force entities to give a private company money.
It’s a tax in the way, let’s say, a hypothetical Right-Libertarian government might tax you, or even an American Homeowners Association might “tax” you: making you give a private company money.
Levy, lol.
Call it what it is: a tax.
A burden on the population. No amount of dirty politics changes the fact. Taxes do not all get directly paid to gavernment. Like sales taxes, service tips ect.
Edit wrote another post, more depth.
