It's clear to me, it's a huge risk for any company to allow access to UK visitors at this stage. All companies should be blocking all UK visitors. It's just too much risk for them to take.
The fault is obviously an incompetent and authoritarian UK government, but that's what the UK overlords have agreed.
It's not specific to the UK: many developed countries are cracking down on Internet businesses. There's going to be an awful lot of regulation, and it will be incompatible between different countries. The one-model-fits-the-whole-world style of business is over: you're going to be confined to national borders again.
The opinion polls are clear: the normies want this.
The often cited YouGov polling, I think sampled a few thousand people. There are almost 2.5 million signatures on petitions between the OSA and Digital ID.
If you mean the opinion polls, I don't have any to hand, but there have been a few articles submitted to /r/ukpolitics since the Online Safety Act took effect detailing opinion polls showing that the UK Government's regulation of internet content has been well-received by the wider public (although the userbase of that subreddit has vociferously disagreed).
I can counter any of the iffy polls by simple point to the official online petitions service. There were a huge number of signatures to revoke OSA and two million signatures to abolish the plans for the Digital ID. While the Digital ID is technically a separate issue, many of the same privacy concerns are present.
The number of people that signed these petitions is far more representative than any polling.
On top of that, recently I've seen reportrs of both the Liberal Democrats and Reform (the two largest parties after the main two) recongising the OSA as unpopular and are likely to suggest reforming/removing it.
On top of that. The labour government and the conservative government that proceeded it which created the OSA were/are both deeply unpopular.
So any notion that there is a popular mandate for this is nonsense.
The Bristol young lib dems oppose it, but the parliamentary party doesn't think it goes far enough. The Bristol lot are great, I talked to them about it, but they're unlikely to change things on the national level.
That is unfortunate to hear. I don't really care for any of the political parties in the UK and tell them exactly what I think of them when they knock on my door.
I wouldn't trust them in young LibDems in Bristol either. Doesn't matter if they seem nice or not. Lots of young politicians have nice ideas and over time they either end up as bad as the ones they are replacing, they are forced out or leave of their own accord and then complain about it on a podcast.
shouldn't it be the other way round? if the UK doesn't like something a non-UK company is doing it should be them that go through the trouble of blocking it.
If I have a website I'm pretty sure I'm bound to break some random country's law without knowing
Answering my own question, I guess it's exceptionalism of the powerful countries where they can just bully you into following their law
> shouldn't it be the other way round? if the UK doesn't like something a non-UK company is doing it should be them that go through the trouble of blocking it.
They're clearly working up to this; it's what happened with Pirate Bay, etc.
They don't want (correctly) unfavorable comparisons to China's "Great Firewall" made, which most Western governments have lambasted in the past, so there's a PR/Politics side of it too.
It would be much better to not block them rather serve them a single screen that explains why the rest of the site is unavailable to them citing the specific laws that make the action necessary
It’s hilarious that imgur is still returning JSON errors even when connecting with a browser. I guess their dev team have never heard of the Accept header.
(My residential IP is blacklisted for some reason and I always get a JSON error message from them)
The fault is obviously an incompetent and authoritarian UK government, but that's what the UK overlords have agreed.