Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like:

> I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.

It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pl...

Unless a law is a mortal threat to the current party in power, it will not be repelled. Even so most likely they will try to wash it down instead of actually abolishing it.

Agreed. I think the supposed justifications for mass population-wide online surveillance, restrictions and de-anonymization are so strong most political parties in western democracies go along with what surveillance agencies push for once they get in power. Even in the U.S. where free speech & personal privacy rights are constitutionally and culturally stronger, both major parties are virtually identical in what they actually permit the surveillance state to do once they get in office (despite sometimes talking differently while campaigning).

The reason is that the surveillance state has gotten extremely good at presenting scary scenarios and examples of supposed "disaster averted because we could spy on everyone", or the alternative, "bad thing happened because we couldn't spy on everyone" to politicians in non-public briefings. They keep these presentations secret from public and press scrutiny by claiming it's necessary to keep "sources and methods" secret from adversaries. Of course, this is ridiculous because adversary spy agencies are certainly already aware of the broad capabilities of our electronic surveillance - it's their job after all and they do the same things to their own populations. The intelligence community rarely briefs politicians on individual operations or the exact details of the sources and methods which adversarial intelligence agencies would care about anyway. The vast majority of these secret briefings could be public without revealing anything of real value to major adversaries. At most it would only confirm we're doing the things adversaries already assume we're doing (and already take steps to counter). The real reason they hide the politician briefings from the public is because voters would be creeped out by the pervasive surveillance and domain experts would call bullshit on the incomplete facts and fallacious reasoning used to justify it to politicians.

Even if a politician sincerely intended to preserve privacy and freedom before getting in office, they aren't domain experts and when confronted with seemingly overwhelming (but secret) evidence of preventing "big bad" presented unanimously by intelligence community experts, the majority of elected officials go along. If that's not enough for the anti-privacy agencies (intel & law enforcement) to get what they want, there's always the "think of the children" arguments. It's the rare politician who's clear-thinking and principled enough to apply appropriate skepticism and measured nuance when faced with horrendous examples of child porn and abuse which the law enforcement/intelligence agency lobby has ready in ample supply and deploys behind closed doors for maximum effect. The anti-privacy lobby has figured out how to hack representative democracy to circumvent protections and because it's done away from public scrutiny, there's currently no way to stop them and it's only going to keep getting worse. IMHO, it's a disaster and even in the U.S. (where I am) it's only slightly better than the UK, Australia, EU and elsewhere.

Politicians don't want to reduce their power, but politicians != governments. Lots of scary stuff actually empowers the civil service more than it empowers politicians. The main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections.

Unfortunately at this time Britain doesn't really have a viable libertarian party. Reform is primarily focused on immigration, and the conservatives have largely withered on the vine becoming merely another center left party. So it's really very unclear if there are any parties that would in fact roll this back, although Nigel Farage is saying they would. His weakness is that he is not always terribly focused on recruiting people ideologically aligned to himself or even spelling out what exactly his ideology is. This is the same problem that the conservatives had and it can lead to back benches that are not on board with what needs to be done. Farage himself though is highly reasonable and always has been.

It may not make sense to you, but they've been arguing constitutional law there for hundreds of years.

Plenty of monarchies also have modern single-document constitutions, like Norway, Spain and Thailand.

> The United Kingdom constitution is composed of the laws and rules that create the institutions of the state, regulate the relationships between those institutions, or regulate the relationship between the state and the individual. These laws and rules are not codified in a single, written document.

Source for that quote is parliamentary: https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-com... - a publication from 2015 which considered and proposed a written constitution. But other definitions include unwritten things like customs and conventions. For example:

> It is often noted that the UK does not have a ‘written’ or ‘codified’ constitution. It is true that most countries have a document with special legal status that contains some of the key features of their constitution. This text is usually upheld by the courts and cannot be changed except through an especially demanding process. The UK, however, does not possess a single constitutional document of this nature. Nevertheless, it does have a constitution. The UK’s constitution is spread across a number of places. This dispersal can make it more difficult to identify and understand. It is found in places including some specific Acts of Parliament; particular understandings of how the system should operate (known as constitutional conventions); and various decisions made by judges that help determine how the system works.

https://consoc.org.uk/the-constitution-explained/the-uk-cons...

From his own Carnegie UK webpage linked above:

> William was instrumental in creating Ofcom, reforming the regulatory regimes of several sectors and kicking off the UK government’s interest in open data.

William was awarded an OBE for his highly influential work at Carnegie UK with Prof Lorna Woods that underpinned the UK government’s approach to regulating online services.

How is he not a founder of Ofcom?

That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s just a verifiable statement of fact.

Or is it the use of the word founder you object to? If you prefer, “was instrumental in setting up and is closely related to the running of Ofcom”.

Not a fun way to live.

https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Staff

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!

I remember an example where the UK Government decided it's OK to rip CDs you own (no, really, it wasn't legal until then), and codified that in law. The parasites that run the UK Music trade organisation appealed and found that the UK had not sufficiently consulted them before deciding to make the law.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933

So - ripping is completely illegal in the UK. Always has been, always will be. Never rip a CD, not even once. Keep paying all your fucking money to the UK Music member corporations and never think you own anything, not even once.

But it illustrates that the UK's law-making is subject to judicial review, and government cannot make laws or regulations without consulting those affected by them how much of a hardship it constitutes to them. The judge here is merely saying we haven't seen the harm yet, and Ofcom can keep threatening indefinitely to cause harm, Wikipedia only have a case when they do cause harm. By contrast, passing the law making CD ripping legal, UK Music argued, using an absolute load of bollocks they made up, that it immediately caused them harm.

Yes. To rephrase it, they cannot act until it's already too late, and the damage has already been done.And we wonder why things are so broken.

So, yes, I believe they both want tracking to exist, because they both benefit massively from it.

People don't like their worldview challenged, no matter their ideology.

Politicians exploit this by offering ways to "help", but at the cost of transferring more power away from the people.

Compared to LLMs, it’s extremely striking to see the relative trust / faith people have in it. It’s pretty sad to see how little the average person values truth and correctness in these systems, how untrusted Wikipedia is to some, and how overly-trusted LLMs are in producing factually correct information to others.

[0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...

And who would they need to hide from?

We shouldn't have to hide behind our more vulnerable peers in order to have reasonable rights for online free speech and unfettered anonymous communication. It is a weak argument made by weak people who aren't brave enough to simply say, "F** you, stop spying on everyone, you haven't solved anything with the powers you have and there's no reason to believe it improves by shoving us all into a panopticon".

Totalitarian neoliberalism sucks; your protest petition with six million signatures is filed as a Jira ticket and closed as WONTFIX, you can't get anyone on the phone to complain at, everyone in power is disposable and replaceable with another stooge who will do the same thing as their predecessor. Go ahead and march in the streets, the government and media will just declare your protest invalid and make the other half of the population hate you on demand.

MPs are elected to Parliament, they get input from their constituents. Bills are debated, revised, voted on multiple times. There are consultations and input from a board range of view points.

A petition is in effect trying to shout over all that process from the street outside.

On that occassion, it was very effective at getting the American government to back down.

> The Wikimedia Foundation shares the UK government’s commitment to promoting online environments where everyone can safely participate. The organization is not bringing a general challenge to the OSA as a whole, nor to the existence of the Category 1 duties themselves. Rather, the legal challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.

---

I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did their conscience go?

Well, at the very least, the American government is already aiming for that

2) Lots of people like it when a company does an obviously good thing, and dislike it when a company does an obviously bad thing. I guess you’ve made a happy discovery: it turns out the underlying principle was something about what the companies were trying to accomplish, rather than some reflexive “American companies are bad” silliness.

AI chatbots are only capable of outputting “vibe knowledge”.

My personal test usage of AI is it will try to bull shit an answer even when you giving known bad questions with content that contradicts each other. Until AI can say there is no answer to bull shit questions it is not truly a viable product because the end user might not know they have a bull shit question and will accept a bull shit answer. AI at it's present state pushed to the masses is just an expensive miss-information bot.

Also, AI that is not open from bottom to top with all training and rules publicly published is just a black box. That black box is just like Volkswagen emissions scandal waiting to happen. AI provider can create rules that override the actual answer with their desired answer which is not only a fallacy. They can also be designed to financially support their own company directly or third party product and services paying them. A question about "diapers" might always push and use the products by "Procter & Gamble".

Yea great, make everyone even dumber by forcing them to use AI slop

If the UK effectively bans public wikis above a certain size (even if by accident), then it is the law of the land that Wikipedia is banned. Or at least the english wikipedia, which is indeed very large. And if it is banned, then it must block access for the uk, under those conditions. Depending on the exact rules, possibly the uk could make do with the Swahili wikipedia?

That said, the problem here is that it is a public wiki of a certain size. One option might be for Wikipedia to implement quotas for the UK, so that they don't fall under category 1 rules.

Another option would be to talk with Ofcon and get things sorted that way.

Blocking, making it clear why your blocking and that you will continue to block until it changes is respecting the decision.

>respect the democratic decisions

Let the peope have a say in the going ons instead of lying to get elected, and maybe we can call it democratic again.

Well, the OSA was put into law by the Tories in 2023. The democratic decision of the UK was that they resoundingly rejected what the Tories were doing in the landslide win for Labour in the 2024 GE. I'd quite like UKGOV to respect the democratic decisions of the country and if they won't, I'm quite happy for other people to push back via the courts, public opinion, etc.

Blocking is respecting the law!

In what way would blocking access from the UK be not respecting the law?

They do that by staying out of such countries. Many US companies don't want to work with EU GDPR and just block all european IPs, wikipedia has full right to leave UK. They are under no obligations to provide service to them in the same was as pornhub is under no obligation to provide services in eg. a country that would require them to disclose IP addresses of all viewers of gay porn, etc.

Saying that it was a democratic decision without people actually being asked if they want that (referendum) is just weaseling out instead of directly pointing out that it's a bad policy that very few brits actually wanted. Somehow no one uses the same words when eg. trump does something (tarifs, defunding, etc.), no one is talking about democratic decisions of americans then.

Wikipedia has the full right to say "nope, we're not playing that game" and pulling out, even if an actual majority of brits want that.

Also, no-one asked for this bill, both parties support it, it received basically no debate or scrutiny and was presented as a fait accompli. Where's the democracy exactly?

    if isAdult == 0 and website doesn't send a "safe-content" header, then:
        browser refuses to display content
    if isAdult == 0 and photo in a messenger doesn't contain a "safe-content" metadata, then
        photo viewer refuses to display content
    if isAdult == 0 and the app is not marked as safe, then
        app store refuses to download the app and OS refuses to launch it

Also a phone number verification is needed if you want to connect to free WiFi in a subway or a bus or a train. Foreign phone numbers are often not supported in this case.

The main point is that the verification is done on the device. The device has a digitally signed flag, saying whether it is owned by an adult user or not. And the OS on the device without the flag allows using only safe apps and websites sending a "Safe: yes" HTTP header. User doesn't need to send your ID to random companies, doesn't need to verify at every website, and website operators and app developers do not need do anything and do not need to do verification - they are banned from unverified devices by default. It is better for everyone.

Also, as I understand the main point of the Act is to allow removing the content the government doesn't like in a prompt manner, for which my proposal is not helpful at all.

1) private - anonymous (don't know who is requesting access) and unlinkable (don't know if the same user makes repeated requests or is the same user on other services).

2) widely available and extremely easy to register and integrate.

The current situation is that it's not easy, or private, or cheap to integrate. And the measures they say they will accept are trivially easy to bypass - so what's the point?

I worked in a startup that satisfied point 1 back in 2015. The widely available bit didn't come off though when we ran out of runway.

This costs Wikipedia nothing - they are not funded by ads. And, in exchange, they don't get sued or any of their employees arrested.

That is the primary reason to ban UK visitors.

They do seem to be considering banning only users after the 7 millionth - 1 visitor every month to avoid being classified as category 1 instead. That would let them avoid some of the most onerous parts of the OSA that would require stripping anonymity from editors and censoring whatever Ofcom says is "misinformation" and "disinformation."

The worst thing is, people will vote out the labour government, and the tory bastards (who will say they are 'the party of freedom) will tell the country "Well, it wasnt us".

Geographically speaking, about half the US has "think of the kids" laws that are similar to the UK's.

No, they're not. I don't know why people keep repeating this "7 million active users limit" idea, it's nowhere to be found in the actual rules. Tiny forums have already had to close because they didn't want to deal with the legal risk:

https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/

they would at least want to block the UK from accessing it first?

So, is Wikipedia really a Category 1 service? From https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2025/9780348267174, it seems to come down to whether Wikipedia is a site which uses a "content recommender system", where that term is defined as:

> a system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user service in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, that uses algorithms which by means of machine learning or other techniques determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other content, may be encountered by other users of the service

There's plenty of flexibility in that definition for Ofcom to interpret "content recommender system" in a way that catches Facebook without catching Wikipedia. For instance, Ofcom could simply take the viewpoint that any content recommendation that Wikipedia engages in is not "in respect of the user-to-user part of that service."

After today's judgement, and perhaps even before, my own bet is that this is exactly the route Ofcom will take.

Seems pretty logical.

Again I think people outside of the UK perceive Ofcom to be a censor with a ban hammer. It's an industry self-regulation authority -- backed by penalties, yes, but it favours self-regulation. And the implementation is a modifiable statutory instrument specifically so that issues like this can be addressed.

In a perfect world would this all be handled with parental oversight and on-device controls? Yeah, maybe. But on-device parental controls are such a total mess, and devices available so readily, that UK PAYG mobile phone companies have already felt compelled (before the law changed) to block adult content by default.

ETA: I am rate-limited so I will just add that I am in the UK too. Not that this is relevant to the discussion. There is no serious UK consensus for overturning this law; the only party that claims that as a position does not even have the support of the majority of its members. I do not observe this law to be censorship, because as an adult I can see what I want to see, I just have to prove I am an adult. Which is how it used to work with top shelf magazines (so I am told! ;-) )

I suppose it's not really the done thing to say this, but if you disagree with me, say something, don't just downvote.

There is a million more greedy companies than Wikimedia, there is also other places that could use your money though, i.e Internet Archive, which is always desperate for donations.

Hmm. So Reddit, Youtube, etc. would be blocked by ISPs by default?

> The Science Department, which oversees the legislation, told companies they could face fines if they failed to uphold free speech rules.

> A spokesman said: “As well as legal duties to keep children safe, the very same law places clear and unequivocal duties on platforms to protect freedom of expression.

> “Failure to meet either obligation can lead to severe penalties, including fines of up to 10 per cent of global revenue or £18m, whichever is greater.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/09/social-media...

They seem to be putting social media platforms between a rock and a hard place, particularly as political debate in the UK is starting to heat up somewhat. I suppose the best to hope for at this point is that fines for infringing free expression never materialize.

Having said that, if Wikipedia geo blocked the UK it would send a powerful message to everyone living here.

It allready collects few hubdred million per year, spends like 10 on wikipedia itself and rest goes for political projects. They could do something useful for once.

(On a side note: all those money and they dont use it to track the cliques / country level actors across admins...)

I was about to ask about this, but then I realized it must so that you can't just point it at a photo of someone.

Which law are you talking about by the way?

I was mostly familiar with laws that required porn companies to verify their user's age. That is a lot more targeted and less offensive than UK Online Safety Act Regulations IMO. I mean it's already illegal to distribute porn to minors - that's just requiring them to enforce it at the expense of porn watcher's anonymity. Whereas the UK Online Safety Act is more like a backdoor for content moderation across the internet.