(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.

(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]

online safety act – Dropsafe

2025-07

Remember September 2020 when “good” people pressured Cloudflare into removing troll harassment site KiwiFarms (KF) from their services, thereby improving the internet?

It didn’t work, was never going to work, and all it achieved was teaching KF to build resilient architecture. Now…

…now Ofcom stomps in with its big boots on, demanding that KF perform a risk assessment under the terms of the online safety act, and KF (whatever you might think of them) have told Ofcom to get stuffed and to come back with an American warrant.

I cannot see any way that this ends without British civil society (mostly the non-technical “child and online safety” kind, whilst the digital rights activists stare at their shoes) screaming for the government to implement some or all of:

Mandatory DNS results censorship in the UK

Mandatory restrictions upon VPN provision / destination site access from the UK

Age verification for VPN usage

Demands for stronger filtering of DNS registrants and deanonymizing them / tying them to responsible people, whether or not that is actually relevant or makes sense

Demands for domain takedown processes to be performed on the grounds of hate speech

Bans upon Tor usage from the UK

Censorship of particular destination IP addresses being accessed from the UK

…none of which are liberal or proportionate, and any one or all of which will do nothing but turbocharge youth desire to access such content — but since when has strategic common sense restrained a campaigning politician with a safety remit?

Previously

Source:
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[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/tag/online-safety-act
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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