Over the years several attempts have been made to introduce this. Just like past attempts it will face a heavy lobby from the adult content industry and social media companies. More importantly this government will likely not be around long enough to actually introduce it (the consensus is that Boris will be gone after the May local elections). It will almost certainly drop off the radar of a subsequent government as there are much bigger and more important issues to tackle after Covid.
In the unlikely event it will get introduced, it will be delayed for years. For past measures Ofcom, the media regulator, was asked to classify all adult websites to determine if they fall in a category that requires age verification, and as you can imagine, this can take a while. In addition age verification is only required for websites that allow users to upload content, not commercially sourced content. There are endless loopholes here, however, likely adult websites will just block user content from UK visitors. It is not like there is a shortage of commercial content. Of course VPN providers will do well out of this too.
To support this, see Turkey and Russia for current examples.
The usual dying government cycles between "we are now super nationalistic and everyone who doesn't join us are terrorists" and "but think about the children!!11" like clockwork.
The damage these cause lives much longer than the creators. It totally makes sense to tread with care.
Don't worry. The next one is going to introduce it. Doesn't matter which party gets into power - one thing stays the same: The government/state always expands in scope.
The politicians in the UK have just slapped the harshest restrictions on people's liberties since (I assume) the world wars, and then they completely ignored them themselves.
People weren't able to attend loved ones funerals, but the politicians where having parties in their offices.
I'm intrigued to find out why you don't think this is a bad thing?
The noted point here is it likely won't happen, but the underlying goal of creating such perception may be achieved.
To give some further idea of how cynical all this is, the people who actually organised the supposed parties which are supposed to end Boris' career - the vast majority of which he doesn't even seem to have been involved in - are just scapegoats according to the media reporting, including the BBC. And at least one of the claimed parties Boris was involved was actually reported by a major newspaper the day after, back when lockdown was still on and people's relatives were still dying alone in hospital, and no-one seemed to conclude it was obviously an illegal party or even really care back then - and that was the one for Boris's birthday.
In any case, this partygate looks to me like an excuse to push the dead weight out of the car when is not useful anymore.
If he were acting as a serious PM at the same time and taking smart actions, the event could be sold easily as 'diplomatic work', hanging up with the people that counts in the public interest and so, and nobody would bat an eye. Nobody. Is just that the videos are too damaging and that damage control train has passed yet.
Ah, gotta love alternative takes on realities. Nah mate, the expensive PPE contracts went to friends and family of people in government. Ooh sure, these are just "cynical attacks" and in reality Boris and co are competent and non-corrupt people working so hard to serve the UK public.
Under his leadership UK suffered immense damage and he dragged down political standards to an almost Trumpian level.
The PPE that was sourced was unusable and the deals were handed out to some Tory mates. Where was the due-diligence?
The police looked into Steir Karmer's beer case and concluded he didn't break the laws.
Compare that to the Tory's multiple parties.
The PM is under criminal investigation for crying out loud.
Why didn't he stop those parties he was at. As the leader he could have easily said this is not on and needs to be stopped now. He sets the tone.
He's a disgrace to the UK and can't lead. He's a lying narcissist who only cares about what's good for him. It's all about 'winning' and not actually thinking about how to improve the lives of people living in the UK.
The Johnson administration is a joke and needs to be replaced asap.
Both were photographed with beer.
This is the photo of Keir Starmer: https://metro.co.uk/2022/02/07/keir-starmer-cleared-of-lockd...
The photo of Johnson is not AFAIK in public circulation; the police have it as part of the evidence they are currently investigating, in particular that this was part of his unlawful birthday celebration with his coworkers.
The picture in this article is not, I think, of this incident: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/feb/04/police-have...
Jonathan Pie: 'Boris Johnson Is a Liar' | NYT Opinion
Today if you try to access adult content on a UK mobile device you get blocked by age verification. You have to call your mobile provider and prove your age (it’s a once-per-contract thing). One of the ways you can prove your age is with a credit card. But I imagine it’s a large deterrent because not many people want to call Vodafone and ask permission to look at pornography. They’d probably just rather get a VPN.
True, and particularly galling when the content you want to look at is not porn but (say) the internet archive or opinion sites that weenies in the provider have deemed offensive.
But the verification process wanted my Driving License number, which I gave repeatedly, but which it never accepted.
I scrapped that mobile contract ("Three") as useless.
No need to call, it's a switch in their app or website. It's the same for pretty much any provider.
The annoying part is that the switch tends to reset fairly often.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28551960
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29903695
I've been using them for a while, very happy with it so far. Stable connection and high speeds - good enough that I often forget I have it on - and a nice selection of locations.
They even accept cash! Each account is just an ID so you can mail your account number and some money to them and payment will be processed.
Mozilla VPN also uses Mullvad's servers behind the scenes.
Vultr ( Cheapest $2.5/Month): https://www.vultr.com/marketplace/apps/openvpn Linode: https://www.linode.com/marketplace/apps/linode/openvpn/ Hetzern, or any other cheap VPS provider as your are not storing any data on it anyways so even it dies or corrupts it shouldn't be a problem.
Open VPN has a clients for every major platform: https://openvpn.net/vpn-client/
Make sure do your research about Open VPN and VPS before using any of it.
Using a VPN moves the point where this occurs and may obfuscate some things, but also realize that many VPNs are probably in some form associated with nation-states and therefore makes their job easier.
I pay €5/month to ultracc for a server I can torrent with. It just happens to come with a vpn installed as a bonus.
Mullvad is the same cost for just a vpn. I'm sure it's better in many ways that people will list below but for the purposes of getting around government internet blocks where you're not then expecting g men to kick in your door for getting around them, openvpn installed on whatever random server works fine.
In effect, this proposal already exists for mobile data connections. Add this to what is enabled by the snoopers charter, and the use of this information accross governement and it is a pretty grim state.
I accidentally saw some pornography when I wasn't sexually active. I had no clue what was I looking at. I found it to be disgusting, like those extreme cancer photos, and didn't watch it again until many years later.
It's a common idiom in political discourse. Or was this a bad joke?
Big company’s (Facebook, etc) will lobby against it, they will argue about what the threshold of requirement is. Then there is the logistics, privacy, security and cost factors. Not going to happen.
I believe this is all about making it look like politicians are doing “something” without actually doing anything.
Yesterday’s obvious attempt at fraud is tomorrow’s legal obligation, and the fraudsters are going to love it.
Plus it means that people that don't have those forms of identification will be restricted from using the internet. Libraries won't be able to offer a lot of services, the "unintended side effects" are enormous.
But never put it past this particular British government from establishing the very best in footguns.
It will be a drastic change to pivot the company from one where the customer is the product to the customer.
Credit card input also introduces friction and bounce rate of user signup. This would hurt Facebook's user growth and MAU KPIs
I am happy to identify myself to government entity A to prove my age, but I don't want A to know what sites I visit.
I want to visit site B, but I don't want to identify myself.
Is there no API that will allow B to verify my age via A, without A finding out what site B is, and without B finding out anything more than my age bracket?
That claim as a signed message can be provided to third-party services which need only validate the signed message using the public key associated with the secret key that signed the claim message.
How would the flow go? Click on an age verification link on a site. It redirects to the gov site, where you authenticate and it returns a signed claim.
Now the government knows what sites you are visiting. Not something I suspect most people will want when accessing porn sites...
See the work of Jan Camenisch for example: https://jan.camenisch.org
But I doubt anything so well thought out would be implemented for this. Current government suggestions are credit card checks, checking identity against government passport records, or your mobile phone service provider.
I don't even understand the mobile phone one. My son has a mobile phone, but I'm the account holder according to the phone company. He's too young to enter into contracts for a start!
If I can prove User is over 18 to App, without giving away who User is to App - that seems quite valuable. An "Ali Baba cave" for identity. (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~mkowalcz/628.pdf)
People will start buying shitty VPNs advertised on prime time TV instead and entirely side step the issue but create two more at the same time.
Think we need a new national anthem now along the lines of https://youtu.be/P1CyPjQQTAM
Use code shittyVPN for 95% off our Best VPN in the World service for life.
So... the internet?
We can do without it if it was just switched off, but everyone else who is using it, is itself a reason to be part of it.
There’s no reasonable definition of who should and shouldn’t be affected by this where Facebook has to comply but Reddit doesn’t.
I would suggest this is generally better than an attempt to codify in law some kind of definition of what companies should be covered.
Who would have thought there would be more friction for just about every part of British life? /s
[1] https://preprod.metro.co.uk/2021/08/27/no-more-cookie-pop-up...
It’s just an implementation of a crappy idea by a crappy government.
But yeah, it's a crappy, incompetent government who are currently announcing all kinds of badly thought out populist ideas to distract attention from the trouble their leader is in.
Wireless radio (it will mean mothers no longer sing to their children), various genres of music over the years (will harm development of children), newspapers (in the 30s there was an obsession with young men reading newspapers rather than talking to their colleagues or family, like a mobile phone concern but in the 30s - if you Google this story you can find some impressive pictures of lines of men waiting at a bus stop and every single one is reading a newspaper).
It wouldn’t surprise me if kids are better adjusted to social media than adults. The kids don’t need to go through a readjustment period of trying to convert their expectations to the new reality.
Kids will still bully each other with or without social media. There will Still exist dangers which can’t be controlled without active parenting and an attentive society.
I see the attraction of banning social media below a certain age but i can’t help think that open discussion with kids would be far more effective.
It’s also extremely harmful for adults, but adults can make their own decisions.
It would be good though if there is some identity standard across platforms rather than the existing patchwork solutions that exclude people without say, credit cards. Digital ID systems like in South Korea or Taiwan seem good because they're uniform across the country and comparable to national ids.
