The “Online Safety Act” is now effective in the UK and prohibits sites from offering services which facilitate any sort of communication between users unless they are age verified via strong methods (no “I’m over 18” check boxes, they want photo ids verified). We have no infrastructure or resources to facilitate dealing with age verification so as a result we, like most other small forums and games, are being forced to prohibit access from our UK player base.
Unfortunately this will also necessarily apply to chat and other user generated content on the online-go.com for players coming from the UK.
My understanding is that games are fine, but chat, images, and other user created content will need to be blocked.
This blocking will be done for any IP address coming from the UK.
This is quite frustrating but we need to follow the law. Should the law change in the future we will be exceedingly happy to open things back up.
Again, this only impacts users in the UK.
P.S. While this doesn’t impact Australian users yet, they have a similar law in the works, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Maybe they’ll learn from the UK’s mistake and carve out some exceptions that won’t decimate their access to small sites.
Do you? Bojo and his illegal covid parties have lessened my respect for the law. I’ve become rather more sympathetic to the “if laws are stupid then ignore them” argument. What are the chances of enforcement and penalties for OGS?
Anyway, see you again once I’ve installed a VPN so I can pretend to be from somewhere else. Just like all the kids who will still watch porn.
In this case the law has some teeth: “Companies can be fined up to £18 million or 10 percent of their qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater.” and it sounds like enforcement is “Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site”. I doubt our providers would hesitate from dropping us if asked by the UK, so I it just doesn’t seem worth the risk, stupid law or no.
Pretty sure VPN providers are the big winners in all of this nonsense.
My understanding is if you can’t guarantee mature content doesn’t pop up then you need to age restrict your forum, chat, image service, game, etc. So practically speaking, yes, all smaller sites, games that have user generated content, chat services, image sharing services, all either need to check ID’s or go offline in the UK. Even though we don’t allow porn here on the forums, we don’t pre-moderate every message or image that gets posted, and we don’t/can’t/won’t moderate PMs between people so even if our moderation is good enough in the public space it can never be good enough in PMs, so we need to go offline. Same for online-go.com, PMs and chat rooms aren’t going to be safe enough for their standards and the fact that we let folks upload avatars, even though we will remove outright pornography if it’s reported, isn’t enough for them because we rely on them being reported so it’s not preemptive.
So, despite being a UK law, they can come after our hosting provider and payment processor to extract penalty fees and shut us down, and/or go to our hosting providers and knock us offline.
We’ve gotta care about the portions where we do business in. Small site, big site problems. It continues to get harder and harder to operate internationally when you’re not already some big player with the resources to have teams of folks to track and follow the changes.
Can you just alter the TOS and include something like that website is operates only in US? I’m talking about shifting the responsibility onto British users.
You know that you are not supposed to ignore the law (Well that’s how laws work usually).
If you have people using OGS somewhere in the world, local laws may apply to them. And therefore to OGS. Now there is the question of enforcement. Without agreement between the law systems there may never be any consequences.
Of course. But for example what if I’m doing business in US and obey US law. But what if I do not want to deal with other jurisdictions?
Should I track the location of users? Especially they didn’t give me consent on tracking? What if they prohibit me tracking? It is technically impossible to enforce this law.
Well we are in some very theoretical aspect but in some way yes. IMHO if you offer something there, the distance doesn’t put away the responsibility you have on what you are offering.
You can’t put whatever you want on internet and some government may try to come after you if you don’t respect their laws.
First I dunno if you need to track. You know where the internet may go, and which access you offer. So everyone is asked for some responsibility in what he provides, in each place. It’s upon you to determine the existence or no existence of risks with local jurisdictions you may encounter.
The interesting thing is that I only heard anything related to this for OGS, but not on other Go servers (like foxwq, wbaduk, tygem, IGS, or even KGS). So most just ignore it?
I do not offering anything there.
They may implement any law they want. What if their law contradicts the law of my jurisdiction? What if some law want me to kill people based on race? Should I obey?
Why do we ignoring North Korea? What is the difference?
What if I’m running small online store in my town? I do not have resources even to be aware of every foreign law.
Well I think the relationship between the NK laws system and the laws system of your country may be almost inexistent anyway (but I may be wrong, considering that I even don’t know where you are)
If we prohibited site supporters from the UK, maybe so, but basically no.
Because payment providers (Stripe, Paypal) and hosting companies (Cloudflare, Google Cloud) want to do business in the UK, that means they have their stick that can reach us. They don’t have to have any agreements with the US, they wrote it in that their stick to wave is to extract penalties from the payment providers and if necessary your hosting companies to shut you down.