Then explain me how they have quite strong go players. Do you think it’s possible without communication with strong players from other countries?
How much would legal action cost, and what kind of resources does OGS have? What grounds would they even have to launch legal action? I’m no expert on law, let alone british law, but from what I understand there’s not much about a law passed by westminster that can be challeneged in court. In Australia or the United States something may be found to be in violation of the constitution, which would invalidate a law or parts of it. In the UK, from my understanding, generally if the parliament passes a law then there’s not much that can be done about it besides passing another law.
You state there is no great reason, but heavy fines and losing the ability to use payment providers or service providers is a pretty big deal.
You’ve sugested taking legal action without given any kind of basis they could rest a legal argument upon.
I would still like to know what you think will happen?
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They don’t. It is an illusion. This players are specially bred slaves trained to play go. This how things work in NK.
But the topic is not about human rights in NK. I do not think we should go too much oftopic. I mentioned NK in different context in the first place.
So at least OGS is still trying to be available in the UK, unlike some other servers which may just be cut off.
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I had an unfortunate experience with GoPanda2 when I went to Japan and login with a Japanese IP, and then when I got back, GoPanada blocked me since they assume I became a Japanese user (which has a different User Agreement and charging method), and had to mail the admin to prove I wasn’t in Japan anymore and unblock it.
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Haha, that happened to me more than once.
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I hope OGS will not got this way.
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CJK servers may probably be less worried to lose some UK players if we consider the size of audiences.
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Do we have the size of audiences for OGS by region?
We had a vague estimation at times yes. But surely the size in proportion should be much lower on a CJK server as on OGS
But not KGS, and KGS was still available to UK users I assume? Even the British room is still up.
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I have no idea how KGS is or will be with UK new policy. It will be interesting to see.
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This is interesting article. And I wonder what this would do to newspaper or other forums as well as blogs comments/replies, do they have to follow the age check as well? (they are user-to-user interaction as well)
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I expect KGS will do nothing in response to this act, and nothing will happen to them in response.
It’s a new world and hard to predict what will happen, but I expect the chance of any enforcement action against OGS is negligible, less than 1%. OfCom is slow to act against even large and influential organisations flouting the rules like TV stations, so some piddly little Go website no one has heard of seems unlikey. But it’s a small chance of a big negative effect against all OGS’s users across the world, so I can appreciate anoek’s decision to proactively comply to mitigate that risk at the cost of inconveniencing the UK minority user base (and his technical work to implement the restrictions).
P.S. And the irony of this, when OGS has already made considerable efforts towards child safety in online spaces with its dedicated kids go server without chat…
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Interesting article indeed. One possibly encouraging point was the emergence of companies providing services such as age verification, content moderation and embeddable chat. But I fear that even then it would probably take a lot of work and money to deploy those tools.
Yeah… for the “safety of the people”. Why do you seem to think that it is impossible to happen? 
Aren’t a lot of those servers hosted in China/Japan/Korea or around there? Not a place where UK has much sway either with the local service providers…
Good God, read what people reply before you go to make the same point. Here is the reply a few posts before:
This is the reply. Simple and true.
Laws do not have to make sense. You have to understand that they are usually made by people that have no idea about the subject they are legislating on, which is why a lot of times things like “construction rules/laws” contain things that make no practical sense, but yet still need to be seemingly upheld, even if it is impossible.
The law doesn’t care about your “personal beliefs”. That’s how democracy works. The majority believes otherwise? Then that is all that matters.
Seems, but isn’t.
That’s what we all said about the war with Ukraine, but if you recall we had at least 10 forum topics complaining about just the OGS banner on “some piddly little Go website no one has heard of”.
All you need is a bad, disgruntled, actor that will “tip off” the authorities and then, once they have a written complaint, it doesn’t matter how obscure we think our hobby is. They will have to do something, because it is illegal for them to ignore a complaint, so your only defense is to make certain that such a complaint cannot happen in the first place.
Protecting your site and time and livelihood is a good choice by @anoek … when you have to deal with laws like that, ironically, it is better to be safe, than sorry.
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It is definitely unlikely.
However unlikely doesn’t mean impossible, so I agree I can’t blame OGS for not taking the risk.
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Hmm, I didn’t think the law required prohibiting any user-to-user communication without age verfication. The law does require age verification if the site intends to host content harmful for children (eg: pornography is the main example).
At least based on how the law presents itself, it just requires considering risks to children, adopting proportionate measures to deal with those risks and I think publishing these results to ofcom so they could let you know if they have concerns. So I think there is a world where we would enumerate potential harms, evaluate them, decide on some measures, implement them and document the results. Then OGS should be compliant (definitely compliant enough to not invite ire from ofcom)?
The first step would be to do a risk assessment:
And this rather wordy document of potential measures to consider:
Based on a quick skim, it doesn’t look like anything completely different from what OGS is already doing would be required.
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Does ofcom say something about private chat/private messaging?
We could imagine an adult sending a private message to a child saying “I can teach you how to play, it will be easier if you click on this link so that we have a video call.”
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Yes
Under .
User controls
User blocking and muting
Application
a child-accessible part of the service has one or more of the following
functionalities:
i) user connection functionality;
ii) posting content functionality;
iii) user communication (including but not limited to: (1) direct
messaging functionality; and (2) commenting on content
functionality).
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