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Comment on UK's Online Safety Act has made 'absolutely no difference,' kids say

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It's bloody well made a difference to those trying to provide a web-service, especially a user-to-user one.

The main difference is now that it's pretty stupid to go online with a new service without running everything through a lawyer, given the OSA has teeth - criminal penalties to people with say in the company.

If I were to print out my OSA docs, they'd come to 168 pages. That's just my take on the regs, my remedies, my policies, and a study of any weaknesses in the coverage of the harms defined by the OSA.

Then, because kids under 18 can access the site, there's the children-specific definitions of the same - except these cover more child-focussed areas like harassment, brigading, encitement to suicide etc. That's another 123 pages.

For a single-operator site like I intend to be, that's a damn lot of paperwork, before I've ever even launched the site. Understandably so, the solicitor is keen to charge quite a bit of money to make sure that volume of content is above-board and legal.

So things got expensive before they ever even get going.

And it's kind of annoying to see the kids say it doesn't matter anyway [sigh] - as if I thought it ever would.

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