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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Looks like https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/16/britains-ofcom-brings-tough-... has some background. Readers may want to look at both.

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And this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433044

It shows the dark side of this coin. It's killing a lot of genuine volunteer initiatives because complying with all the red tape.

I find that a huge loss because it drives us more and more in the arms of big tech who only have dollars as a goal, not helping people or establishing a community like these initiatives do.

This law is aimed at big tech but it actually hurts the smallest players which don't need this legislation because they're already ethical. The big players will just hire more lawyers to contest any fines and find as many loopholes as they can.

An 18 million pound fine is just a massive risk for a hobbyist. It would basically ruin their entire life.

> This law is aimed at big tech

The law is not aimed at big tech. It is aimed at any online forum that the government wants to shut down, and gives an lengthy, arbitrary, and vague list of pretenses that they can base a shutdown on. Big tech has shown itself to be eager to conform to government expectations at every turn. Big tech helps even to shape government expectations, and continually shares personnel with government itself.

besides big tech i assume it will push more people underground (this is what i would do). and VPNs will get (yet another) big boost.

myopic governments pushed by myopic voters are apparently the new norm.

Understand that 99% of VPNs can be trivialy shut down if they wanted.

The loophole is tolerated. For now.

yes, very much aware of this. you can even block them at carrier level, but it’s a little bit more expensive

It will be tolerated for a long goddamn time though given how useful VPNs are for corporate security.

We elect decision makers who are lazy to do their job so they put the difficult part on everyone's head, basically making everyone proactively proving that they are not criminals (including helping criminals by intent). Also the catching of the criminals are put on citizens too (those being directors or responible persons of an organization). I can collect perhaps dozens of such if I try apart from this example. First comes to mind is when you have to prove you are not money loundering when receiving a large sum or buying an expensive but essential to life thing (house). I lived in a country where re-registering your pre-paid SIM card is a yearly feat, otherwise it will be taken away, only because the officials did not notice criminals buying that by the 100's of thousands. No mistake, 200.000 suspicious purchase occurred. So, now everyone has one more small task to do, prove him/herself towards authorities because authorities are sooo incompetent and lazy. Fucking up the life for everyone bit by bit, slowly making it not worthwile to do anything meaningful, better just sit and exists silently.

We elect these inept parasites. It is on us.

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