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Comment by davesmylie | Hacker News Reader

> This firm doesn’t care a whit about the impact on users - they are just too cheap to follow the rules.

I'm old enough to remember when one of great things about the web was the low barrier to entry.

Not every site has a large company with deep pockets behind it. Some of the websites I've run, I've run at a loss because I was interested in the subject and thought it provided real value for other people. Probably the income from these sites was in the hundreds of dollars a year range, the cost in time and effort waaay beyond that.

I don't know the actual compliance costs here - I know the cost of a UK lawyer just to review obligations and liabilities is probably going to be a few hundred quid, if not substantially more. I don't know of many non-professional, or FOSS sites that could afford that.

Your curt dismissal of this huge chunk of the internet saying they shouldn't be operating at all is mind boggling

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To be clear, I think a huge chunk of the tech giants also should not be operating! They need to be regulated heavily with algorithic feeds banned, anyone under 18 banned and better compensation for content creators.

The wild west of the internet was largely a mistake and created massive social disruption for the benefit of a tiny few and was caused by regulators being asleep at the switch. It is good they are finally catching up.

I have no idea why we need to require site operators to verify users ages? Just force the mobile phone companies do it. It would be pretty trivial for apple, with a front facing camera, face detection, and then just read everything on the screen. If something bad or offensive is shown, the phone is disabled and a notification is sent to the parents and the police.

The western internet as we knew it is dead. Privacy is dead, we already live in a post-Snowden panopticon. With multiple always-on microphones in every public room and often in private rooms too. HD cameras are everywhere. If you live in any major city, hundreds to thousands of hours of footage, which might contain you, is being uploaded for public view and AI training daily.

There have been other open source deathblow laws passed in the EU like the Cyber Resilience Act and the Product Liability Directive which have been repeatedly dismissed by other commenters on hn. Earlier stuff like the GDPR was dismissed too as only affecting big companies. The arguments in support of these laws have basically been you are small so you don't need to follow them. That seems like lot of disrespect for the EU's legal system but maybe it's well deserved.

It's only a matter of time until ID verification will be mandated even to make a post like this one on sites like hn. Western companies assisted authoritarian prison states in monitoring, censoring and controlling their citizens, when they should have been doing the exact opposite. Now it's really hard to argue that it isn't possible here.

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