Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

> The UK is bracketing "intimate images shared without a victim's consent" along with terror and child sexual abuse material, and demanding that online platforms remove them within two days.

Bare in mind, this would have been used to stop the Epstein images of the former Prince Andrew from being viewed [1].

> Platforms that do not do so would potentially face fines of 10 percent of "qualifying worldwide income" or have their services blocked in the UK.

Why on earth would it be 10% of their world wide income and not their UK-based income? These politicians really think they have more power than they really do.

> The amendment follows outrage over the Elon Musk-owned chatbot Grok's willingness to generate nude or sexualized images of people, mainly women and girls, which forced a climbdown earlier this year.

The AI didn't just randomly generate NSFW content, it did it at the request of the user. Remember, there was no interest in removing the CP content from Twitter prior to Musk buying it, and then they all moved to Mastodon / BlueSky where they now share that content.

> The government said: "Plans are currently being considered by Ofcom for these kinds of images to be treated with the same severity as child sexual abuse and terrorism content, digitally marking them so that any time someone tries to repost them, they will be automatically taken down."

Ofcom simply doesn't have this kind of power. 4chan are showing as much [2]. This is simply massive overreach by the UK government, and I would advise tech giants to stop complying.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g5490xmkeo

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz6ejedj59no

> Why on earth would it be 10% of their world wide income and not their UK-based income? These politicians really think they have more power than they really do.

Regardless of whether the actions of the British state are correct, I do not think it is a good position that a foreign tech company is more powerful than the British state.

This is basically the same argument for the US forced divestiture of TikTok.

> I do not think it is a good position that a foreign tech company is more powerful than the British state.

Britain is a weak state. There will always be foreign companies more powerful than it is. The only way to change that would be for the British state to become extremely powerful.

Does it bother you if a British company is more powerful than the state of Turkmenistan?

The British press has strict libel laws, and stories that the American press publishes are absolutely not legal in Britain, yet the British state doesn't threaten the New York Times or Washington Post with reparations (unless I'm missing something.)

If this is the end goal, then they should do the same thing China does. Make back doors mandatory on all devices and ban any sensitive foreign platforms at the network level. If anyone is using VPNs, Tor, or whatever the UK police can flag those individuals and investigate what they are doing. At minimum, they can get ad revenue for Google, X, Meta, etc close to $0 in the UK which will dis-incentivize those platforms from having users there.

There is also a future here where the UK will not be able to monitor or see what their users are doing. SpaceX is already breaking foreign sovereignty with Starlink usage in Iran. If the UK or the rest of EU fails to really crack down at the scale China did, they may completely lose control of what is distributed within their borders. A combination of satellites and mesh networks could be much harder to monitor than the current telecom infrastructure.

The current approach is going to get the UK pressured at the nation state level by the US. In that case the UK isn't answering to some foreign tech company but whatever party is in power in the US at the time.

> If this is the end goal, then they should do the same thing China does.

This seems like an extreme over reaction; why can't the US platforms just stop profiting from revenge porn?

> Why on earth would it be 10% of their world wide income and not their UK-based income? These politicians really think they have more power than they really do.

Because fines are not a tax, they exist as a punishment for bad behaviour, so the question should really be "why not 100% of worldwide income?" (Or 200%, because a year of income is arbitrary; or "why not enough to bankrupt the company?" because profit, income, and bank balance are all different things, etc.)

The reason for only 10% is that this is to signal "we're still playing cooperate" in game theory, just with a baked-in rough (and rounded) guess of what big tech's typical income distribution is, in order to avoid shenanigans during court cases where e.g. someone tries to argue with creative accounting that their UK revenue is less than it really is.

> Bare in mind, this would have been used to stop the Epstein images of the former Prince Andrew from being viewed

(Bear, although your typo is awkwardly relevant...)

Would redacted images, and those that do not identify the victim, actually count?

> Why on earth would it be 10% of their world wide income and not their UK-based income? These politicians really think they have more power than they really do.

I mean, when it comes down to a fine or blocking access altogether, surely they can ask for whatever they want? They could've made it "one bajillion dollars" if they wanted. Actually collecting the fine is a whole other matter.

> Mastodon / BlueSky where they now share that content.

I regularly check Bluesky and occasionally check Mastodon, and I've never seen even 'tame' porn on either. I have absolutely seen porn on X, though.

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