U.K. To Regulate Many Online Forums Out Of Existence

I don't like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and this is worse.

This, from Techcrunch, seems like a good summary of a bad situation facing this blog: Death Of A Forum: How The UK's Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities.

This blog is just that: my personal blog, with comments.

Over the past two decades a lively community has evolved in the discussion threads. However, the Online Safety Act threatens to impose impossible hurdles on the continuation of open fora in the UK. The intent is officially to protect adults and children from illegal content, but ... there's no lower threshold on scale. A blog with comments is subject to exactly as much regulatory oversight as Facebook. It applies to all fora that enable people in the UK (that would be me) to communicate with other people in the UK (that's a whole bunch of you), so I can't avoid the restrictions by moving to a hosting provider in the US. Nor am I terribly keen on filing the huge amounts of paperwork necessary to identify myself as the Trust and Safety officer of an organization and arrange for commercial age verification services (that I can't in any event integrate with this ancient blogging platform). And the penalties for infractions are the same—fines of up to £18M (which is a gigantic multiple of my gross worth).

And it comes into effect on March 15th.

Accordingly ...

The blog will continue to exist.

However the comment threads may be closed for good after March 14th.

(I don't know for sure yet. It's very late in the day but the ICO may see sanity and provide some sort of sanity clause for hobbyist sites.) 

. . . 

Update: According to this in-depth article about the Act there appears to be a limited exemption for "limited functionality services" that covers blog comments—"but it may not include them if users can reply to each other - this is unclear". Ofcom are expected to clarify their regulations in January, so we can live in hope for a little longer. 

Also: "The OSA puts obligations on the service provider, so if you host a community on a platform such as Discord or WhatsApp, the OSA doesn't directly affect you." (So I may be able to open a forum on Discord instead.) 

Also: my quick first pass risk assessment per Ofcom guidelines is that this blog is, to put it mildly, at low risk for priority illegal content, if only because it doesn't provide most of the types of communication channel Ofcom is concerned with (eg. generating and hosting video and images, enabling direct 1:1 private communication between users).

From Sci-Fi author Charlie Stross's blog.