I fucking hate the government. They are so fucking clueless. Not just Labour but the Cons, the Lib Dems, Reform, all of them are so fucking stupid and they ignore the people there to tell them their ideas are Stupid.

The irony is that despite being a confessional state, the UK is 100x more secular than the USA.

If I had to guess, they don’t care at all about porn and are using this as a pretext to censor sites that talk about LGBTQIA+ people.

Transgender people are in the crosshairs and have been for a couple of years for now.

Wonder what they’re gonna use that power for, especially considering their efforts to censor history and go after people they don’t like.

OK so Trump is going to have to choose whether or not to side with fucking 4chan, you know, the site with regular pedophilia threads.

Jesus christ, that’s even worse.

You know the law must be bad if they block Mississippi due to this, but not the UK.

Hey, remember when people were saying Milei was a “Libertarian” and saying he will show the world what a “Libertarian” Country could look like? Remember that? Remember him dressing up as Captain Anap?

Almost immediately, dare I say the moment he got into power, he fucking went full fascist complete with the suppression of protests and propaganda announcements at railway stations. This is why I hate Right wing “Libertarians” (or as I like to call them, “Fauxbertarians”). They basically want a Corporatocracy. They’ll be like “I want the state out of our lives” one moment, then once with a modicum of power, they use it to increase the power of corporations over our lives and crush any dissent with a vigour the likes of which you only see in North Korea. They want the “government” out the lives of corporations and into the lives of everyday people. It always turns into a corporatocracy with these Children of bitches.

Among his plans to downsize the State, President Milei has been saying that he intends to replace government workers and organizations with AI systems. The first role that he will give to this technology, however, will be an expansion of state agencies: on Monday his government created the Unit of Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security.

LOL how the fuck is mass surveilence of people downsizing the state?

Well done you know how sales tax works. Customers pay the business. Business pays the Government. My point.

…and where in this chain is YOTI et al paying the government?

Frankly, you sound like the most odious little turd I have ever met on Lemmy.

A burden on the population.

The population being the people who run self hosted forums with a certain amount of British users. If you are one of those people, yeah, I’m sorry, I hate it too, but the vast majority of the UK don’t run forums with a large amount of British users. Fun fact, the End users (the people giving away their IDs) aren’t actually paying shit to anyone bar their IDs.

Taxes do not all get directly paid to gavernment. Like sales taxes, service tips ect.

VAT (what you call “sales tax”) does go to the Treasury. Like when you buy something, that 20% extra you paid goes off to the government via the Taxes the shop pays. That’s how VAT works.

Services tips aren’t really a thing in the UK, especially not mandatory ones because food service workers in the UK aren’t exempt from the minimum wage.

Are you even from the UK? Are you even in the UK? Because if you were from here, or even if you spent any amount of time here, you would’ve known the following things:

1. The United Kingdom doesn’t have Federal Taxes because we’re not a Federal country. Again, we’re a Unitary Country with Devolution.
2. We don’t use the term “Sales Tax”, we use the term VAT (Value Added Tax). That’s not some special technical term, VAT is common parlance.
3. Service tips are not compulsory nor expected in any way, shape or form because food service workers in the UK are paid minimum wage with no exceptions. Most places here don’t even have the option to give a tip.

Considering these things, I think you’re American. In that case, please, do us a favour, don’t act like you’re a fucking expert on this. I live in the UK, Scotland to be precise. Shit’s bad, The OSA can get tae fuck, but having Yanks who watched videos made by other yanks who don’t know shit about fuck on the ground lecture me about my own fucking country as if it’s just “America with funny accents” not only doesn’t help, it’s just spreading bullshit.

State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it’s s state mandated cost aka tax.

Just because it’s a state mandated cost doesn’t mean it’s a tax. Tax implies the money goes to the government to pay for goods and services. It’s actually worse than that: it’s a levy.

A levy doesn’t go to the government. A levy goes to whatever person provides the good or service. For example: if I tax alcohol based on alcohol content, the amount of money added to the tax goes to the government. If I place a levy based on alcohol content, the amount of money that is added goes to the person/company selling the booze. An example of a levy is the plastic bag levy, which was put in place to reduce plastic pollution. That money you spend on a bag doesn’t go to the government, it goes to the people you got the bag from, and they can do whatever they want with it, keep it, give it to charity, use it to buy Heroin on the deep web, you name it!

What this law has effectively done has made service providers (not just companies, but whoever runs the site) a choice: They can either develop their own age verification system or pay a company (like YOTI) to do it for them. Most service providers do the latter because they do not have the resources to do the latter.

Does the money go to the government? No (except maybe under the table nudge nudge wink wink), it goes straight to the company. What the government has done is force entities to give a private company money.

It’s a tax in the way, let’s say, a hypothetical Right-Libertarian government might tax you, or even an American Homeowners Association might “tax” you: making you give a private company money.

The Online Safety Act doesn’t apply any new taxes on anyone. It forces service providers (IE: Private Companies) to institute age checks through either AI Face checks or ID either through an in house solution or buying services from a third party (YOTI or similar). It imposes a cost on a business where they have to either spend money setting up an age verification solution or acquire one from a private company. The government doesn’t impose any new taxes on people on businesses with this bill, but instead makes companies who run services give money to other companies to comply with the law.

In short, the censorship isn’t being done directly by the state, it’s being done by private companies under pain of massive fines by the state. Other than suing websites or dealing with court challenges (which is done in house), all the actual legwork is being done by private companies, some of whom, like YOTI, are making handsome amounts of cash.

UK has a massive federal budget problem…

The UK isn’t a Federal Country. It’s a Unitary state with Devolution. I know it is basically a Federal state in Practice (Holyrood, Cardiff Bay and Stormont all have varying amounts of autonomy) but the distinction is significant.

and they still keep increasing expenditure on surveillance.

This is the fucked up bit though: The OSA doesn’t put the burden of Age gates on the State. They put it on The Service Provider (Websites and services). This is why so many non-porn forums, lemmy instances, and mastodon instances have either had to shut down or geoblock the UK, all the responsibility is on them to institute this lest they get sued out the arse. They can’t afford to get YOTI or whatever, or don’t have the manpower or money to institute their own system, so they shut down.

It’s also why overblocking is a thing: because the OSA’s official defination of what should be blocked is so vague so the two people who decide what get’s blocked are the Service Provider and the Government effectively in that order. This is why Reddit is blocking things that should not be agegated (like support groups), because the law is so fucking vague, and why sites like Twitter are blocking tweets that don’t need to be blocked under the “news” exception (yes, there is an exception for the news).

All of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don’t need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.

And all the other major tech players (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft) are developing “Digital ID” systems as a “solution” which will not only make it easier to track people for them and the government, but also for advertisers, so they aren’t complaining either.

TL;DR, The UK basically put all the pressure on the Websites so their friends can make loads of money.