Feeds

The UK’s Online Safety Act is scheduled to take effect on March 16, 2025. Lobsters can’t comply with it and needs your help to avoid having to geoblock the UK.

The Online Safety Act regulates most sites where users can interact with each other. The law explicitly claims authority over all forums with visitors located in the UK, regardless of where they are hosted or the nationality of their owners.

As a practical matter, Lobsters can’t comply. The OSA is written for commercial sites far bigger than this non-commercial, hobbyist forum. The regulator’s statements include many long, cross-referenced legalese documents (an incomplete sample, because I can’t find a directory): 1 2 3 4 5. Sites are required to produce lengthy documentation about their features, practices, and risks - both up-front and as they moderate. Attempting to understand which sections apply and how to comply would be a huge project. Doing so correctly would require legal advice we can’t afford. The cost in time and money to implement the bureaucratic processes it demands also outstrip a hobbyist forum.

There’s also an ideological matter, that Lobsters is not a UK entity or operated in its jurisdiction. The OSA isn’t written to directly regulate the UK’s occupants, it exerts authority over non-UK maintainers of sites that UK occupants read. Even if the OSA was proportionate and reasonable, complying would encourage every jurisdiction to write similarly broad laws.

The OSA’s civil penalties run up to $22 million USD, and it includes also criminal penalties. While poor and despotic countries have written laws to curtail freedom of speech internationally online (usually a broadly over-enforced “no criticizing the rulers”), as a practical matter those have been vanishingly unlikely to be enforced against Western citizens. Because the UK is wealthy, powerful, and threatening large penalties, I can’t ignore the risk that the UK attempts to enforce the law against Lobsters, perhaps to make a political point against American Big Tech as promised by the regulator.

So the current, bad plan is that Lobsters will geoblock the UK before the law takes effect on March 16. While the inaccuracy of IP databases and availability of VPNs mean that this can’t be perfectly accurate, unambiguously blocking UK occupants as effectively as we can is the only course I see to substantially reduce the risk the OSA is enforced against the site.

UK users, we need you to please help improve this situation. You have the local knowledge and political representation needed to address the OSA. I can see a couple courses of action that would sufficiently mitigate the risk:

Some kind of guidance or waiver from the implementing regulator Ofcom that this law won’t apply to Lobsters individually or as a class of non-UK, small, and/or noncommercial forums.
Delay or cancellation of the Parliamentary approval required for the regulator’s guidance to be adopted into legal effect, at least until something like the previous option can happen.
Legal advice from a UK lawyer that the law does not apply to Lobsters for some plausible reason.
A statement from the US Department of State that it does not believe the law applies to American entities and a commitment to defend them against it.
Something else I haven’t thought of that would greatly reduce the risk the OSA is enforced against Lobsters.

I’m reaching out to people I know who also run sites that will be affected by the OSA, in and out of the UK, to ask how they’re handling this. I’m also reaching out to organizations that focus on online rights like the EFF and ORG. I’ll post update in the comments below so this story will be the best single resource to watch for news.

There’s more background info and thoughts in the story on LFGSS shutting down, previous and today’s office hours streams, which include searchable transcripts.

There are a lot of distracting off-topic rabbit holes here like recent political events, international diplomacy, defining “free speech”, pretending to practice UK law, and many more - please do try to stay focused on the existential problem at hand.

Thanks for your help,