Hello Online Safety Act. Goodbye UK?

With this flawed piece of legislation coming into effect this month, I’m currently considering geo-blocking UK from accessing my site.

There are multiple reasons for this.

Being a blog with anonymous comments enabled, it (likely) classes as a low risk user to user service. However, I don’t have the resources to run a full compliance test (hiring a third party to assess the risks, implement whatever changes, etc) and doing it alone will probably get it wrong anyway. And the site is making negative profit at the moment to justify any investment into this kind of work.

Regarding the content of both the posts and games, who can tell if they contain anything harmful for non-adults? An Ofcom inspector might find that a too revealing cleavage or the “Satanic” theme of Born of Fire TD is harmful. Maybe they’ll consider that characters of Wiggly Things are too phalic. Or complain that you can type “dick”, “pussy” and their anatomically correct variants in That Word Game. Or pehaps they’d simply feel offended by my position on these kind of laws, in particular, to its pre-cursor.

As a side note, when I sold a license to Wobbly Dot, the buyer asked for the first level name of Noodles game mode, “Experiment Omicron 219”, to be changed because they didn’t want to associate themselves or remind players of COVID (Omicron was a strain of SARS-Cov-2). Sensitivities ¯\_(?)_/¯

Surely, nobody is going to manually search a tiny blog by hand, but rather rely on automated AI tools to summarize the “feeling” of a site. Since the process of detecting what “harmful content” is obscured, who knows in what wide-cast net my blog will fall in? Whose to say Ofcom won’t want to make an example by punishing a tiny site just to show how “powerful” they are?

Bottom line, I’ll wait to see how things are moving, but I’m not willing to take the risk of dealing with UK bureaucracy.

Willing to hear UK users thoughts on this.