UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act

Re:UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act by cornfieldlabs on Monday July 28, 2025 @08:35AM (#44710221)

How should small social network sites, forums or any sites that post user-generatrd content etc who can't afford to do age verification respond to this law? Block all requests from UK IPs?

We are building a niche social network and don't want to be in the cross-hairs.

Is anyone in a similar position? How's your company dealing with this?

Edit: apart from cost, storing user IDs etc goes against our goal of building a private social network. We would like to retain least amount info

https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev

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Re:UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act by xd on Monday July 28, 2025 @08:43AM (#44710289)

The new legislation likely won't apply to you: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-... - the section "Threshold conditions for categorisation of services".

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Re:UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act by jart on Monday July 28, 2025 @08:39AM (#44710251)

Focus on building and don't worry about being in regulatory crosshairs until you're actually in their crosshairs.

The less you know about this stuff the better.

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Re:UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act by varispeed on Monday July 28, 2025 @09:02AM (#44710451)

If you are building competing service and your competition has links to government, you will be one brown envelope away from being crushed.

These regulations are meant to serve big corporations and protect their monopoly.

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Re:UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act by tharmas on Monday July 28, 2025 @07:17PM (#44716948)

>These regulations are meant to serve big corporations and protect their monopoly.

B*I*N*G*O!

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Re:UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act by raverbashing on Monday July 28, 2025 @08:53AM (#44710374)

This right here

(also applies to GDPR, and even though GDPR has wider applicability, devs should focus on the low-hanging fruit first instead of going around in what-ifs and exceptions)

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Re:UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act by hkon on Monday July 28, 2025 @08:47AM (#44710315)

I'm not saying this is the intended consequence. But it's certainly something that has been considered.

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Re:UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act by GoblinSlayer on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @09:13AM (#44722922)

You don't need to block anything, british ISPs will block requests to your site by themselves.

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