Prohibition never works, but that didn’t stop the UK’s Online Safety Act

Opinion You might think, since I write about tech all the time, my degrees are in computer science. Nope. I’m a bona fide, degreed historian, which is why I can say with confidence that the UK’s recently passed Online Safety Act is doomed to fail.

Sorry. We’ve been there. We’ve done that. It doesn’t work.

Over here in the United States, our greatest failure in that regard was the “Noble Experiment,” AKA Prohibition. From 1920 to 1933, you could not legally own, buy, or drink alcohol. You can argue it failed for all kinds of reasons, but the real bottom line reason was that people wanted to drink.

Guess what? People want to watch porn, violent videos, and look up forbidden information. Heck, like the song says, “The internet is for porn.”

Sure, the idea as presented was to make the UK “the safest place in the world to be online,” especially for children. The Act was promoted as a way to prevent children from accessing porn, materials that encourage suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, dangerous stunts etc, etc.

To quote former Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan, “Today will go down as a historic moment that ensures the online safety of British society not only now, but for decades to come.”

Yeah. No. Not at all.

In the real world, this has meant such dens of inequity as Spotify, Bluesky, and Discord have all implemented age-restriction requirements. Forcing internet services and ISPs to be de facto police means they’re choosing the easiest way to block people rather than try the Herculean task of determining what’s OK to share and what’s not. Faced with the threat of losing 10 percent of their global revenue or courts blocking their services, I can’t blame them.

Seriously, do you know what non-designated content (NDC) is? I don’t. I do know that since content promoting depression falls under it, someone is sure to make certain teenagers can’t read The Diary of Anne Frank.

Surely not, you say? Please. I live in the United States; there are always efforts afoot to censor it.

Or, ask Wikipedia. It has a dog in this fight, too. The Wikimedia Foundation faces significant challenges due to Wikipedia being subject to the Act’s most restrictive Category 1 duties. The organization fears that its editors’ identities will be revealed, and that will open a can of worms, including “data breaches, stalking, lawsuits, or even imprisonment by authoritarian regimes.”

They’re not the only ones. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pointed out, “Mandatory age verification tools are surveillance systems that threaten everyone’s rights to speech and privacy, and introduce more harm than they seek to combat.” Ding! Ding! Correct.

Besides, as the Americans demonstrated back in the 1920s, when you try to force people to be “good” in the most Puritanical sense, they find workarounds.

You could, for example, go to Use Their ID. This site enables you to “see” what your local MP’s driver’s license looks like, for you know, educational purposes. <WINK!>

Or, since you don’t need to find a bootlegger to get your open internet feed, you can do what most people are already doing: Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

I know, you’re shocked, aren’t you? Who’d guessed this would happen? Well, other than anyone who’s been on the internet for more than a few months.

ProtonVPN has reported a more than 1,400 percent increase in UK sign-ups following the implementation of age verification requirements. They’re far from alone, VPN apps became the most downloaded on Apple’s UK App Store.

The same thing has been happening in the US as more and more States have passed anti-porn age verification laws. Today, 24 States have such laws. Guess what? According to vpnMentor, after Florida’s anti-porn law came into effect this year, there was a “staggering increase noted in the first hours of January 1st, increasing consistently since the last minutes of 2024 and reaching its peak of 1,150 percent only four hours after the HB3 law came into effect.”

In the UK, the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA), whose members stand to make a lot of money from helping companies enforce the Online Safety Act, reported making 5 million age checks a day, and claims your data is safe with them.

It deletes the data after it’s been used, but in the meantime the AVPA’s privacy policy says: “Your information is securely stored in a Dropbox (which may be replicated on approved, secured laptops) and on MSTeams.”

As Madeleine Stone, Big Brother Watch’s senior advocacy officer, told The Guardian, “It only takes one dodgy age verification website to leak someone’s data.” Exactly.

Besides, when all’s said and done, the new law simply isn’t going to work. Not unless you want to ban VPNs. Does the UK, and I fear soon enough the US, really want to join such anti-VPN countries as Russia, Iran, and China? I don’t think so. Or, considering how things are going in the States…

Besides being technically almost impossible to block VPNs, to paraphrase a popular American saying, “If VPNs are outlawed, only outlaws will have VPNs.” You really don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. ®

READ MORE HERE