Published on: by Neil Brown
Some of the UK government’s policy announcements around the Internet - and, in particular, social media and VPNs - are downright concerning me at the moment.
In the name of “online safety”, the fundamental rights of both freedom of expression and privacy appear to be under imminent threat.
I have concerns which go beyond our shores - mostly stemming from Google, frankly - but the UK legislative / policy issues are bothering me especially at the moment.
I value my ability to read, learn, and communicate almost without borders. I don’t like signing up to websites or newsletters (I prefer RSS), I don’t like storing my data on other people’s computers, and I’ve certainly no wish to prove my age or identity outside core government services.
The current proposal to ban people under 16 - who also have the rights to freedom of expression and privacy - from some (as yet not fully delineated) social media services is likely to result in wide-spread verification.
While I am unlikely to be affected directly - although it would depend on the definition of “social media” - I anticipate that more websites will simply choose to block traffic from UK IP addresses, especially if UK-originated traffic does not matter a huge amount to them.
I am already seeing this as a consequence of the Online Safety Act, and I expect any future UK laws in this area to exacerbate that.
I also anticipate that we will soon see the first court-ordered blocking injunctions under the Online Safety Act, when the fines issued by Ofcom against some website providers (so far, most quite niche porn sites, as far as I can tell, plus a “suicide discussion forum”) go unpaid and the “compliance issues” which Ofcom has identified go unresolved.
Some - many - UK ISPs have already implemented, and carry out, DNS blocking, both for mandatory and non-mandatory reasons. Mine - A&A - is probably one of the outliers, with no blocking save for the mandatory sanctions-related requirements.
In any case, so far, since I run my own recursive DNS infrastructure, I have not been affected.
I use Tor quite a lot, but I’ve seen an increase - sure, a small increase, but an increase nevertheless - of sites which are blocking Tor traffic.
And so, for the first time, I am considering locating something (perhaps a WireGuard node, or a SOCKS proxy, or a recursive DNS server / DNS proxy, or perhaps all of them) somewhere on the Internet outside the UK, so that I can route some traffic through that, as needed, to maintain my access to the web.
Honestly, it seems such a shame to me, that UK Internet censorship should reach such a place, but there we go.
I have not decided exactly what I might do, or exactly how, or where, I might do it, but it is far more attractive to me now that it has been ever before, in all the 30ish years that I’ve been online.
To me, the need to even contemplate this kind of thing is the stuff of dystopian sci-fi.
And yet here I find myself.