Online Safety Act: What went wrong?

Scope of the Problem: Safety vs Surveillance

• Several commenters argue that “online safety” at the scale implied inevitably means mass surveillance, so the Act trades civil liberties for only marginal protection.
• Others stress the underlying issue (kids viewing porn / harmful content) is largely cultural and parental, not technical, and therefore resistant to top‑down engineering.
• Some worry the law is less about children and more about normalizing a surveillance infrastructure that can later be repurposed (e.g., against VPNs, protest content).

Public Support, Politics, and Legitimacy

• There’s deep cynicism about UK politics: both major parties backed the Act; petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures are seen as performative and routinely ignored.
• One side claims such measures are broadly popular in the abstract (“protect the kids”), with backlash only appearing once implementation pain is felt.
• Others think polls show growing opposition and see this as classic “Something Must Be Done” legislation driven by optics, not outcomes.

Implementation, Enforcement, and Alternatives

• Many criticize the rollout: no government-run age‑ID system, reliance on third‑party age‑verification firms, and unclear guarantees about data minimization and breach risks.
• Some suggest OS‑level or device‑level anonymous age attestations, leveraging existing KYC for banking/NHS, or mobile carrier age checks.
• Others propose web standards: content‑rating or “adult” HTTP headers, category tags (sex, gambling, extremism), or mandatory “safe” variants of sites plus child‑safe DNS.
• A counterpoint: any robust age‑verification scheme inevitably creates a powerful surveillance vector, even if data is nominally not retained.

Porn, Harm, and Efficacy

• Disagreement over how serious youth porn exposure is: some say evidence from schools shows very young kids accessing extreme content; others say most adults had access as teens and society hasn’t collapsed.
• Many believe determined teenagers will trivially bypass controls (VPN, Tor), so the law mainly burdens law‑abiding adults and small sites while doing little to stop motivated minors.
• One view: better to target institutional porn sites and gambling platforms with tightly scoped regulation and digital IDs, rather than impose broad duties on all user‑generated content.

Broader Reflections

• Several lament the poor state and usability of existing parental controls and fault both policymakers and technologists for failing to provide simple, consistent tools.
• A recurring theme is whether the “true test” of policy is its intentions, its implementation, or its actual outcomes; commenters generally converge on outcomes, where this Act is seen as failing.