edit: removed unintentional deadnaming
Thank you to those who have tirelessly run these online communities for decades, I'm sorry we can't collectively elect lawmakers who are more educated about the real challenges online, and thoughtful on real ways to solve them.
I sympathise with the OP because at some point everyone becomes too old to deal with the headaches of running a community. I have no opposition to their choice to shut down the forum. I just don't believe liability as a result of the new bill is the reason.
Rightly or wrongly, limited companies in the UK provide a high degree of protection for wrongdoing. Defrauding HMRC out of hundreds of thousands of pounds and suffering no consequence is happening day in day out. An Ofcom fine is nothing by comparison.
there's never been an instance of any of the proclaimed things that this act protects [...] people from, so he should be safe, right?
but despite this, he is already being attacked, and those attacks will not just continue but they are likely to increase because the attack surface has become larger.
2. Doesn't the fact that simple legal manoeuvring can be used to dodge 99% of this law make the law (and laws like it) farcical on its face? Merely an elaborate set of extra hoops that only serves to punish the naive, while increasing everyone's compliance costs?
It seems like OP is commenting on this thread; you can accuse them of lying directly, if you'd like.
Does this in practice mean that the original human person would have to pay that fine? What would the consequences likely be for the original human person?
If those consequences remain severe, then it's not a simple legal manoeuvre after all. This reduces farcicality, but also means there's no way for an individual to safely run this kind of website.
If those consequences round to zero, my next question would be: Can a large company spin up a CIC just to shield itself in the same way? (If so, it seems the farce would be complete.)
Does the UK have a similar concept?
the liability is very high, and whilst I would perceive the risk to be low if it were based on how we moderate... the real risk is what happens when one moderates another person.
as I outlined, whether it's attempts to revoke the domain names with ICANN, or fake DMCA reports to hosting companies, or stalkers, or pizzas being ordered to your door, or being signed up to porn sites, or being DOX'd, or being bombarded with emails... all of this stuff has happened, and happens.
but the new risk is that there is nothing about the Online Safety Act or Ofcom's communication that gives me confidence that this cannot be weaponised against myself, as the person who ultimately does the moderation and runs the site.
and that risk changes even more in the current culture war climate, given that I've come out, and that those attacks now take a personal aspect too.
the risk feels too high for me personally. it's, a lot.
No a large company can't spin up a CIC to run a business website (because it is not community interest), but it doesn't need to, it is already a limited liability company. However this is not a farce, the limited liability applies to the shareholders, not the company. The company gets fined, and has to pay the fine or risk having its assets siezed.... then the shareholders have lost their company. The liability of the shareholders is limited to the shareholders invested amount, ie the shareholders can't lose any more than they put in. So if the fine was more than the company can afford, the shareholders lose their company, but don't have to pay the rest.
It is not a farce, because losing a profit earning company is bad for a shareholder
The Online safety bill gives Ofcom the power to levy regulatory fines, not criminal sanctions, so is very different
Filing accounts: £15. An online form will ask you for your balance sheet summary only unless you are very large.
One off registration:£65
Annual confirmation statement:£34
So depends on your perspective I suppose.
You have to keep accounts if a business even if not incorporated. A company has to keep accounts if it has any assets (e.g. a domain) or any financial transactions (e.g. paying for hosting)
You will also probably have to file a tax return. You have to keep a register of shareholders.
In fact if definitely not making a profit a standard ltd might be simpler (or maybe a company limited by guarantee) then a CIC as all a CIC does it add restrictions and extra regulation https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7b800640f0b...
Indeed, so this cost is not relevant to the decision to set up a CIC or not
Could a company create a non-CIC sub-company (with ~$0 in assets) to own the website, and thereby shield shareholders of the original company? (If so, I think farcicality is conserved.)
It may turn out that it is too much work to comply and so you might still need to shut down, but with the LLC you've got a lot more leeway to try without personal risk.
Restauranteurs can't say they don't have time to comply with the law. Construction companies can't. Doctors can't. Why should online service providers be able to?
However it probably wouldn't work for a profit seeking company in this case. Big Corp owns Web Corp, and Web Corp owns the site. Which company is operating the site? If it is Web Corp. So when Web Corp gets fined, you lose your site. This is a problem for a profit seeking company, because it lost its value. If Big Corp owned the site, and Web corp operated the site, you may be OK. Your accountancy costs just went through the roof though. Not sure about this law, but some compliance laws treat the group as one whole entity to stop this sort of thing.
Since this applies to laws in general, are you arguing that corporations are a farce? I may be inclined to agree.
Edit: answering your other point, the company could not have no assets, if it owns the site then it has the site as an asset. If it runs the site then it will have cash etc. Etc.
I'm sorry, what precisely do you mean by this? The rules don't punish you for illegal content ending up on your site, so you can't have a user upload something then report it and you get in trouble.
>So when Web Corp gets fined, you lose your site.
My mind immediately goes in the direction of "Maybe you lost that server, but just buy a new one and change some DNS entries", which isn't free but a lot less than £18M. But maybe there are protections against this kind of scheming? I'd like to think there were.
>If Big Corp owned the site, and Web corp operated the site, you may be OK.
I don't follow -- if Big Corp owns the site, won't it lose everything?
>Since this applies to laws in general, are you arguing that corporations are a farce? I may be inclined to agree.
I think I am actually. They do seem like a way to get something for (almost) nothing (and they seem like they were probably engineered to be this way deliberately).
A forum that isn't proactively monitored (approval before publishing) is in the "Multi-Risk service" category (see page 77 of that link), and the "kinds of illegal harm" include things as obvious as "users encountering CSAM" and as nebulous as "users encountering Hate".
Does no-one recall Slashdot and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_Amer... trolls? Such activity would make the site owner liable under this law.
You might glibly reply that we should moderate, take it down, etc... but we, is me... a single individual who likes to go hiking off-grid for a vacation and to look at stars at night. There are enough times when I could not respond in the timely way to moderate things.
This is what I mean by the Act providing a weapon to disgruntled users, trolls, those who have been moderated... a service providing user generated content in a user to user environment can trivially be weaponised, and it will be a very short amount of time before it happens.
Forum invasions by 4chan and others make this extremely obvious.
Oh I do... the link... HN must have a word based deny list
I vouched for it, so it should be visible now.
We are not talking about a business here. The whole problem is that these are things that people are doing as essentially voluntary work.
What your saying would be true in a different context, but this is not business. I do not know whether you find it hard to grasp that some people will put a lot of effort into something for motives other than profit.
That's not true, you'd need to conclude you're at a medium or high risk of things happening and consider the impact on people if they do.
> and as nebulous as "users encountering Hate".
But users posting public messages can easily fit into the low risk category for this, it's even one of their examples of low risk.
Everything, ownership of the domain, codebase, digital assets for instance.
> I don't follow -- if Big Corp owns the site, won't it lose everything
Good question If Big Corp owns the domain, codebase, IP etc. and lets Web Corp operate a site using those assets, Big Corp is not responsible for Web Corps transgressions.
A simpler analogy. Big Corp owns a pub, rents it to Web Corp. Web Corp plays music too loud, opens too late and gets fined and loses its alcohol licence. Web Corp is insolvent, but Big Corp still owns the pub.
My outlook on doing this is that this is not the way to do it because these things exist:
- EU citizens living in non-EU countries (isn't GDPR supposed to apply EU citizens worldwide?)
- EU citizens using VPN with exit node to/IP address spoofing a non-EU country
Either comply with GDPR or just don't exist, period.