https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
"We’ve heard concerns from some smaller services that the new rules will be too burdensome for them. Some of them believe they don’t have the resources to dedicate to assessing risk on their platforms, and to making sure they have measures in place to help them comply with the rules. As a result, some smaller services feel they might need to shut down completely.
So, we wanted to reassure those smaller services that this is unlikely to be the case."
Political winds shift, and if someone is saying something the new government doesn't like, the legislation is there to utterly ruin someone's life.
It’s clear the UK wants big monopolistic tech platforms to fully dominate their local market so they only have a few throats to choke when trying to control the narrative…just like “the good old days” of centralized media.
I wouldn’t stand in the way of authoritarians if you value your freedom (or the ability to have a bank account).
The risk just isn't worth it. You write a blog post that rubs someone power-adjacent the wrong way and suddenly you're getting the classic "...nice little blog you have there...would be a shame to find something that could be interpreted as violating 1 of our 17 problem areas..."
Unless Ofcom actively say "we will NOT enforce the Online Safety Act against small blogs", the chilling effect is still there. Ofcom need to own this. Either they enforce the bad law, or loudly reject their masters' bidding. None of this "oh i don't want to but i've had to prosecute this crippled blind orphan support forum because one of them insulted islam but ny hands are tied..."
This is the flimsiest paper thin reassurance. They've built a gun with which they can destroy the lives of individuals hosting user generated content, but they've said they're unlikely to use it.
A minister tweeted that it didn’t apply to shotguns, as if that’s legally binding as opposed to you know, the law as written.
The problem is the dishonesty, saying the intent is one thing but being unwilling to codify the stated intent.
The point is simply that even merely picking 1% or 0.1% of people completely at random to audit keeps 99% of normal people in line, which is far more valuable to society (not just in immediate dollars) than the cost of those few actual audits, regardless what those audits "earn" in collecting a few, or zero, or indeed negative dollars that might have gone uncollected from a random individual. There is no reason an audit should not show that there was an error and the government owes the taxayer, let alone collecting nothing or collecting less than the cost of the audit.
The police's job is not to recover ypur stolen lawnmower, it's to maintain order in general. They expend many thousands of dollars in resources to track down a lawnmower theif not to recover your $400 possession, but to inhibit the activity of theft in general.
Tax audits are, or should be imo, like that.
The actual details of what should be written in the IRS manual are this: Something.
It's a meaningless question since we're not at that level. I'm only talking about the fallacy of treating tax audits as nothing more than a direct and immediate source of income instead of a means to maintain order and a far greater but indirect source of income.
But here's the thing: it's often the case that the theft rate in an area is down to a handful a prolific thieves... who act with impunity because they reckon that any one act of theft won't be followed up.
I'd hope that in most jurisdictions, police keep track of who the prolific thieves/shoplifters/burglars/muggers are, and are also willing to look into individual thefts, etc., because even when it's the thief's first crime, there can often be an organised crime link - the newbie thief's drug dealer has asked them to do a "favour" to clear a debt, or such.
So it can be really useful to track down your lawnmower. Sometimes. And the police don't know if it's worth it or not until they do the work. I can see the parallels in this analogy to tax audits.