An Act devised by silly people, passed by silly people, enforced by silly people

The Online Safety Act in the UK has a name that could come from a dystopian movie, but it was introduced under previous Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak and of course the Starmer Government is in favour of it, boots and all.

As with so much legislative fervour nowadays, it was introduced to protect children by empowering a national regulator to block content, as well as require that end-to-end encryption. 

Sean Thomas in The Spectator writes:

Since the Act came into force (originally in 2023, but with greater effect in recent days), the absurdities have piled up fast. Entire Reddit communities – from harmless subreddits about cider to basic vape advice chatrooms – have gone half-dark, unable to easily implement the age verification systems. Niche forums for LGBT teens, survivors of abuse, and mental health support groups have shrunk away rather than risk falling foul of vague ‘harmful content’ clauses. A forum about ‘fixed gear cycling in London’ (yes, really) shut down because it feared it couldn’t afford the compliance overhead.

The absurdity of it was seen a few days ago when Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, said that Nigel Farage was on the side of Jimmy Savile - the late disgraced former DJ and TV star who, after his death, was found to have committed multiple sexual offences against young girls (none of this online or facilitated by the internet, as he was as technologically illiterate as the politicians supporting this Act). 

Thomas rightly says:

it’s a naked attempt to distract from the fact that Peter Kyle – a man so well suited to his role as Technology Minister that he appears to have no background in technology, no experience in the technology sector, no career with technology companies, no obvious technological training, and a degree in ‘International Development’ – has no argument.

Former Conservative Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Nadine Dorries apparently: once walked into a meeting with Microsoft and bluntly asked when they were ‘going to get rid of algorithms’.

One of the most egregiously inane things any politicians can do is to pass laws as a kneejerk reaction to a problem and especially being seen to address a problem.

This is an example of that. Thomas points out the threats not just to free speech (which politicians care about that nowadays, as it is so often seen as coded with being a Nazi, a pedophile or a terrorist), but to the whole IT sector in the UK.  

The result is a legal ambiguity so vast it could engulf an entire industry. Startups will die under the compliance burden. Larger tech and AI firms will shift labs and headquarters abroad. And Britain’s AI industry, briefly a potential world leader, will find itself reduced to the digital equivalent of a wine bar shut down for not having a government-approved corkscrew made of chocolate.

Let us hope our local politicians don't think this is a model to copy, bearing in mind both sides of politics seem to not be immune to this.

Harmful Digital Communications Act indeed

Turn away for long enough and I find the NZ government does something outrageous to curtail freedom and to expand Nanny State, sure enough it has with the Orwellian sounding "Harmful Digital Communications Act".  Even if I supported it, if I was a Minister getting that title passed over my desk by a Ministry of Justice manager, I'd have tore a strip off of her or him for having had a complete lack of any education in either literature or history to give ANY legislation such a title.

The purpose of the Act as well has shades of Big Brother:

"to deter, prevent, and mitigate harm caused to individuals by digital communications; and

provide victims of harmful digital communications with a quick and efficient means of redress"

It's a curious post-modernist trend for laws to be created not to protect rights based on well worn principles of individual rights and freedoms, property rights, contracts and torts, but to "prevent harm" - to have laws to sanitise life so that "everyone" is protected.

However, the term "harm" doesn't mean physical harm.  There is no need for new laws covering an actual infringement of your body (although the digital dimension does justify ensuring laws protect your property and covers contracts and torts), for such laws exist - in abundance - including ones to protect you from yourself.  The harm being covered is, what "The Flight of the Conchords" would say are "hurt feelings".

Being offended, is to be harmed.  To be distressed by what someone else has said, is to harmed.  This goes beyond defamation, which is - indeed - damage to one's property in the form of your reputation. It's an almost childlike drive to make everything structured and inoffensive.  In the UK, it came out in its most absurd form a few months ago with the National Union of Students Women's Conference saying:

"Some delegates are requesting that we move to jazz hands rather than clapping, as it's triggering anxiety. Please be mindful"

I didn't make that up.  If someone is a little bit upset, then everyone else must conform to avoid upsetting that person.  It's the radical so-called "progressive" identity politics champions being manufactured by post-modernist university departments out of air headed students raised on this form of Newspeak. 

So the Harmful Digital Communications Act is about "serious emotional distress".  It is now a crime in New Zealand to make someone else upset, digitally (now now!).  I know I did that when I separated from my wife, thankfully I didn't do it by text message today, or I might be in trouble.

However, let's see how you might get into trouble, because Amy Adams, the National Party, the Labour Party, the Maori Party, NZ First and much of the Green Party thinks your freedom of speech should be curtailed, in case it distresses someone.  Kudos to ACT's David Seymour for standing up to it, and indeed Russel Norman, Gareth Hughes, Julie-Anne Genter and Steffan Browning for having thought about it.  

I know this legislation has had much coverage online for what's bad about it, but it deserves constant attention, and every single MP who voted for it needs to be exposed for their moronic endorsement of it.  It's a disgrace to all who voted for it, and if anything indicates clearly how utterly incompetent they are in being able to apply principle and concepts to problems and issues, it is this law.

I encourage all to push the boundaries of this law to expose this incompetence.

North Korea's internet shutdown? So?

Whilst much of the media has parroted reports that the "DPRK's internet has been shut down", few actually specified the source for this, nor did they explain how meaningless this is without the explanation that 99.99% of the population has absolutely no internet access.

You see the DPRK's internet connection is restricted to a privileged subset of the ruling elite.   Virtually none of the DPRK's population outside Pyongyang and the Chinese border town of Sinuiju is even aware of the Internet.   A tiny proportion of the population has PCs, and the extent to which they are interconnected, it is through Kyangmyong - the local intranet which largely exists to distribute government material and approved content.  

So,  the consequences for almost everyone in the country are nil.  The consequences for a fraction of the ruling party and army elite are inconvenience.  

The authority for this is also not a DPRK source.  The Korean Central News Agency is a source for the news that the DPRK wants to present to the world, but domestically its content is quite different. Domestically, there is no awareness of the internet, although reports about Kyangmyong exist to demonstrate how technically adept the country is.  However, NKNews.Org has reported that there appears to have been a compromise of the country's external connections, although this isn't hard to do:

North Korea’s connection to the internet is relatively fragile, indicating that it would not take a particularly sophisticated attack to knock the DPRK offline.

“There’s nothing clearly evident which points to U.S. involvement … there has been talk amongst the [non-government-aligned] hacking classes of reprisals,” Frank Feinstein NK News chief technical officer said.

“This sort of thing could be pulled off by a collective or handful of individuals, rather than a state power very easily,” Feinstein added.

So a technically unsophisticated dictatorship with very few connections to the outside world,  for a system that serve the Kim family, and the top echelons of the party and military, was weakened.  

I've seen no reports noting that its brethren in the south, one of the world's most connected country's, could easily undertake such an attack.   

The real story is that the DPRK is under almost constant internet shutdown.  It is the world's least connected country, not due to poverty, but because of deliberate government policy.

Closing down its international connections, which it appears to have used to attack systems in other countries, and which are largely reserved to an elite that actively prevents the free speech and information it offers from reaching almost anyone else, is not a bad result.

The petulant man-child running the place, aping his sophisticated grand fraudster grandfather, is trying to flex his muscles to show to the military - the real source of power and threat to power - that he is up to the job.   Embarrassing a Japanese corporation in the USA over a film that pokes fun at him would have a been a top job for the Pyongyang hackers.  

In truth, he runs a country where he can't expose too many skilled young computer technicians to the technology that it can't easily access (due to sanctions) or the internet, or else they will find out a little too much about the lies told to them through school and the media - without rewarding them all very handsomely indeed, or keeping the under draconian control.

That's not a formula for building ICT capabilities to seriously take on south Korea or the USA, set aside companies that are weak in the computer security.   It should not be difficult to confine the child's ambitions.   China, on the other hand, is another story.

Where is Facebook not used?

Look at this map, showing Facebook connections.

Well there are three reasons for big dark areas:

1.  Nobody lives there (vast tracts of the Amazon, Sahara, Arctic Circle, Siberia, majority of Australia but notice how Greenland is still connected despite a population of well under 1 million);

2.  Few can afford it (mountains of South America, central and west Africa, and the lower density in some areas);

but there is a third reason...

Look at China, no lack of people, no lack of people who can afford it, but it's a blank.  In fact look at the Middle East, except the shining lights from Egypt through Israel, Jordan and Lebanon.  Beacons in the oil rich Qatar, Bahrain and UAE.  Not Syria, Saudi, Yemen, Libya and little Iran.  Yet Vietnam has some, and we can see free China in the form of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau against the near devoid lack of mainland connections.  South Korea vs North Korea is too obvious to point out.  Indonesia and Malaysia are wonderfully well connected.

Speaks far more of freedom than many indicators.

Where did the Liberal part go?

In the midst of the announcements of slender cuts to public spending in the UK, came the news that the government is to proceed with Labour's plan for data on every phone call, website visit, text message and email in the UK to be stored for one year.   Unlike Labour, which wanted the government collecting it on its own database, the Con-Dem coalition will impose the obligation on internet service providers and telecommunications providers.  The emails and text message details wont include the content, but it is still a big brother state seeking to have the capacity to engage in surveillance of anyone it wishes.   It is one thing to get a warrant to monitor the communications of a suspect, another to make private providers keep such records.  After all, what does a website visit tell anyone other than what someone may be curious about (does visiting an Islamist website make someone a sympathiser?).

The Liberal Democrats claimed that they would bring a commitment to individual freedom and a belief in a smaller state to this coalition.   It would appear that this has been stomped on by the jackboot of the Home Office and the obsessive paranoia of the law enforcement sector which always errs on the side of less freedom.

Google says no to the Communist Party of China

Google's enormous success as a company offering a search engine and advertising related to it has given it dominance in how people search the internet. A dominance that has upset governments, some of whom are keen to kneecap overly successful businesses (think of anti-trust/competition law agencies, none of which have learnt from the absurd attempt to kneecap Microsoft, only to find that Microsoft itself is facing both competition and the disadvantages of being too big), but others don't like the internet because of it facilitating a free flow of information and media.

Every new communications and information technology has seen responses from vested interests seeking to restrict or ban it. However, they have also proven to be the unlocking of freedom, a check on bullies, charlatans and authoritarians of every bent. It is no surprise that the Nazis engaged in public book burning, that communist Romania banned typewriters unless they were officially approved, registered and their typefaces customised so the Securitate could tell whose typewriter had produced a document.

Whilst the Nazis were the first to extensively use radio broadcasts to rally support across the nation, the discovery of shortwave radio meant that people in authoritarian regimes could get news from free countries. So the Soviets and even today regimes in China, Cuba and Iran still attempt to jam inbound radio broadcasts from the likes of the BBC and Voice of America. North Korea simply produces radios with no tuning dial, with the capacitor preset to the single state radio station.

Television became a key platform to inform East Germans of what life in the West was like, and news from a non-Stalinist perspective, with much of East Germany able to receive West German terrestrial television broadcasts. Satellite TV more recently has made major inroads across the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. However, entry into that market in China has been done respecting local censorship laws.

However, the internet has become revolutionary. As anyone online can produce content, and the content accessed is up to the person online, its scope is ubiquitous and all encompassing. However, unlike broadcasting, the internet is also an essential business tool. Email is now vital to the productivity and sales of many businesses.

In the mid-late 1990s I attended several intergovernmental meetings which discussed "regulating" the internet. At the time Saudi Arabia had banned it, because it had no idea how to handle content that was blasphemy against Islam and anything of a sexual nature. What was made abundantly clear is that with the internet comes freedom of choice, although some countries were and still are engaging in grand firewall projects.

When Google set up google.cn, it agreed to respect the censorship policies of the People's Republic of China. Google argued that participating in the Chinese market would be more positive for free speech than ignoring it. However, whilst Google would explicitly not include certain results in its google.cn searches, it was clear savvy users in China could find ways around this.

Since then, the Chinese government has expressed concern that Google facilitates access to pornography, and has called for Google to step up measures to help with its censorship efforts. It is trying to pursue an endless game and losing.

So the announcement by Google that it will pull out of China unless it can provide a free open uncensored service is astonishing. It has justified it on the grounds that there have been hacking attempts at Gmail accounts from China, and presumably it has little recourse to the Chinese authorities to prosecute this. However, it is a brave move in the country that has now got the largest number of internet users in the world.

Google has apparently stopped censoring google.cn, which must be causing great angst amongst the Chinese government and the Communist Party. Previously censored articles and images of Tiananmen Square, critiques of Mao Tse Tung and support for Chinese dissidents, Taiwan and indeed much porn will now be easily accessible.

More important than that, Google has let all users in China know of its policy. It has called upon the 300 million or so Chinese internet users to note what their government is doing, and how Google will walk if things don't change.

It is a calculated risk. In China, Google is not the leading search engine. A local variant, Baidu, (a blatant copy) is. However, it will not take long before its users learn they can access what was previously forbidden. Google risks losing advertising revenue in China, now the world's second biggest economy. Yet Google also will gain publicity elsewhere and support from millions in the free world.

So what is the likely response from Beijing? I suspect it will seek to wave Google farewell and seek to ingratiate itself with Yahoo and MSN. It is terrified of free information, protests and calls for political reform, so will itself seek to block Google. After all, the odds that millions of Chinese will revolt over this is low. Yet it will put a stumbling block in the growth of the internet in China.

However, kudos to Google. It will have declared its hand as being the search engine for a free world, it will have shown how a private company can frighten the world's largest authoritarian government. After all, look at how sanitised this report from Xinhua (the Chinese state news agency) is about the issue.

Peter Foster, the Beijing correspondent of the Daily Telegraph says: "Interestingly, for all the nationalism and anti-foreign sentiment that typifies China’s more vocal netizens, the majority of comments on Chinese web discussions forums seem to be extremely worried about what Google’s potential pull-out signifies for China in the longer term."

China has made massive progress though its own hard work and ingenuity, but it has also leant heavily on a global knowledge economy whose well-spring is the free-flow of information.

Google is a potent symbol of that idea and while China can get along just fine without Google in the short-term, a decision to shun Google (which at this point looks the likely course) would expose the inherent limits of the Chinese ‘miracle’.

Yes, the relative economic freedom China has experienced in the past 30 years has been matched by much less individual freedom, particularly when it comes to holding government and more specifically the Communist Party to account. It would appear that the Communist Party can no longer demand obedience and surrender by foreign companies seeking to reap rewards from the ample Chinese market.

Phones, streets and mail not safe for children

That's my reaction to the Privacy Commissioner's absurd declaration that the "internet is not safe for children".

What is?

Travel? Talking to people on the phone? Sending letters? Talking to neighbours? Relatives? Playing sports? Climbing trees? Swimming pools? Playing in the streets?

It really becomes a matter of applying your mind to the situation, and when children are involved, an appropriate amount of supervision. Smart kids manage risk, and smart adults know the extent and degree of keeping an eye on their kids.

In the scheme of things, the internet isn't dangerous. Physically it does nothing at all other than facilitate information and conversation. Of course if you let your kids take photos and send them without permission it becomes a little riskier. If your kids seek attention from strangers then maybe it is because they can't talk to you about certain things, or they are from a home lacking a parent. As much attention should be paid to those who seek out inappropriate attention, as those who respond to it.

Meeting people you only know from the internet is risky, just as risky as pen pals once were i bet, just easier. Simple rules around never meeting people without someone else present, who is an adult, is key.

This issues comes up perenially, this time because a man was luring underage girls to talk about sex with him online. He of course is now paying a price for that, the law is strict and is in itself a deterrent. However, the internet for many kids is probably far less risky than Uncle Tom, or Cousin Jed, especially if you leave them alone, they are alcoholic, and you as parents spend large amounts of time partying, or being absent. Risks need to be in perspective. The bigger risk comes from meeting people you don't know who might abuse you. These people are often brought in by adults as friends, or partners.

However, all that gets the attention of law enforcement on the internet is not the result of adults. You see the truth is that censorship laws are producing some new perverse results - according to Wired thanks to camera phones and web cams, teenagers (they aren't children and not adults) are now being prosecuted for producing child pornography. Why? Because they take photos of themselves and send them on. In one ridiculous case a teenage couple have been prosecuted because they filmed themselves having sex, and sent it to no one.

The internet is presenting new challenges to parenting, it also means taking a realistic approach to what young people do. It is more an opportunity than a risk. It offers unparalleled access to information and entertainment. It makes it far easier for young people who feel isolated and alone to explore the world, and learn about themselves and others. In short it offers far more good than bad.

Children shouldn't be exploring the internet unsupervised, but as they get older they should be allowed more and more freedom. They will talk to friends online, they may make new ones, and yes, some will explore sexuality - like they have for time immemorial. Yes, they should be protected from being hurt and harmed by predatory adults, but given the rate of teenage pregnancy far too many are experimenting with each other in the riskiest way. Wouldn't many parents rather that their teenagers sat behind a computer looking at pictures and chatting to strangers they never meet, than went out partying, getting drunk, and risking getting pregnant (or someone pregnant) or catching something nasty?

Risk is all around, it is about life. The best gift any parent can give to their children is to nurture their ability to reason, balance risk with opportunity and make informed judgments, and to be monitored, and observed as they mature with that ability.

The internet is no different.