The last Parliament featured debate over several contentious Internet-related bills, notably streaming and news laws (Bills C-11 and C-18), online harms (Bill C-63) and Internet age verification and website blocking (Bill S-210). Bill S-210 fell below the radar screen for many months as it started in the Senate and received only cursory review in the House. The bill faced only a final vote in the House but it died with the election call. This week, the bill’s sponsor, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, wasted no time in bringing it back. Now Bill S-209, the bill starts from scratch in the Senate with the same basic framework but with some notable changes that address at least some of the concerns raised by the prior bill (a fulsome review of those concerns can be heard in a Law Bytes podcast I conducted with Senator Miville-Dechêne).
Not-for-profits and community groups which formerly had their own websites feel forced to move onto big social media platforms to avoid liability under the law.
The wrong types of content are being taken down.
“Age assurance” is applied widely to anything the slightest bit risky.
The list of websites that have shut down or started to geoblock the UK continues to grow.
There are constant reports of “age estimation” not working correctly — blocking people who should be allowed through and allowing those who shouldn’t.
People are angry about it, and have responded by resorting to VPNs and other such tools in unprecedented numbers.
Perhaps emboldened by all this success in protecting the children, the government is now threatening all-out war on general-purpose computing in the form of requiring that devices “supplied for use in the UK must have installed tamper-proof system software” to scan for CSAM.
But it’s only been a few months, I’m sure there’s much more to come.
Point 1 tells me who wanted this the most. Facebook is a fucking cesspit that I stopped looking at ages ago and seemed like people moving away from it. They are now becoming a hub again since people are forced into it.
And Zuckerberg is a reptile who guards his own privacy to impossible extremes while wanting to know every single tiny detail about us.
Number 1 is a big one. The overhead for checking all this will kill off all the small players on the internet. It will become a playground for only the large corporations and the internet will become a shell of its old self.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/eff-open-rights-group-big-brother-watch-and-index-censorship-call-uk-government
The age checkpoint results so far in the UK:
Not-for-profits and community groups which formerly had their own websites feel forced to move onto big social media platforms to avoid liability under the law.
The wrong types of content are being taken down.
“Age assurance” is applied widely to anything the slightest bit risky.
The list of websites that have shut down or started to geoblock the UK continues to grow.
There are constant reports of “age estimation” not working correctly — blocking people who should be allowed through and allowing those who shouldn’t.
People are angry about it, and have responded by resorting to VPNs and other such tools in unprecedented numbers.
Perhaps emboldened by all this success in protecting the children, the government is now threatening all-out war on general-purpose computing in the form of requiring that devices “supplied for use in the UK must have installed tamper-proof system software” to scan for CSAM.
But it’s only been a few months, I’m sure there’s much more to come.
Point 1 tells me who wanted this the most. Facebook is a fucking cesspit that I stopped looking at ages ago and seemed like people moving away from it. They are now becoming a hub again since people are forced into it.
And Zuckerberg is a reptile who guards his own privacy to impossible extremes while wanting to know every single tiny detail about us.
I’ll throw my phone in the goddamn lake first.
Be sure to smash it and apply a blowtorch to it first to render the SSD card and all electronics useless.
Number 1 is a big one. The overhead for checking all this will kill off all the small players on the internet. It will become a playground for only the large corporations and the internet will become a shell of its old self.