The UK's Online Safety Act requires operators of "user to user services" to read through hundreds (if not thousands) of pages of documentation to attempt to craft "meaningful" risk assessments and 'child access assessments' or face £18,000,000 fines, even imprisonment.
Additionally if your website or platform has content not meant for children but children might want to view it then it is a requirement to gather ID or otherwise age verify ALL visitors who might be children from the UK
For large websites and platforms with compliance teams and lawyers this won't be much a problem. But for small Mastodon instances, blogs, wikis and any other community/hobby project it is a HUGE undertaking with a potentially quite scary downside for failing to get it right.
Luckily OFCOM (the UK Government department responsible for 'enforcement' of these new rules) have confirmed that blocking people in the UK from accessing your website is a perfectly legal and acceptable way to comply with the law.
| Technology | Link to HowTo |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Link |
| Fast.ly | Link |
| HAProxy | Link |
| Nginx | Link |
| IPTables | Link |
| Wordpress | Link |
| Wix | Link |
| AWS Cloudfront | Link |
For a more informed take on the obligations on user-to-user providers as well as the enforcement powers OFCOM has please check the volunteer crafted https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/ which has templates, examples and informed opinions (not legal advice).
When your favorite website blocks the UK (or OFCOM uses its "Business Disruption" powers to order UK ISPs to block the website) you may wonder how to access it.
We recommend using Tor by way of the Tor Browser; https://www.torproject.org/download/.
Better still encourage your favorite websites to deploy a .onion version of their website ahead of time!
Many people have suggested that VPNs get mentioned in this section and indeed a VPN will allow you to tunnel your traffic to a different jurisdiction. Choosing a VPN provider is a complicated task, some 'comparison' sites are run by the VPN companies themselves.
The EFF have a good article on choosing a VPN that's right for you.