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I would love to hear how do they pretend to enforce it. What are they gonna do? Force the vpn companies to ID users? Are they going to scan all internet traffic searching for vpn traffic?
No, really, I am curious about now they will try to apply this because I'm not sure they have thought this even minimally.
I’m not sure they have thought this even minimally
If they had, I would think these laws would not exist in the first place.
The age verification companies go into more detail on their website but the tl;dr is they want any website with age checks to compare the user's IP address to publicly known lists of VPN IPs, look for hints such as time of day for if the user is UK based, and then force the user to either prove their age or prove that they live outside the UK.
Which is insane of course. It's already a bad law as it stands, but if they get their way then even people living outside of the UK would be forced to provide their location to every social media platform they use if a websites automated system believes them to be connecting via a VPN.
I can't imagine it being very enforcable since Netflix have tried for years to block VPN users with very mixed results & as for geolocation it should be fairly straightforward to spoof that. But these companies get paid by each verification so even if it only shifts another 20% off of VPNs and onto handing over their ID it's still more profit for them.
Do the VPN companies want to make money (credit card payments)?
Then they have to comply with local laws or risk being cut off from payment processors.
There are certainly ways around that (crypto), but a mich smaller percentage of their users will be willing to deal with that.
Force the vpn companies to ID users?
Yes, obviously. They will say that the VPN providers themselves are subject to the Online Safety Act because they indirectly provide websites that show porn and let you chat to adults. Therefore the VPN providers must do age checks themselves. If they don't, they can't offer services in the UK (as with any other website).
It's shit, but they can do it if they want to. I predict they will, because currently you can trivially bypass the OSA with a free Proton VPN account and zero effort.
We need the original act revoked.