A few years ago I wrote a letter to my then MP Tulip Siddiq, with regard to the Online Safety bill.

This bill has now become the Online Safety Act and the regulator, Ofcom is preparing the rules and regulations around this.

What I then was worrying about, now all seems to come through. So I wrote the following letter to my new MP Georgia Gould.

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Dear Georgia Gould MP,

I wanted to write to you as my MP regarding the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA), which was passed under the previous government with wide support from Labour.

Although it was always touted as promoting online safety, targeting the large social media companies, it is currently already having serious unintended consequences.

Because it is not just the larger social media companies that are in scope, but it also affects community forums, discussion groups about issues in Open Source software, and small independent sites. In most cases, these are not commercial entities making money from stirring up controversies, which is what in my opinion the OSA should have focussed on.

Each platform that has some relation with user-to-user to content is in scope, and the operators needs to a complicated risk assessment. Although Ofcon is now coming out with some help 1, and they talk about "proportionality", I would argue that many of these requirements are not proportional at all.

Personally, I would, need to do a risk assessment for several "services" (that I have identified so far), none of which are commercial—there are not even ads, algorithms, or tracking:

• The comments for my low-traffic blog (https://derickrethans.nl), as users can reply to comments by other users, and potentially add links to photos, even though all comments are pre-moderated.

• The issue tracker for one of my Open Source projects (https://bugs.xdebug.org). I self-host this, but users can submit bug reports, with screenshots showing where something went wrong.

• The web-based interfaces to the discussion groups of a large Open Source language project (PHP) (https://news-web.php.net/). This is a language used by upwards of 50% of the web. The groups are for discussing technical details of the language, but as it is user-to-user and not just e-mail, it is in scope.

• I help run a Mastodon server for the community of users for this language (https://phpc.social) as well, which is also clearly in scope.

• A small website that I, and a few other users, use for storing and sharing notes on whiskies we have tried (https://dram.io).

If I do any of these assessments wrong, or neglect to do, I would be liable, perhaps with severe penalties. Some of those deal with images, others with alcohol (so 18 and up). But none of them are probably high risk. But I still have to this. And these 5 are just examples that affect me. And nothing would stop malicious entities from making spurious complaints or uploads to get me in trouble.

But it goes further, resources and communities grown over decades will be gone because the consequences of enforcement under the OSA are so draconian that anyone rightly concerned about their users and the law isn't going to take the risk of that liability 2.

Ironically those who don't care about their users or UK law will just ignore it and likely be beyond prosecution/enforcement anyway, while those who do genuinely care about the actual safety would find it really hard and costly.

The worst about this is this will do is the opposite of the intentions of the OSA, and consolidate power in the large companies, as small independent operators shut their services down.

This is pretty much exactly the opposite of what we need right now.

We need diversity of online communities and opportunities for people to create safe online spaces that are not subject to the whims of someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.

As a matter of fact, there is already a list being compiled of services that have decided to shut down, or block access to users from UK locations: https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/ — I expect that list to grow drastically over the next few months.

I hope you can urge the UK government to amend things and clarify the position for small operators (some of which that have been part of the internet since the earliest days), so the UK doesn't lose all the small, independent, curated online communities, nor small independent non-UK companies blocking access for UK users.

With kind regards, Derick Rethans

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Please write to your own MP if you share similar concerns, and feel free to copy parts of this letter and adapt them to your own examples. You can find out how to contact your elected officals on WriteToThem.