If you’re in the United Kingdom, get ready to fight against your fellow citizens for access to Wikipedia.  Why?  Because quotas are coming.

What…quotas?

The British legal landscape that is going to force Wikipedia to introduce daily limits on how many people from the UK can access Wikipedia is a result of the Online Safety Act.

Wacky Laws

What is it about governments that makes them so perpetually inept in regulating the Internet?  Seems like every time they introduce a new bill, there’s a firestorm of controversy and they end up getting it wrong, like when your grandmother tries to explain how computers work.

The Online Safety Act introduces a number of big changes.  The one that has some people reaching for their pitchforks is the requirement to allow the government to snoop on communications – the infamous encryption back door.  But it’s the “duty of care” provisions that Wikipedia is concerned about.

Duty of Care

“Duty of Care” is a common legal notion which means the responsibility of a person or organization to avoid doing things that could reasonably be foreseen to cause harm to others.  For example, a pharmacist has a duty of care to dispense the correct medication.  If I go the pharmacy and they give me the wrong pills and I get sick, the pharmacy has breached their duty of care.

The Online Safety Act expands “duty of care” for Internet organizations.  It requires them to protect users from illegal content and content harmful to children.  Internet sites and particularly social media networks are not just common carriers providing a platform.  Now they have a responsibility to protect all users from things like CSM.

Quotas

The OSA sets up various tiers for sites.  Your blog which gets 5 visitors a month has a different responsibility than Facebook.  The “tier one” sites like Instagram and YouTube are faced with onerous requirements to certify that users are safe.  If they don’t get it right, they face fines up to £18 million or 10% of annual revenue.  Hundreds of sites and small forums have firewalled off the UK to protect themselves.

Wikipedia, because of its massive user base, easily qualifies as a tier one site.  The threshold is 7 million users.  So the obvious strategy is…get under 7 million users.

Which leads to quotas.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.