London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed (LFGSS) is an admirable online community of fixed-gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London. Sadly, this columnist does not qualify for membership: he doesn’t reside in (or near) the metropolis, and he requires a number of gears to tackle even the gentlest of inclines – and therefore admires harder cyclists who disdain the assistance of Sturmey- Archer or Campagnolo hardware.
There is, however, bad news on the horizon. After Sunday 16 March, LFGSS will be no more. Dee Kitchen, the software wizard (and cyclist) who is the core developer of Microcosm, a platform for running non-commercial, non-profit, privacy-sensitive, accessible online forums such as LFGSS, has announced that on that date they will “ delete the virtual servers hosting LFGSS and other communities, and effectively immediately end the approximately 300 small communities that I run, and the few large communities such as LFGSS”.
Why will Kitchen be doing this? Answer: they have read the statement published on 16 December by Ofcom, the regulator appointed by the government to implement the provisions of the Online Safety Act (OSA). It says: “Providers now have a duty to assess the risk of illegal harms on their services, with a deadline of 16 March 2025. Subject to the codes completing the parliamentary process, from 17 March 2025, providers will need to take the safety measures. set out in the codes or use other effective measures to protect users from illegal content and activity. We are ready to take enforcement action if providers do not act promptly to address the risks on their services.”
Hang on: isn’t the OSA just about protecting children and adults from harmful content, bullying, pornography, etc – not discussions about fixed-gear bikes, cancer support, dog-walking, rebuilding valve amplifiers and the like? Well, bizarre though it sounds, the answer seems to be no. The act requires services that handle user-generated content to have baseline content moderation practices, use those moderation practices to take down reported content that violates UK law, and stop kids from seeing porn. And it applies to every service which handles user-generated content and has “links to the UK”.
Kitchen believes that the online forums they host fall within the scope of the act and that they have “no way to dodge it” because they are based in the UK. “I can’t afford what is likely tens of thousand to go through all the legal and technical hoops here over a prolonged period of time … the site itself barely gets a few hundred in donations each month and costs a little more to run … this is not a venture that can afford compliance costs … and if we did, what remains is a disproportionately high personal liability for me, and one that could easily be weaponised by disgruntled people who are banned for their egregious behaviour.” Which is why they see no alternative to shuttering the platform.
Some people will think that Kitchen is overreacting, that common sense will prevail and that in due course legal precedents will emerge from court cases. But the OSA is a new statute – and one that had a tortuous evolution from a 2019 white paper on online harms and a chaotic passage through parliament at a time when the Tories were busy mismanaging the country. (One grizzled political insider described it to me as “a dog’s breakfast”.) In such circumstances, the costs of being an early test case would give anyone pause. I’ve been a blogger for decades and decided from the outset not to allow comments on my blog partly because I didn’t want the burden of moderating them, but also because I worried about the legal implications of what people might post. So in Kitchen’s place I would be inclined to do what they have decided to do.
Many years ago, I had an exchange at a Royal Society conference with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. I had just come from a conversation with a senior New Labor minister in which it had dawned on me that this man thinks that the web is the internet!and I told Tim about it. “It’s much worse than that,” he replied, “millions of people across the world think that. Facebook is the internet.”
The root of the problems with the OSA is that it was framed and enacted by legislators who think that the “internet” consists only of the platforms of a small number of huge tech corporations. So they passed a statute that supposedly would deal with these corporate miscreants – without imagining what the unintended consequences would be on the actual internet of people using the technology for genuinely social purposes. And in doing so they have inadvertently raised the question famously posed by Alexander Pope in 1735 in his letter to Dr Arbuthnot: “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?”
What I’ve been reading
English students in peril
Nathan Heller’s long, thoughtful New Yorker Essay on the flight from the humanities in American universities.
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Don’t delegate your life away
Really nuanced article by LM Sacasas on what we in the AI age can learn from the 20th-century cultural critic Lewis Mumford.
Musk, meet Ross Perot
Sharp piece by John Ganz on two techies who thought they understood politics.
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