> The Wikimedia Foundation shares the UK government’s commitment to promoting online environments where everyone can safely participate. The organization is not bringing a general challenge to the OSA as a whole, nor to the existence of the Category 1 duties themselves. Rather, the legal challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.
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I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did their conscience go?
Aaron Swartz is no longer with us.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Opposition_to_the...
This new multi-media technology was going to give everyone on the planet access to a complete free university education, thousands of books, and would prevent the likes of Chinese state-run media suppressing knowledge about Tienanmen Square.
And after they receive this marvellous free education, all the communists and nazis and religious nutjobs will realise they were wrong and we were right. We won't need any censorship though, in our enlightenment-style marketplace of ideas, rational argument is all that's needed to send bad ideas packing, and the educated audience will have no trouble seeing through fallacies and trickery.
Also the greater education will mean everyone can get better jobs and make more money, and with this trade with China we're just ramping up they'll see our brilliant democratic system, and peacefully adopt it. The recently fallen Soviet Union is of course going to do the same, and it's going to go really well. We'll all live happily ever after.
This Bill Clinton chap has a federal budget surplus, now we're not spending all that money on the cold war, so we'll get that national debt paid off in no time too.
You may be able to figure out why this particular brand of optimism isn't so fashionable these days.
Also, I think tech optimists might have a tendency to ignore how slow changes actually happen (thinking of how many times we got promised self driving cars or fusion).
My impression is that the covid pandemic had a huge psychological impact on everybody which resulted in anger and fear surfacing at all levels, with bad implications (emotion based decision making, aggressiveness, conflict). No clue if this is real or if it is how it will play out on the long term...
plus the media and public sphere dysfunction we see through the fact that we haven't seen any new celebrities or public intellectuals elected in the past 10 years, telling people ideas don't get you anywhere.
This will only get worse as we are at the end of progression of this culture and cultural consensus has split between educated legacy media and uneducated young new media which develops its own often incorrect assumptions about the world- like about mental illness assumptions. It's cultural ouroboros- we're destroying parts of ourselves because they've grown too different. We need a new way forward and a new culture of contentment that champions the human.
If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening.
Maybe I'm a bit dramatic here, but the subtext I seem to get is that "legacy media is dying out and we're not going to cede power easily. Even if we burn the country down with us."
There's no graceful transfer to the next generation like usual (or perhaps, there never was a graceful transfer to begin with). It has this apocalyptic feeling where the old guard wants to do any and everything they want and don't care what happens after they are gone. Not every boomer, but it's the generation with those people in power.
I absolutely abhor the "Kids these days" sort of argument, but it does seem the case that we lowered the barrier of entry sufficiently in the tech sector that people who simply dont give a shit, or actively want to harm our values, now outnumber us greatly.
What has happened previously was we would rally around corporations and institutions that would generally work in our best interests. But the people driving those social goods in those entities are now the villains.
Not to mention all the mergers and acquisitions.
In Australia, during the internet filter debate, we had both a not for profit entity spending money on advertising, but also decently sized ISP's like iiNet working publicly against the problem. The not for profit was funded by industry, something that never happened again. And iiNet is now owned by TPG who also used to have a social conscience but have been hammered into the dust by the (completely non technical, and completely asinine bane of the internets existence and literal satan) ACCC and have no fight left in them for anything. When Teoh leaves or sells TPG, it will probably never fight a good fight ever again.
Its the same everywhere. We cant expect people to fight for freedom when the legislation just gets renamed and relaunched again after the next crisis comes out in the media. We lost internet filtration after christchurch, for absolutely no justifiable reason. And we lost the Access and Assistance fight despite having half the global tech industry tell our government to suck eggs.
The only real solution is to prep the next generation to fight back as best as possible, to help them ignore the doomsayers and help the right humans into the right places to deal with this shit.
I don't think it's a matter of number but activity. There are numerous ways that entities with no morals can make huge amounts of money by exploiting people online (via weaknesses in human psychology adapted for hunting on a savannah), both children and adults. It's hard to make money doing the opposite.
1. They lost this legal challenge, so perhaps their UK lawyers (barristers?) knew that much broader claim would be even less likely to work and advised them against it. Just because they didn't challenge the overall law in court doesn't mean they wouldn't challenge it in a political sense.
2. The Protests against SOPA and PIPA[1] were in response to overreach by capitalists, and as such drew support from many capitalists with opposing interests (e.g. Google, Craigslist, Flickr, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Wordpress, etc.). Certainly Reddit et al have similar general concerns with having to implement ID systems as they did about policing content for IP violations, but the biggest impact will be on minors, which AFAIK are far from the most popular advertising demo. Certainly some adult users will be put off by the hassle and/or insult, but how many, and for how long?
3. Wikimedia is a US-based organization, and the two major organizers of the 2012 protests--Fight for the Future[2] and the Electronic Frontier Foundation[3]--are US-focused as well. The EFF does have a blog post about these UK laws, but AFAICT no history of bringing legal and/or protest action there. This dovetails nicely with the previous point, while we're at it: the US spends $300B on digital ads every year, whereas the UK only spends $40B[4]. The per-capita spends are closer ($870/p v. $567/p), but the fact remains: the US is the lifeblood of these companies in a way that the UK is not.
4. More fundamentally, I strongly suspect that "big business is trying to ruin the internet by hoarding their property" is an easier sell for the average voter than "big government is trying to ruin the internet by protecting children from adult content". We can call it fascism all we like, but at the end of the day, people do seem concerned about children accessing adult content. IMHO YouTube brainrot content farms are a much bigger threat to children than porn, but I'm not a parent.
The final point is perhaps weakened by the ongoing AI debates, where there's suddenly a ton of support for the "we're protecting artists!" arguments employed in 2012. Still, I think the general shape of things is clear: Wikimedia stood in solidarity with many others in 2012, and now stands relatively alone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA
[2] https://www.fightforthefuture.org/
[3] https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-cases
[4] https://www.salehoo.com/learn/digital-ad-spend-by-country
That's my point, though. This is the perfect opportunity to do so, and they aren't doing it. Instead, they are picking the smallest possible battle they can. That decision alone makes waves.
> Certainly Reddit et al have similar general concerns with having to implement ID systems as they did about policing content for IP violations, but the biggest impact will be on minors.
That's ridiculous. ID systems endanger everyone, particularly the adults who participate. This issue isn't isolated from capitalism. These ID systems must be implemented and managed by corporations, whose greatest incentive is to collect and monetize data.
> We can call it fascism all we like, but at the end of the day, people do seem concerned about children accessing adult content.
The think-of-the-children argument is the oldest trick in the book. You are seriously asking me to take it at face value? No thank you.
> More fundamentally, I strongly suspect that "big business is trying to ruin the internet by hoarding their property" is an easier sell for the average voter than "big government is trying to ruin the internet by protecting children from adult content".
If people really are blind to the change that has happened right in front of them, then we should be spelling it out at every opportunity. This is my biggest concern with how Wikimedia is behaving: they are in a significant position politically, and are abdicating this crucial responsibility.
Executive acts, on the other hand, can be annulled or overturned reasonably straightforwardly, and this includes the regulations that flesh out the details of Acts of Parliament (which are executive instruments even when they need Parliamentary approval).
In short, judicial review is a practical remedy for a particular decision. "These regulations may unreasonably burden my speech" is potentially justiciable. "This Act could be used to do grave evil" isn't. If an act can be implemented in a Convention compatible way then the courts will assume it will until shown otherwise.
The consequences can look something like the report of this judgement. Yes, it looks like the regulations could harm Wikipedia in ways that might not be Convention compatible. But because interpretation and enforcement is in the hands of Ofcom, it's not yet clear. If they are, Wikipedia have been (essentially) invited to come back. But the regulations are not void ab inito.
This is the perfect opportunity to do so, and they aren't doing it. Instead, they are picking the smallest possible battle they can.
More recently, they've proposed the "Wikipedia test" to the public and to lawmakers (such as at the 2024 UN General Assembly[6]) that pretty clearly implicates this bill. The test reads as such: Before passing regulations, legislators should ask themselves whether their proposed laws would make it easier or harder for people to read, contribute to, and/or trust a project like Wikipedia.
That's ridiculous. ID systems endanger everyone, particularly the adults who participate.
The think-of-the-children argument is the oldest trick in the book. You are seriously asking me to take it at face value? No thank you.
This is my biggest concern with how Wikimedia is behaving: they are in a significant position politically, and are abdicating this crucial responsibility.
The real nuclear option--blocking the UK from accessing Wikimedia sites--would certainly garner some attention, but it would cost them greatly in terms of good will, energy, and raw output from their (presumably quite significant) UK editor base. And when would it end? If the UK government chooses to ignore them, wouldn't it feel weird for Wikipedia to be blocked for years in the UK but remain accessible in brutal autocracies worldwide?
In the end, this feels like a job for UK voters, not international encyclopedias. I appreciate the solidarity they've shown already, but implying that they are weak for "abdicating [their] crucial responsibility" seems like a step too far.
...IMHO. As a wikimedia glazer ;)
[1] March 2022: https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/early-impressions-of-the...
[2] November 2022: https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/deep-dive-the-united-kin...
[3] May 2023: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/05/11/good-intentions-bad-ef...
[4] June 2023: https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/p...
[5] September 2023: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/09/19/wikimedia-fo...
[6] September 2024 & June 2025: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/06/27/the-wikipedi... // https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/06/27/the-wikipedi...
Anyone expecting sanity from the UK on this topic is being somewhat optimistic.
To reiterate - this is not about protecting kids. If it was about protecting kids it would be trivial to set up a blacklist of the most popular porn sites that need ID as a first step, and worry about other sites - like Wikipedia - later.
This is about setting up a mechanism for mass surveillance of future dissent.
The "think of the kids" argument is a Trojan horse - a standard and predictable populist appeal to protective emotions.
My point is that it is not a strong argument. It isn't an argument at all! Instead, "think of the children" is a thoughtless appeal to emotion. The irony is that my position comes from actually thinking of the children. Censorship does not help children at all. Instead, it degrades well moderated platforms, which incentivizes children into interacting with poorly moderated platforms.
> I just don't see them as being in that significant of a position.
That's incredible to me. What website could possibly be more important to laypeople? Maybe YouTube or Facebook, I suppose, but neither of those could begin to replace Wikipedia.
> The real nuclear option--blocking the UK from accessing Wikimedia sites--would certainly garner some attention.
That's an understatement. Everyone would notice. Even more interestingly, it would illustrate to everyone the absurdity of internet censorship: everyone would immediately learn a workaround, because it's impossible to actually censor the internet.