> There's no forms that need to be completed.
One of us has completely misunderstood the legislation.
By my reading - there's a ton of red tape and paperwork. Heck, there's a ton of work even getting to the point of understanding what work you need to do. And dismissing the fear of life-changing financial liability as "being spooked" is not helpful.
I've got a open-source 3D sharing site almost ready to launch and I'm considering geo-blocking the UK. And I live in the UK.
> By my reading - there's a ton of red tape and paperwork.
It might help if you referenced the section what defines those requirements.
I don’t recall seeing anything that required such red tape unless there was special circumstances after the fact (for example, reporting child porn that was uploaded to your site, or responding to a police or court order).
But these kinds of rules exist for freedom of information et al too.
Maybe I’ve missed something though?
> Heck, there's a ton of work even getting to the point of understanding what work you need to do.
That is a fair point.
Unfortunately it’s also not novel to this legislation. Running any site that allows for public contributions opens one’s self to lots of different laws from lots of different countries. For some counties in the EU, Nazi content is illegal. Different countries have different rules around copyright. Then there’s laws around data protection, consent, and so on and so forth.
This law certainly doesn’t make things any easier but there has been a requirement to understand this stuff for decades already. So it’s a bit of a stretch to say this one new law suddenly makes a burden to run a site insurmountable.
However I do agree with your more general point that it’s getting very hard to navigate all of these local laws at scale.
> And dismissing the fear of life-changing financial liability as "being spooked" is not helpful.
It’s an unfounded fear though, so my language is fair. You’d use the same language about any other unfounded fear.
This is the crux of the point. People are scared, and I get why. But it’s completely unfounded. If people still want to discriminate against UK IPs then that’s their choice as they have to weigh up the risks as they perceive them. But it doesn’t mean it’s any likelier to happen than, for example, being in a plane crash (to cite another fear people overcome daily).
———
That all said, maybe everyone blocking UK IPs could be a good thing. If everyone shows they don’t consider it safe to operate in the UK then our government might consider revoking this stupid law.
In principle you need to have records of your risk assessment(s) and you need to have good T&Cs (like for GDPR, etc). But that's about it for red tape.
Templates have popped up to help with both.