Making Britain “the safest place to be online” by putting all Britons in a cage… this is not a positive message about our country, and UK Civil Society is complicit
Civil society across the world has spent so much time on the techlash for the past 10 years — literally working to convince people that we are all powerless victims at the mercy of big technology companies — that we all appear to have forgotten we are individuals with agency and that circumventing censorship is simply an exercise in running your own software and sharing it with your less-nerdy mates.
Lacking anyone to teach them different — of course — the governments have followed this line of “techlash” thinking and decided that all they have to do is “screw the billionaires to the wall” in order to achieve dominance and mastery of the internet; some of us know that they are wrong, but everything that Civil Society is saying at the moment (e.g. “we should make the OSA better!”) reinforces the government worldview that “the internet is a bunch of services run by corporations”.
There are two potential trajectories open to the UK at the moment: the government is either going to have to lose face, or else they are going to have to crack down on access to apps and to open source software in order to deliver their supposed child-safety goals.
Which do you think they are going to prefer?
Imagine that the UK Government declares war on VPNs and/or projects like Tor: the next step will be for Ofcom will be to seek funding to become “The VPN regulator” who will determine whether a VPN is legitimate or illegitimate. This builds all of brand, power and empire for Ofcom.
And then we all go around again, and we shall build Beijing in England’s green and pleasant land.
I was asked re: what VPN would I recommend:
https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1950514658030375294