The Online Safety Act doesn’t apply any new taxes on anyone. It forces service providers (IE: Private Companies) to institute age checks through either AI Face checks or ID either through an in house solution or buying services from a third party (YOTI or similar). It imposes a cost on a business where they have to either spend money setting up an age verification solution or acquire one from a private company. The government doesn’t impose any new taxes on people on businesses with this bill, but instead makes companies who run services give money to other companies to comply with the law.
In short, the censorship isn’t being done directly by the state, it’s being done by private companies under pain of massive fines by the state. Other than suing websites or dealing with court challenges (which is done in house), all the actual legwork is being done by private companies, some of whom, like YOTI, are making handsome amounts of cash.
State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it’s s state mandated cost aka tax.
Just because it’s a state mandated cost doesn’t mean it’s a tax. Tax implies the money goes to the government to pay for goods and services. It’s actually worse than that: it’s a levy.
A levy doesn’t go to the government. A levy goes to whatever person provides the good or service. For example: if I tax alcohol based on alcohol content, the amount of money added to the tax goes to the government. If I place a levy based on alcohol content, the amount of money that is added goes to the person/company selling the booze. An example of a levy is the plastic bag levy, which was put in place to reduce plastic pollution. That money you spend on a bag doesn’t go to the government, it goes to the people you got the bag from, and they can do whatever they want with it, keep it, give it to charity, use it to buy Heroin on the deep web, you name it!
What this law has effectively done has made service providers (not just companies, but whoever runs the site) a choice: They can either develop their own age verification system or pay a company (like YOTI) to do it for them. Most service providers do the latter because they do not have the resources to do the latter.
Does the money go to the government? No (except maybe under the table nudge nudge wink wink), it goes straight to the company. What the government has done is force entities to give a private company money.
It’s a tax in the way, let’s say, a hypothetical Right-Libertarian government might tax you, or even an American Homeowners Association might “tax” you: making you give a private company money.
A burden on the population. No amount of dirty politics changes the fact. Taxes do not all get directly paid to gavernment. Like sales taxes, service tips ect.
The population being the people who run self hosted forums with a certain amount of British users. If you are one of those people, yeah, I’m sorry, I hate it too, but the vast majority of the UK don’t run forums with a large amount of British users. Fun fact, the End users (the people giving away their IDs) aren’t actually paying shit to anyone bar their IDs.
Taxes do not all get directly paid to gavernment. Like sales taxes, service tips ect.
VAT (what you call “sales tax”) does go to the Treasury. Like when you buy something, that 20% extra you paid goes off to the government via the Taxes the shop pays. That’s how VAT works.
Services tips aren’t really a thing in the UK, especially not mandatory ones because food service workers in the UK aren’t exempt from the minimum wage.
Are you even from the UK? Are you even in the UK? Because if you were from here, or even if you spent any amount of time here, you would’ve known the following things:
The United Kingdom doesn’t have Federal Taxes because we’re not a Federal country. Again, we’re a Unitary Country with Devolution.
We don’t use the term “Sales Tax”, we use the term VAT (Value Added Tax). That’s not some special technical term, VAT is common parlance.
Service tips are not compulsory nor expected in any way, shape or form because food service workers in the UK are paid minimum wage with no exceptions. Most places here don’t even have the option to give a tip.
Considering these things, I think you’re American. In that case, please, do us a favour, don’t act like you’re a fucking expert on this. I live in the UK, Scotland to be precise. Shit’s bad, The OSA can get tae fuck, but having Yanks who watched videos made by other yanks who don’t know shit about fuck on the ground lecture me about my own fucking country as if it’s just “America with funny accents” not only doesn’t help, it’s just spreading bullshit.
The Online Safety Act doesn’t apply any new taxes on anyone. It forces service providers (IE: Private Companies) to institute age checks through either AI Face checks or ID either through an in house solution or buying services from a third party (YOTI or similar). It imposes a cost on a business where they have to either spend money setting up an age verification solution or acquire one from a private company. The government doesn’t impose any new taxes on people on businesses with this bill, but instead makes companies who run services give money to other companies to comply with the law.
In short, the censorship isn’t being done directly by the state, it’s being done by private companies under pain of massive fines by the state. Other than suing websites or dealing with court challenges (which is done in house), all the actual legwork is being done by private companies, some of whom, like YOTI, are making handsome amounts of cash.
Read my post, you really didn’t read it.
I’ll spell it out.
State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it’s s state mandated cost aka tax.
Just because it’s a state mandated cost doesn’t mean it’s a tax. Tax implies the money goes to the government to pay for goods and services. It’s actually worse than that: it’s a levy.
A levy doesn’t go to the government. A levy goes to whatever person provides the good or service. For example: if I tax alcohol based on alcohol content, the amount of money added to the tax goes to the government. If I place a levy based on alcohol content, the amount of money that is added goes to the person/company selling the booze. An example of a levy is the plastic bag levy, which was put in place to reduce plastic pollution. That money you spend on a bag doesn’t go to the government, it goes to the people you got the bag from, and they can do whatever they want with it, keep it, give it to charity, use it to buy Heroin on the deep web, you name it!
What this law has effectively done has made service providers (not just companies, but whoever runs the site) a choice: They can either develop their own age verification system or pay a company (like YOTI) to do it for them. Most service providers do the latter because they do not have the resources to do the latter.
Does the money go to the government? No (except maybe under the table nudge nudge wink wink), it goes straight to the company. What the government has done is force entities to give a private company money.
It’s a tax in the way, let’s say, a hypothetical Right-Libertarian government might tax you, or even an American Homeowners Association might “tax” you: making you give a private company money.
Levy, lol.
Call it what it is: a tax.
A burden on the population. No amount of dirty politics changes the fact. Taxes do not all get directly paid to gavernment. Like sales taxes, service tips ect.
Edit wrote another post, more depth.
The population being the people who run self hosted forums with a certain amount of British users. If you are one of those people, yeah, I’m sorry, I hate it too, but the vast majority of the UK don’t run forums with a large amount of British users. Fun fact, the End users (the people giving away their IDs) aren’t actually paying shit to anyone bar their IDs.
VAT (what you call “sales tax”) does go to the Treasury. Like when you buy something, that 20% extra you paid goes off to the government via the Taxes the shop pays. That’s how VAT works.
Services tips aren’t really a thing in the UK, especially not mandatory ones because food service workers in the UK aren’t exempt from the minimum wage.
Are you even from the UK? Are you even in the UK? Because if you were from here, or even if you spent any amount of time here, you would’ve known the following things:
Considering these things, I think you’re American. In that case, please, do us a favour, don’t act like you’re a fucking expert on this. I live in the UK, Scotland to be precise. Shit’s bad, The OSA can get tae fuck, but having Yanks who watched videos made by other yanks who don’t know shit about fuck on the ground lecture me about my own fucking country as if it’s just “America with funny accents” not only doesn’t help, it’s just spreading bullshit.