Tech will quit Britain over online safety crackdown, warn Musk and Google
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/16/tech-quit-britain-online-safety-act-warn-musk-google/
Posted by vriska1
Tech will quit Britain over online safety crackdown, warn Musk and Google
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/16/tech-quit-britain-online-safety-act-warn-musk-google/
Posted by vriska1
28 Comments
> Tech will quit Britain over online safety crackdown, warn Musk
Ok Hitler, thanks for your concern.
Tech employs plenty of British people. If it quits Britain (and also Europe which will have similar regulations) then that’s more space for all those people to start interesting startups instead of working for US companies.
Look at all these massive companies, Google, X and Uber concerned that the competition will avoid the UK. How thoughtful of them!
More online panic mongering from the Daily Telegraph, Trump and Putin’s stooge in the UK press.
Oh please leave Musk. We dont want you here anyway
No they won’t. The money they make here is far greater than the inconvenience they would have over this.
Also: Dear Elon, Shut the fuck up you Nazi cunt. Love the UK
Wow.. now the UK is getting threatened by the tech bros..
How about Stramer joins the EU and slaps a higher digital services tax on all U.S tech that makes huge profit out of their citizens.
I wasn’t before, but if Elon is threatening to leave then I’m all for it
UK is gaining on china for cracking down on the internet.
The UK has no tech infrastructure due to the electricity being some of the most expensive in the world.
This is the point where they’d normally point out the loss in taxation.
If there was one.
Musk is just upset that [DeepMind](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind), a British startup, is at the vanguard of computational neuroscience – and much else that’s AI-related – and shows no sign of faltering. Unlike his [barbaric](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/05/neuralink-animal-testing-elon-musk-investigation?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other) animal experiments, which apparently aim to create a wireless connection between brains & computers. [RIP](https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/) those poor monkeys.
The comments here so far are crazy. The Online Safety Act is a terrible, extremely authoritarian idea that will take away people’s freedom’s and right to privacy.
Just because someone you don’t like said something, doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Oh no!
Anyway.
Also, another telegraph article? Someone is definitely being paid to post these.
I don’t understand why people think that the government would be any better at regulating content on social media websites than the tech giants themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that tech giants are beyond reproach, far from it, but let’s not forget that the government isn’t trustworthy in the digital space.
The UK government recently demanded that Apple provide them with a ‘backdoor’ to the encryption on their cloud service. Not only did they do so, they attempted to put a gag on Apple even raising the alarm about what they asked them to do. Why the fuck should I trust the government to regulate anything on the digital space? These people are completely untrustworthy themselves.
Well, if *anyone* can recognise when a situation is about to go tits up, it’s The Telegraph.
Right, guys…?
websites based outside the uk can just ignore the laws, uk laws dont apply outside the uk
Everyone here right now. Stop concentrating on Elon Musk and start concentrating on the online safety bill. This bill is going to be far far worse than anything the Republicans are doing to the internet in America right now. It could get to the stage that all forms of Internet communication may be cut off so as a result, we may not be even able to use Reddit.
I thought “x” had already quit the uk and was operating out of Eire.
Fuck Google, fuck Musk, fuck the tech bros
But also fuck the online safety bill. Abhorrent legislation.
“Sometimes, things I say will be wrong.” – Elon Musk.
As a FinTech employee, I’m pretty worried about this reform.
If people have to sign up just to view our website, it will massively hurt our business. We employ approx 800 people.
The issue is the government wanting backdoor access that breaks encryption. There’s no such thing as a safe back door. There’s a back door and it’s a vulnerability, it’s an unworkable disaster of a piece of legislation. It was doomed to fail from the outset but they pushed ahead regardless even when advised it was nonsense.
As expected, everyone using the fact that its *Elon Musk* thats against it to justify it, when in reality its a completely draconian and authoritarian bill designed to give the Government control of the entire internet……
If you ever thought Right Wingers were thick for thinking Farage is the solution, Left Wingers are just as thick for voting for *objectively* bad things because “the wrong people” dont want it
Can we have a third option? Scrap the Online Safety Act and get rid of X. That’s the perfect solution.
The UKs push for “Online Safety” is akin to Americas “Patriot Act” post 9/11.
Just a whole lot of SAFETY/PROTECTION hyperbole being used to hide a huge power grab and overreach to hoover up millions of people’s deeply personal data.
Much like the Patriot Act – can’t say no, or your not an American patriot, terrorists!
Can’t say no to “Online Safety” – it’s protecting children from pedophiles!
So many people in these comments completely out of depth with how bad this bill will be. Our rights are been stripped and been told it will make us safer. You trust this government with your encryption would you also trust reform? Let’s say you trust both but how about an enemy state? Because that’s exactly who will be fighting for access to this information too
As someone who runs a small website with user to user communication and lives in the UK, I’ve had the particular misfortune of trying to deal with the OSA.
The costs OFCOM suggest that are required to make a site compliant run in to the hundreds of thousands. (And they’re undercooking the costs). My website gets roughly 40 quid a month in donations. So yeah.
I am just as liable as Meta or X in terms of what my obligations are and what I have to do (well, there are some changes, but mostly just as liable).
I have decided to just make my life easier and geoblock UK ip addresses. Anyone who is savvy enough will get around it fairly simply. But OFCOM have proven their technical incompetence so of course this isn’t mentioned at all.
It’s a shame this involves Musk, but you’re about to see a whole load of websites who actually care about their users stop providing services to the UK. The sites left will be the ones big enough to pay teams of lawyers, or those that don’t care about their users and keeping them safe.
I have lots more to say on this, but it gets a bit ranty. Safe to say the UK is heading towards implementing something like Chinas great firewall and destroying privacy online, under the guise of children’s safety.
I despise Musk, but he’s right.
This bill is ridiculous and will completely decimate the ability for UK citizens to interact online. If it’s a small UK based forum, they’re going to just shut down because they can’t afford to put the necessary measures in place so that they don’t get fined stupid amounts of money.
If it’s not a small company (such as Reddit) they’ll need to either pull out of the UK entirely, implement proper verified age restrictions (using government ID) or remove absolutely all even slightly NSFW content. Which one do you think they’ll do? I’ll give you a hint, turning off access to a region is really cheap.
Every single expert in the tech space has called out this bill for what it is – authoritarian and overreaching. It doesn’t seem to have been slowed down.