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PayPalThe fightback against regulations to lock down the internet in the UK is heating up, with multiple big groups joining together with a firm statement.
An open letter has been sent to UK policymakers urging them to fight the actual causes of online harm, rather than repeatedly taking steps to lock down the internet and force us all to verify our ID just to do basic things. Which increases tracking, creates more places for private data to leak and a whole host of other problems. In terms of gaming, it can be a big problem for preservation too for any game that has online features.
The groups / companies who came together to sign the statement include:
- Big Brother Watch
- Defend Digital Me
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- ExpressVPN
- Gamers Voice
- Global Partners Digital
- Index on Censorship
- Internet Society
- IPVanish
- Mozilla
- Mullvad VPN
- NO2ID
- Open Rights Group
- Privacymatters
- Proton
- Stop Killing Games
- Tor Project
- Tuta
- VPN Trust Initiative
The full statement:
Joint Statement: UK policymakers must prioritise addressing the roots of online harm, not undermining the open web
The open Internet is a global public resource that has long since become foundational to the flourishing of individuals, businesses, and societies. Digital technologies and the open web allow us to foster connections, access educational resources, express ourselves, and work together to build a better society. The open web is also an engine for economic growth, innovation and creativity: anyone can build successful services and products, and reach people across the globe. At the core of this openness lie open standards, shared protocols, and interoperability across borders as the default.
This openness and the opportunities it affords are coming under threat in the UK. In attempting to respond to tough questions around online harms, UK policymakers are currently pursuing blunt policy interventions like access bans that will do little to improve young people’s experiences online, and instead undermine the web and infringe on human rights.
Now that the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill has passed, ministers are consulting on which platforms and specific features should be placed behind age gates as part of a national consultation on online harms. This approach focuses on restricting young people’s access, rather than ensuring services are designed to uphold their rights and interests by default. Crucially, even targeted age restrictions of specific features could mean that all users are required to complete intrusive age assurance processes to retain full access. Restrictions under consultation include curfews for young users and wider restrictions on children’s access to online services, with implications across internet services from video games, VPNs to even static websites. Implementing such access restrictions hinges on all users having to verify their ages, not just young people, and places the burden on providers to comply in ways they consider appropriate.
As the UK’s experiences with age assurance under the Online Safety Act have shown, deploying age assurance technologies at scale comes with significant trade-offs: Existing age assurance technologies are either insufficiently accurate, undermine privacy and data security, or are not widely available across populations. Beyond concerns related to age assurance technologies themselves, mandating their implementation across an ever-expanding list of core internet services undermines the decentralised nature of the web, its accessibility and creates serious new security threats. Specifically, age assurance mandates risk cementing the dominance of gatekeeper app stores, operating systems, and platforms’ walled gardens. They also risk turning the web into a patchwork of age-gated jurisdictions, undermining free expression and access to information, rather than a global resource accessible by all. Finally, age assurance technologies create massive data risks for all users, as demonstrated by serious breaches of UK users’ government ID data.
The internet is an essential resource that enables young people to engage with the world in a way that transcends their immediate environment, as well as find information they may not feel safe to access offline, such as about family abuse, politics, or their sexuality. At the same time, however, digital spaces can carry risks for different populations, including young people. These risks are real and require thoughtful policy interventions that address the root of the issue, not just simplistic policies like access bans. Of particular importance is the way that most online spaces are not built with users’ rights or choices in mind, but optimised for extracting value for online platforms. Underlying this is often the massive collection of user data used to target, lock-in and surveil users—feeding platforms ads-based business models.
Addressing these harmful practices and holding tech companies accountable for providing safe online spaces that strengthen, not undermine users’ choices and agency, must be the priority of UK policymakers. Now is the time to hold tech to account, not undermine the open internet. Signatories of this letter remain ready to provide expertise, working with policymakers to ensure that measures that aim to keep children safe online are effective, proportional and enable them to exercise all their human rights.
You can find the announcements across various websites from the included orgs like ones from Mozilla, EFF, Stop Killing Games and others.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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You can also find comments for this article on social media: 
If there is illegal activities happening in some streets, the solution is not to ban access to streets.
Nor is it viable to have a police officer that constantly checks that you're allowed to be on a street, even going to the point of investigating if you really appear to be living in that house that you're busy going into.
Last edited by Eocene84 on 6 May 2026 at 2:25 pm UTC
GustyGhost a day ago
Quoting: GustyGhost1990s: Never share your real information with anyone on the internet.And it was the damn feds that were telling people that.
Quoting: Eocene84Where has the EFF been all this time? This is the first I've heard of them getting involved. Did they run out of funding or something??[The full list.](https://www.eff.org/updates)
Mostly USA government overreach.
You're scared of your publicly accountable elected government arbitrarily locking off parts of the internet by arresting and blocking the operators.
You're completely right to fear those things and people like you keep them away.
In the USA the danger is getting shot in broad daylight based on inaccurate information pulled straight from the ssd of your phone for fully lawful acts on the whims of some rich dude, while the public can still do something about it.
Last edited by LoudTechie on 6 May 2026 at 4:04 pm UTC
It's heartbreaking. If we let even a handful of countries finalize their implementation of all this mess, it'll only serve either as an incentive for other to follow tracks, or even worse, as a justification to do so.
Hopefully we can stop this. I can't do much for what's happening in the UK, but all this already made me more aware of the options we have as EU citizen, even if they're quite… limited. Petitions and all that jazz.
Still, it's very worrying.
Linux_Rocks a day ago
Last edited by tohur on 7 May 2026 at 2:01 am UTC
Boycotting a few companies into bankrupcy sends a clear message. And given how much hemming and hawing goes on about economics and GDP, I think it is the only language these people understand. Want to restrict the internet, suffer economic losses. All of a sudden the legislature becomes much more receptive and the companies themselves will start actually pushing back because it will now be existential.
Quoting: eggroleWhen these things happen (I suspect it is only a matter of time) IMHO the only valid response is to boycott the companies restricting access. Petitions and voting new "leaders" in doesn't seem to work. Violence is always an option, but a terrible one.people that think voting folks out doesn't work is why we have lazy a$$ people UNWILLING to hold their representatives accountable.. those fools get paid to be in office you threaten their livelihood they will listen when enough people are threatening them
Boycotting a few companies into bankrupcy sends a clear message. And given how much hemming and hawing goes on about economics and GDP, I think it is the only language these people understand. Want to restrict the internet, suffer economic losses. All of a sudden the legislature becomes much more receptive and the companies themselves will start actually pushing back because it will now be existential.
Last edited by tohur on 7 May 2026 at 11:38 am UTC
Quoting: Cley_FayeDamn. It really feels like we're walking backward at neckbreaking speed. It was not too long ago that Europe was seen as a bastion of freedom against a handful of totalitarian countries, and now, we're full steam ahead toward the destruction of freedom of speech and access to public resources everywhere.The scary part is that you're wrong and Europe 's bastion of freedomness's only increasing.
It's heartbreaking. If we let even a handful of countries finalize their implementation of all this mess, it'll only serve either as an incentive for other to follow tracks, or even worse, as a justification to do so.
Hopefully we can stop this. I can't do much for what's happening in the UK, but all this already made me more aware of the options we have as EU citizen, even if they're quite… limited. Petitions and all that jazz.
Still, it's very worrying.
Europe suffers from some democratic backsliding for certain, but partly thanks to people like you it's less fast and somewhat corrected compared to most other places, which are in general experiencing even worse democratic backsliding.
While the English are certainly suffering some grimm times, it's nothing compared that other self proclaimed bastion of freedom the USA.
Also the Polish are slowly working their way up from a broken rule of law.
The Hungarians at least have a chance, since the last election.
The Spanish are slowly weeding out corruption.
In Italy a constitutional power grab got stopped by referendum.
That having said not everything is hunky dorky on the continent:
The EU is propping up a Serbian dictator, because of a desire for silicon.
The dsa is being weaponized to force age verification although limited by the EU's own data minimization laws.
The Danish really want to install backdoors on everybody's phones. Luckily the Eu pushes them back.
Russia is running a tech crackdown.
Caldathras 23 hours ago
Quoting: tohurYou'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, as I am writing from a Canadian perspective, but there are a lot of countries whose politics are based off the British parliamentary system, just like Canada. At least for Canada, there is no recall option. In other words, the voters can only hold their representative accountable at election time. The politicians know that voters have short memories and tend to gamble quite confidently that the voters' anger will have cooled off by the time the election rolls around. It usually does.Quoting: eggroleWhen these things happen (I suspect it is only a matter of time) IMHO the only valid response is to boycott the companies restricting access. Petitions and voting new "leaders" in doesn't seem to work. Violence is always an option, but a terrible one.people that think voting folks out doesn't work is why we have lazy a$$ people UNWILLING to hold their representatives accountable.. those fools get paid to be in office you threaten their livelihood they will listen when enough people are threatening them
Boycotting a few companies into bankrupcy sends a clear message. And given how much hemming and hawing goes on about economics and GDP, I think it is the only language these people understand. Want to restrict the internet, suffer economic losses. All of a sudden the legislature becomes much more receptive and the companies themselves will start actually pushing back because it will now be existential.
Other issues come up, some politically manufactured, that distract the general voting population from the offense of an individual politician. Generally, the political parties are very careful not to stir up the voters' ire close to election time. So, it is not as simple as "lazy people being unwilling to hold their representatives accountable" -- although it does happen from time to time that a constituency's memory is longer than expected.
Quoting: CaldathrasThere's for most countries no recall option(for obvious stability reasons), but there're several control options, which does affect their ability to function and often even their income.Quoting: tohurYou'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, as I am writing from a Canadian perspective, but there are a lot of countries whose politics are based off the British parliamentary system, just like Canada. At least for Canada, there is no recall option. In other words, the voters can only hold their representative accountable at election time. The politicians know that voters have short memories and tend to gamble quite confidently that the voters' anger will have cooled off by the time the election rolls around. It usually does.Quoting: eggroleWhen these things happen (I suspect it is only a matter of time) IMHO the only valid response is to boycott the companies restricting access. Petitions and voting new "leaders" in doesn't seem to work. Violence is always an option, but a terrible one.people that think voting folks out doesn't work is why we have lazy a$$ people UNWILLING to hold their representatives accountable.. those fools get paid to be in office you threaten their livelihood they will listen when enough people are threatening them
Boycotting a few companies into bankrupcy sends a clear message. And given how much hemming and hawing goes on about economics and GDP, I think it is the only language these people understand. Want to restrict the internet, suffer economic losses. All of a sudden the legislature becomes much more receptive and the companies themselves will start actually pushing back because it will now be existential.
Other issues come up, some politically manufactured, that distract the general voting population from the offense of an individual politician. Generally, the political parties are very careful not to stir up the voters' ire close to election time. So, it is not as simple as "lazy people being unwilling to hold their representatives accountable" -- although it does happen from time to time that a constituency's memory is longer than expected.
There're the spread out elections on different levels of government, which all preform checks and balances on each other.(on average 1 par year in Canada)
There's the ability to appeal to the other arms of the trias political.
There's the ability to track how your government has wronged you and remind others when the election does come up(freedom of speech), I'm actually quite surprised how few people do that, since everybody can write and people are quite publicly opiniated.
Your boss can't fire you any moment he likes, yet you still fear his power.
The same is true for politicians.
The accusation here's not laziness, but fatalism. I don't have absolute power, so I have no power, so I should take all the abuse.
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