Administrative bits: UK Online Safety Act

Hello,

a quick update from the administrative side of TDF.

As mentioned in my earlier posting at A look behind some administrative scenes at TDF, TDF also had to look into the UK Online Safety Act (Online Safety Act 2023 - Wikipedia), even if we are not UK-based.

Given its impact, some communities have just decided to geoblock UK visitors, which obviously is not the path TDF wanted to take.

Simon Phipps informed us at this year’s FOSDEM that this is a matter we need to look into. Paolo Vecchi has been kicking off the work on addressing this issue by introducing us to Neil Brown, a UK lawyer who did this work pro bono for TDF. Initially handled by me, with a lot of technical input from Guilhem Moulin and Christian Lohmaier, now Sophie Gautier has finished the work and is also available as a point of contact, which is a requirement of these regulations.

We need to do assessments for new services and document our compliance also in the future. Given the nature of this relatively new regulation, I don’t want to share too many details just now, until the situation has been cleared a bit. TDF has produced the actual paperwork required.

Thanks to everyone who was instrumental in driving this forward, and I hope I didn’t forget to mention anyone! :slight_smile:

Florian

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The related vote has been published already here: [DECISION] Authorize Florian to sign legal engagement letter