The UK Is Poised to Force a Bad Law on the Internet | WIRED

WhatsApp and Signal have threatened to shut down services in Britain if the Online Safety Bill includes restrictions that undermine encryption. The government is pushing it through anyway.

The UK’s ambitious and controversial proposed internet regulation started with scribblings on the back of a packet for a brie and cranberry sandwich from Pret a Manger. Those notes, from discussions between academics Lorna Woods and William Perrin about how to make tech companies responsible for online harms, became an influential white paper in 2019. That in turn became the foundation of a draft law called the Online Safety Bill, an ambitious attempt to turn the UK into the “safest place in


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