As someone who's had "experience with government compliance" all I can say is, developers, especially those with an significantly sized operation should have a longer term plan. Government compliance and regulation is not new, this act is, but this type of enforcement and checking is not exactly new.
For example state sales tax in the US and website accessibility compliance forced us to do IP-based geo-location of customers in the past. We were left with the choice, track users to the best of our ability, or risk getting sued into bankruptcy. We had other state-based compliance issues that added to this as well. Specifically compliance we simply couldn't do because the tools we used didn't support it.
Nostr is going to break a lot of rules in a lot of countries. As, an operator, as a developer, as a business, you absolutely MUST be prepared for government activity like this. These types of compliance acts should not take you by surprise. It does the community no good for you to say "oh damn that's crazy" then do nothing about it.
I know it's not easy, trust me I get it, please let this be encouragement to keep your eyes on the end goal and keep your ears to the ground. I don't want to see people get caught up in legal issues because they simply didn't take the time to pay attention. There are 1000 compliance issues you're probably already in violation of, but that's just the job.
Be ready, have some funds saved to pay for legal council for your business, and for you and your family. Don't forget that they will often cease bank funds during investigations even for civil one sometimes. Be prepared for that as well.
What are other nostr app developers and relay operators doing with regard to the UK Online Services Act?
Apparently there is no legal exception for open source or apps that are not connecting to servers you control or apps that are entirely encrypted and peer to peer.
Basically they want us to KYC anyone they think might be based in the UK, and implement content filters.
There seems to be no way to be in compliance in Nostr without limiting all connections to a single gateway relay the way Primal does, and with geo location, including blocking tor and vpn connections, and content analysis of all text and media.
Basically insanity which is completely counter to the entire Nostr project. I knew there was some of OSA coming but I hadn’t paid attention to it. None of us want to KYC our users or build a content filtering system. I mean how do we know if a post is about a knife? Yes we can’t have content about knives! Or how do we determine who considers content hateful?
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/online-safety/information-for-industry/illegal-harms/illegal-content-codes-of-practice-for-user-to-user-services.pdf?v=391681
What are Nostr devs based in the UK doing? Users? Relay operators?
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