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This week @Apple confirmed that UK iPhone owners must now verify their age to access restricted services, following pressure from the UK government and Ofcom. The on-screen notice tells users that UK law requires this. The Financial Times notes that app stores are not covered by the Online Safety Act. The legal basis for that statement is unclear.
This is how it works. This is governance without legislation. The government pressures. The company complies. The compliance is presented as legal obligation. No specific law is cited because no specific law clearly applies. The infrastructure of child protection becomes the infrastructure of adult surveillance, built not through legislation but through regulatory relationships that cannot be documented, appealed, or meaningfully challenged.
Once age verification exists, it can be expanded administratively. A record of which verified adult accessed which service exists, is held by someone, and is subject to government access. That is not speculation. It is the logical endpoint of a system that requires proving identity to access legal content.
BitChute made a different choice. We exited the UK market rather than operate in an environment where the line between legal requirement and regulatory pressure is deliberately blurred, where compliance is achieved through informal regulatory pressure, and where honest governance becomes impossible. You cannot tell creators that a restriction is legally compelled when the legal basis is a regulator working closely with a platform under implied pressure. You cannot document the specific law when the specific law does not clearly apply.
That decision cost us a significant market. We made it anyway.
Leadership is not about optimizing for revenue in every jurisdiction regardless of what that requires. It is about knowing which lines you will not cross and acting on them before you are pushed.
Principles over profits is not a slogan. It is a test. We took it.
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