[zbentley]

> Governments don't typically go "aw, shucks, you've caught us on a technicality" without getting the courts involved.

That might happen here, but I don’t think that principle holds generally. If that were true, wouldn’t every component of the service provider chain be sued for people e.g. downloading pirated or illegal stuff? The government cracks down on e.g. torrent trackers and ISPs, but they haven’t seriously attacked torrent clients or the app stores/OSes that allow users to run those clients. Why not?

[jeroenhd]

Governments go after websites that don't host anything illegal all the time. Torrents don't contain any illegal information yet torrent websites are taken down routinely through legal challenges, by court orders, and in some countries where the government is at the behest of the entertainment industry, by special anti-piracy organisations with ridiculous censorship powers.

Apple and Google have both been forced to take down apps and ISPs block IP ranges all the time. Usually without much of a fight. Apps for reporting ICE, for instance, have been taken down without any clear legal precedent and without much judicial challenge. The entire chain is already being threatened, sued, and censored.

The trick is usually to escape the jurisdiction of countries that care by hosting serves in foreign countries, to host app executables and such off-platform, and maybe adding a CDN like Cloudflare to the mix to protect against getting arrested too easily. For this to work for Matrix, the company developing Matrix needs to leave the UK and move to a place where this age verification bollocks isn't necessary. I don't think that kind of behaviour is good for a company currently financed in large part by government contracts.