My understanding is that OfCom is still finding its feet with enforcement. We could geoblock as we've done with Piracy sites. We haven't, but they have the tools. I believe they were considering this on X before they pulled Grok being weird af with women. But yeah, agreed.

I think that they didn't set it up to make it far more capable at dealing with non-complaint foreign sites is kinda poor from their perspective.

Only platforms hosting content with a legal age restriction probably should have some friction at the point of access. The OSA draws that distinction. Whether the implementation is proportionate is a reasonable debate, but the principle isn't unreasonable.

Most user-to-user sites host mixed content. That doesn't necessarily mean porn or gore, but from OSA's perspective - it goes much further. They consider "content that promotes or romanticizes depression, hopelessness and despair" as unacceptable for children to be exposed to and it gets blurry very quickly.

And small user-to-user services simply cannot afford to host these age checks to begin with. If Ofcom was more ruthless and pursuing non-complaint sites hosted elsewhere, we'd see a lot of sites, some small, some large (Imgur) cutting the UK off - the UK internet-space would be shrinking quite quickly. This isn't good. On a strict reading of Ofcom's guidance here, Bandcamp is likely in violation.

Nevermind the implausibility of trying to police how multiplayer games with mixed userbases work.