- people are being arrested, charged, and prosecuted, for opinions

- that number is greater than 1

- the number of people being arrested under speech laws, per year, is reportedly[0] over 12,000

- some substantial number of those are for opinions, some are not but we don't know how many either way [0] (and considering the government were attempting to delete the Courtdesk archive[1], I'd say that's by design)

- "convictions and sentencings for the relevant offences had decreased dramatically" [0]

This points to overzealous policing and vague laws.

The criticisms by Americans, who are surely aghast at this state of affairs given their founding principles, cannot be dismissed until better numbers are available, but while the number we do know is > 1, the criticisms are valid if not entirely sound (but may be entirely sound).

[0] https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...

[1] https://www.legalcheek.com/2026/02/ministry-of-justice-order...

Physics is the study of physics, not history, no muslim scholars are relevant to modern physics, whereas Newton is relevant to modern physics. That's either because he's closer in the chain or because his work remains relevant, but either way he gets a mention for being relevant. Not every European mathematician or physicist is mentioned either, for the same reason. Descartes never came up, nor did Brahmagupta, nor did Tesla… the list of greats would be too long to mention and just wouldn't be relevant. Complaining about people nigh on 400 years ago not writing citations properly is an insubstantial complaint, to say the least.

No one else needs to care about your religion but you.

It doesn't need to be thousands for it to be worrying.

From [1]:

> The Metropolitan Police has awarded Father Ted creator and Irish comedian Graham Linehan £25,000 and an unreserved apology after they arrested him last year as his plane touched down at Heathrow airport.

> Last year, Graham Linehan — who now lives in Arizona, United States of America — was arrested by five armed police officers as he landed at Heathrow airport in one of the most shocking incidents we have seen in years.

> What was Graham's supposed crime? Three gender-critical posts on X. This is despite the fact that gender-critical beliefs are protected under the Equality Act 2010 and were reaffirmed by last year's landmark Supreme Court ruling, which settled that "sex" is defined by biology, not gender identity.

Armed police for 3 tweets on a political topic, seems like overkill in an unfortunately possible literal use of the word. It also seems that it is far more than one, too:

> General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Lord Young, said: "I'm beginning to lose count of the number of cases we've fought in which the police have arrested someone for a tweet, decided to take no further action and then had to pay them substantial compensation for wrongful arrest.

[1] https://freespeechunion.org/news/met-police-apologises-and-p...

Don't forget the legacy section, where there is a long list of people and organisations giving him enormous credit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham#Legacy

Secondly, to this claim:

> That's why there's little to no credit given to Muslim scholars (Arabic, Persian, Moorish Spain, etc) by the western scholars, by conveniently dismissing the Muslim golden era as "Dark Ages" but at the same time stealing the knowledge (idea, equations design, tools, etc) for most of the prior inventions by the Muslim scholars, for example the telescope.

From the link you provided, in the very first paragraph:

> The works of Alhazen were frequently cited during the Scientific Revolution by Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Johannes Kepler, and Christiaan Huygens.

No credit or frequent credit - which is it?

I'm not sure that this is the only way, just the way that selfish, sloppy, or impatient actors within business often work. If more wealth is created, more efficiencies found, more problems fixed, new jobs created, these would also bring the returns desired.

I'm going to guess that means "the blogs you know, you primarily found from Google searches"?

Most of the substacks I follow are because I encountered the author's thoughts on X or forums like this one. I don't know if anyone else is like that but I'm also not sure why you're generalising, seemingly quite hastily.

> Operating a motor vehicle requires a license, and you have to present it.

You do not have to present it in all cases, and not to actually use the vehicle.

> Drinking and other activities and purchases require showing ID to prove your age.

Not in all cases. Purchasing alcohol in the UK may require ID (but again, not in all cases) but drinking is legal above 5 years old in areas that are not solely for the purpose of selling alcohol (crazy, but true).

That list will go on.

> Since the government currently has all of our ID data

No, it does not - for example, a passport is different to a birth certificate and they contain different amounts of identity information, and my government does not need to know other identity info regarding my work.

> mathematically secure algorithms have been invented to prove personal information without revealing it, I'd say we have reached the point where digital identification can be implemented without infringing on people's privacy any more than a clerk checking your ID.

This is too strong a statement. Having strong algorithms does not equate with the level of security you claim to exist. Implementation of the whole process is just as important.

Regardless, we have plenty of good reasons to fear any government having this information. The Japanese government, for example, has its civil service set up in a way to prevent the kind of abuses we saw in WW2. I wouldn't be surprised if the Dutch have done the same, for what should be obvious reasons.

I know, and neither am I. Perhaps you misread my comment.

> I couldn't care less that the web has not been government-gated for the past X years

That is clear.

> because through this logic you should adhere to any dumb tradition or custom humans have ever had

Not only is that statement a non-sequitur, since neither of us is making an argument based on tradition, it's also entirely irrelevant.

> I am concerned with the present and the future of the web's impact on the world, which of course requires government intervention like any other big phenomenon or technology in the history of humanity.

An assertion that is a) going beyond the subject, thus creating a straw man, and b) when applied to that actual subject, completely undermined by my comment.

My actual comment, not the one you appear to have decided to respond to that I haven't written, wouldn't write, and thus doesn't exist.

> Not only is your assumption false, since in its first years the web was only accessible to academics so the gating was implicit

The subject is *explicit* age gating. Nothing implicit, and nothing that isn't age gating is relevant.

> Do you know what's behind the cables that carry your bytes? The ICANN? The IANA? I hope you never do, if you dislike government involvement this much

Firstly, that is snark, but fair's fair I suppose. The irony.

Secondly and much more importantly, I dislike age gating via large-scale government coercion, the subject of this discussion.

Could you respond to that? Specifically, age gating via large-scale government coercion.

> How about not needing to do age verification?

Which I agree with. However, I think that ship is sailing. Those who care about this had better find a provider that they trust and support providers they trust, because the perfect is the enemy of the good, and without the good there'll be no way to rollback to the perfect at all.

The irony.

Please, try harder to raise the level of debate.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

I'm not sure HN is for you.

One doesn't need to be a free speech absolutist to not be a fascist, far from it; and the exceptions prove the rule - those examples are the definition of exceptional. "10 times…" I can remember people getting banned en masse for changing their profile pic to an NPC character. The difference is night and day.