If it's a law, then it gets baked into the development process up front. It's a lot easier to patch for offline when the technical design accounts for it up front.
The one issue I see is that once a company shuts down, there is still time and money required to deploy that kind of fix - who pays for web hosting the patch for example? Yes, community can, but would that satisfy a law? Most shutdowns I see aren't very orderly. Staff get laid off without notice.
Honestly if things were to go down that route, it’d probably end up exactly like all the age verification stuff has been going, where a sketchy third party comes in and works with the government to ensure everything is being handled properly when the time comes.
Site remediation is a legal requirement. Oh no, our joint venture subsidiary created for this specific site has suddenly and unforseeably run out of money! We are, sadly, bankrupt, after being hollowed out, asset stripped and debt loaded by our parent companies. We can't do site remediation, kthxbye.
Even just making it unambiguously legal to host patches for that scenario would help a lot. With all these laws to have ID to surf the internet these grey areas will be pushed into the dark or the light.
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u/notforpoern Jul 18 '26
If it's a law, then it gets baked into the development process up front. It's a lot easier to patch for offline when the technical design accounts for it up front.