British users of BibleGateway.com got an unpleasant surprise last night:
This must be in response to a threat of official action. And unfortunately, in Britain, such action is a real possibility.
Those in charge of the United Kingdom have passed a law requiring those accessing “adult” material to register their ID and prove their age. The stated motive is to “protect the children.”
Now I’m all in favour of getting porn off the internet. But I have never detected the slightest concern about this from those in power, any more than they care about spam. Nor do I believe that these people care about the children, because the same people have connived at Muslim rape gangs in Rotherham.
So it’s a pretext, and we should ask instead what the likely effect will be. The effect will be the real motive.
The practical effect of this measure is to end online anonymity, and – importantly – to start a process of state control of who can – and cannot – access the web. Because if you have to register your ID to access this site or that site, if you have to get approval to use the web for some sites, basically it’s a trivial step, technically, to make this every site.
Who might be responsible? A little while ago an agency called “Ofcom” wrote a threatening letter to 4Chan, who have applied for protection in the US courts. So I’d be very suspicious that it was the same people. Who else would do this?
But who are “Ofcom”? This was originally a minor department responsible to regulating telecoms companies, but its officials now seem have wide ambitions. It looks as if Ofcom has sent a threatening letter to Bible Gateway, trying to impose some kind of control on it. Rather than agree, the US company has simply blocked UK access. The European Union access seems to be an afterthought here.
But possibly the GDPR regulations come into this. These were originally an EU measure supposed to ensure big companies did not abuse address and other details of ordinary people. But I’ve never seen any sign of it being used for that purpose. Rather it is a means of interference.
We can’t know for sure at this point. But there seems to be a pattern here of petty bureaucrats trying to do a power grab over the internet.
It won’t work, of course. There’s no reason why US companies should give some bunch of officials in a foreign country control over their operations. They will just do what BibleGateway have done, and block the UK and EU, and shove them back into the darkness of the pre-internet era.
Grim stuff. Why can’t people just leave people alone?
Via Jonathan Black on Twitter.
Updated to rephrase.
Update 26 September 2025: the site has reappeared without explanation. Let’s hope whatever happened will not recur.
Thanks so much for pointing this out, Roger. What a disgrace – and how sinister! If I can find an email address, I shall write to Ofcom to protest.
There’s no certainty that it is Ofcom, but who else?
My wife is really upset, she has used Bible Gateway for years making loads of notes she uses for reference. All gone overnight and never to be retrieved according to the website message.
Is this really what the bureaucrats intended?
Try using a VPN. I use Tunnelbear which has a generous free allowance. I was able to access the site that way.
using a VPN connection gives me access to the site. but ALL of my notes and studies are gone
That’s bad! I wish we knew more.
Thanks for the suggestion to use a VPN Roger – I’ve been able to access the site again.
Though I may be proved wrong later, I doubt that Ofcom has anything to do with it. Even if it were Ofcom for the UK, this would not explain the simultaneous issue with the EU, so it seems that has to be something else.
There is also no reason for them to have deleted users’ saved content if it was stored on servers outside the UK’s jurisdiction, so it sounds to me more like an accidental deletion. They would not be offering refunds to subscribers unless they had seriously messed-up in some way.
I also wonder if the Bible Gateway had illegally included copyrighted versions of the Bible? — US copyright law is different from that in the UK and EU.
It’s certainly possible. You make some good points here. It would be nice if we knew.
But whatever it is must be specific to the UK and EU. That sounds like GDPR. The only way a US company would do something this drastic is if they received a letter from a regulator. The UK regulator has been sending out letters. So I reasoned that this was UK driven. The current scandal about UK state censorship naturally raises the worst suspicions.
I am in the UK and can use a VPN. However, I sincerely doubt this is a “technical issue” but rather BibleGateway just not wanting to deal with the UK and the EU and all the nonsense that comes along with it. (Hence the refunds; no-one refunds anything for a problem they are sincerely trying to fix.) I can’t blame them.
That was my reading of the situation. The exact pretext used by the regulators is not obvious. But we have been here before. When German publishers attacked Google Books for daring to include stuff before 1923, Google shrugged and just blocked access to it in the EU. So I naturally infer that Bible Gateway are doing the same. I can’t blame them either.
Thanks for the update Roger. Like many other Christians, I find the gateway site very user friendly and I’m very surprised at their decision to close it.
I have no problem with officials accessing my usage, or having to use a digital ID to use the site.
Rather than acting arbitrarily, the site owners could have asked the users if we minded losing our anonymity.
Outside of paranoia, I think most of us would be fine with that.
We should not confuse EU and UK pre-emptive legislation with “The Great Reset”. That’s going to happen anyway. UK and EU are simply doing the groundwork.
I doubt the UK and EU access problems with the Bible Gateway site are connected with a “woke” response to its content. It may possibly be a response to BG’s failure to fill out some arcane bureaucratic form. Someone once said to me, “You cannot go through Bureaukrateia, you cannot go over it, around it, underneath it. You can only pass by it by throwing it the honey-cake of correct form.”
4chan is a notorious locus of very questionable internet activity including, but not limited to, activities consistent with the Rotherham scandal, which, until you mentioned it, I had never heard of. Holy Toledo! as we say.
Given the silence from Biblegateway, I wonder if it is a problem due to them. Perhaps the bible publishers have threatend to sue them as they have not paid copyright charges or something. Just a thought, as I would have expected by now some form of positive comment from the site as to the problem, and if they are really going to try and fix it!
It’s very odd, I agree.
I’m not sure, but this could be a reaction to GDPR updates this year that forbid exports of data to countries where data protection is lower (such as the USA). I presume Bible Gateway’s data is currently hosted in the USA and so storing data of users (inc children) accessing from Europe might be more risky for them without changes to their technology.
see https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3825/publications
Could be.
An interesting possibility via Twitter:
“Implementation of EU Digital Services Regulations are reported to be the reason! The bureaucrats want loads more information for BG to operate in EU and UK.”
“See Interoperability, contract terms and market access!”
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/factpages/data-act-explained#:~:text=Chapter%20IV:%20Unfair%20contractual%20terms&text=Contractual%20freedom%20is%20central%20to,and%20use%20on%20the%20other
@James Glover
I suspect that no, most of us would not be rushing to create a digital ID to use any website, and neither should you be. If you want to be the one going around saying things like “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear” then first have a thought for our Christian brothers and sisters world-wide that are being persecuted and even murdered for their opinions. That world is not only coming to a previously-safe UK, it’s already here and it’s about to get real.
Huge security risk too. What if your ID gets hacked?
See also https://x.com/alexathallow/status/1884411906816979300
IT IS BACK! Came back a couple of days ago, looks slightly different, ut works fine.
It’s excellent news.
“Ross Anderson says:
September 10, 2025 at 1:52 pm
My wife is really upset, she has used Bible Gateway for years making loads of notes she uses for reference. All gone overnight and never to be retrieved according to the website message.”
Let this be a warning–DO NOT put a lot of your time and effort or irreplaceable information into a website that does not have a way to export and download it to your computer.
I like BibleGateway and use it quite a bit, and think the paid version is worth it. But I don’t use its highighting or note taking except as a temporary convenience. When I started using web bibles sites a few years ago I found none that had everything I wanted, so I checked to see if I could export my notes. None of the the ones I checked would do it (Bible Gateway, Life Bible, some others).
When studying a book of the bible I copy the whole book, 7 chapters at a time, from Bible Gateway to a word processor document on my computer. Then I do highlighting and commenting in that document. Not the easiest, but I know I have my writings (as long as I backup my computer, or use a trustworthy cloud file store like google docs.)
Two other big cases to look out for-
– online photo sharing- you can export your photos but not your comments, or other people comments, on most sites including Google Photos.
– email from your ISP (e.g. Comcast, Spectrum in the US)- if you change ISPs your email is often deleted immediately or in a short time.
Facebook, Blogspot, WordPress generally let you download your inputs, though it may (or may not) be difficult to read and re-use it. I don’t know about other social media.
Also be aware–websites can shutdown without warning, go bankrupt, be shutdown by governments. Their terms of service are not binding contracts with you. Even if they were bankruptcy and government action can override contracts. Often in bankruptcy another company buys the user accounts and data and access continues. But not always. Very large companies like Google are unlikely to go backrupt or shut down a service without warning. But many Google services have been shut down (with warning) and user data deleted, such as Picassa and Notebook.
Best,
tt
los angeles usa
I think this is the big lesson here: don’t rely on online resources always being available. They have no obligation to be.
A story in The Register on Imgur doing the same. It’s the ICO issuing threats. What fun these petty clerks must be having. How important it makes them feel.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/01/imgur_exits_uk/
The website is working well on the whole now but it doesn’t seem to be possible to change settings – eg choice of Bible version.
I had no trouble when I went to this link and changed the DRA to another version…?