Can Britain make its own laws, and decide how it is governed? To extricate ourselves from Brussels took many years and much pain, but once again British sovereignty is under attack. This time the pressure to decide what laws we are permitted to retain comes not from Brussels, but Washington DC, and the pressure is intense.
The popularity comes from the assertion of sovereign power in an area that has left parents helpless and the young vulnerable
What has made the Americans angry this time, ironically, is one of very few pieces of legislation passed by the 2019-2024 Conservative Government that is popular with the public. Indeed, it may be the only one. The Online Safety Act is a messy, sprawling and certainly imperfect piece of legislation, but voters at large can see it fills a yawning chasm.
Some 75 per cent of voters support it, and this is consistent across party affiliation. Even 59 per cent of Reform voters support the Act. In the latest polling, 19 out of 20 voters want to retain it in some form: just five per cent want abolition.
The popularity comes from the assertion of sovereign power in an area that has left parents helpless and the young vulnerable to exploitation. For 25 years, we have conducted an experiment in which we give adults unfettered access to teenage girls. An entire economic sector, one which now dictates the terms of trade for many other sectors, was given freedom from liability. And the result is exactly what you would expect to happen when you allow someone to be their own policeman.
Today, after two decades of “innovation”, there is no space in which British children can find out who they are, and express themselves online, in reasonable safety. This is a clear market failure. The OSA addresses this by introducing age verification for adult material such as pornography and gore. Critics, including your author, were not optimistic that this would ever work. But something extraordinary has happened: it has been introduced with remarkably little fuss or pushback. It now seems odd that we ever allowed hardcore pornography to be delivered to anyone who typed out a URL, including children — and insisted that all the market externalities were loaded onto parents to grapple with, in the form of bewildering firewalls, parental controls and other technical measures. Wander into Mumset, and you will see exactly why the Online Safety Act is popular. We don’t care if there are flaws, because it’s better than nothing, they say.
Yet the Conservatives seem strangely reluctant to defend it, even in opposition.
The Act is far from perfect. Originally, in its 2017 Green Paper, the Government preferred self-regulation, but the response from platforms such as Facebook (now Meta) was simple: get stuffed. Legislation then became inevitable. Along the way it snowballed beyond child harms to encompass misinformation and bad conduct between speech was added. These are fertile ground for potential mischief. The media regulator Ofcom was given new powers to demand codes of conduct, and fine companies who failed to provide them. The result is complex and baroque. Some parts could be dispensed with, without harming the core framework. Yet other areas clearly need attention, such as generative AI chatbots that convince the vulnerable to commit self harm. In one horrific example, a 16 year old boy was not only persuaded by ChatGPT that committing suicide was noble, over several months, but told exactly him how to do it, including how long the rope should be.
But revision is not what the US tech lobbyists and radical libertarians who have attached themselves to the Trump administration want to see. They have singled out the Online Safety Act in particular for abolition. Why? It cannot be allowed to be seen to be a success. It has thus become the subject of the most aggressive interference in the domestic policy of the UK that I can recall. In response, the Government has bent, if not buckled. In April, advisors to the (then) Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds confirmed it may be discarded as a peace offering in trade talks.
Preston Byrne, a cryptofinance lawyer who is advising think tanks in London, has filed a lawsuit suit on behalf of 4Chan. 4Chan is a site packed with gore, hardcore pornography and competitive racism. Ofcom requested a code of conduct, and 4Chan refused.
In the lawsuit, which is worth reading in detail to gain a flavour of American triumphalism, Byrne claims that America not only invented the internet, but also anything of value on it. (In fact the term packet networking was coined by a Welshman working at Harwell Physics laboratory, Donald Davies, and America’s ARPANet borrowed both the concepts and terminology).
The lawsuit then declares that no sovereign state shall impose conditions on any American service provider. It’s a silly piece of grandstanding, without legal merit — 4Chan can simply geoblock the UK and not serve its material here, as Pornhub did when France attempted to impose conditions on it. All US tech companies are free to boycott the UK market, but don’t, because we may decide we prefer home grown alternatives instead: we have the talent to produce superior services.
The 4Chat v Ofcom lawsuit is very illuminating for Byrne says the quiet part out loud. There can be no attempt to assert national sovereignty over any American internet companies, by any nation state, anywhere else in the world. There is no law, but us. The norms and values of every society must be dictated by technology companies.
The lawsuit is part of a ratchet of pressure designed to make enforcement of the Act difficult. Another, gleefully advocated by Lord Young, would prevent British citizens from travelling to the United States: “withholding visas from UK citizens who work for censorship bodies such as Ofcom, which is currently trying to take enforcement action against US tech companies that refuse to comply with the Online Safety Act,” he wrote recently.
This is punching down, and sets an ominous precedent for any country that tries to set rules over how American technology companies behave.
There are many areas that impact speech in Starmer’s Britain, all of which are felt much more heavily than the OSA, all have been used to inhibit conservative views from being expressed. The malicious communications act, the banter bill, and debanking have all been abused: politics conducted by other means. The Online Safety Act is the only one where there is a statutory obligation to consider freedom of speech.
Opponents of the Act claim censorship is rampant, but this is a dishonest argument: equating age verification with censorship, which removes the material from adult view. Refusing a 10 year old pornographic material is not being “censorship”. Over the first weekend when age checking came into force, one example cited was age verification being was placed on the transcript of a rape gang trial. But as Miriam Cates has pointed out, this passage contains a horrific and explicit example of sexual torture, X-rated stuff. And it was not removed at all. The censorship claims have largely disappeared.
Use of VPNs to circumvent age verification surged for a few days then faded. There is only one in the Top 30 downloads now, four in the Top 50 — just how it was before.
I write as a member of Lord Young’s Free Speech Union, which I consider to be the most valuable organisation in Britain. It has made a lasting material difference to people’s lives. When 30 arrests a day are made, on average, for malicious Tweeting, and Nigel Farage is being debanked, and the “banter ban” threatens to turn employers into conversation cops, it seems bizarre to focus instead on the hypotheticals of the OSA.
Better a bad law made in Westminster, than one dictated to us from Brussels or Washington DC
If American internet companies withdraw from Britain, would we be poorer? Hardly. In several examples superior UK and European services in search and mapping were muscled out by competitive practices, such as bundling, subsequently found to be illegal. Being boycotted by Wikipedia would hardly be the end of the world, and allow a “Britipedia” without the Californian wokeness.
The response to the Online Safety Act represents interference in domestic UK policy-making that no Prime Minister before 1997 would have countenanced. It is also infantilising: looking for an imperial authority to save us from ourselves: Daddy Trump Syndrome.
Better a bad law made in Westminster, than one dictated to us from Brussels or Washington DC.
This article expands on a short address made to the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester in October 2025, at the invitation of Shadow Culture Secretary Julia Lopez, for a panel discussion entitled: BIG TECH ON TRIAL, The Online Safety Act – Protecting Kids or Policing Speech? which took place on the main stage.
