UK Lords take aim at Ofcom's 'child-protection' upgrades to Online Safety Act The House of Lords is about to put the latest child-protection plans of UK regulator the Office of Communications (Ofcom) under the microscope. On Tuesday, the Lords Communications and Digital Committee will hear from three prominent online safety advocates as it probes the regulator's proposed new measures under the Online …
Parent: 'Mr MP/Your Honour/Father, my child made a recording of your inappropriate conversation with them last Friday, we're turning it into the police'
Newspapers before the week is out: 'Parent in possession of inappropriate video of their child banned under CSAM laws'
....except for widespread use of VPN software
....except for validation jokes like link: https://use-their-id.com/
....except for 18 year olds signing on for their 14 year old chums
Business as usual in SW1.......just like other enforcement jokes:
Yup.....no one is enforcing the 30mph speed limit in streets in London.
Yup.....GDPR is a joke.
Yup.....Ofwat can't stop our rivers overflowing with sewage.
Yup....."PREVENT" doesn't prevent anything.
Sigh!!
...and yet nothing happens when a foreigner incites violence and unrest?
...and yet nothing when the leader of Reform UK Ltd incites violence and unrest?
...and yet nothing when the leader of Reform UK Ltd breaks parliamentary rules regarding political uniforms?
...and yet nothing when the leader of Reform UK Ltd breaks reporting and tax rules?
.no one is enforcing the 30mph speed limit in streets in London.
Where I live there are 20mph speed limits on all residential streets. Before the council put them in the Police said they would not enforce the new limits.
Rules/laws only work if there is a stick for non-compliance. No stick means no-one has any incentive to comply with the rules.
The predictable outcome of this law is now happening with 4Chan and Kiwi Farms in the USA. Their argument is why should a publisher in one country have to censor its output for the citizens of another country?
The UK government has tried this before, most notably with the book Spycatcher by Peter Wright; originally banned in England (but not Scotland) and published in Australia. The British government tried to ban the publication and failed miserably, this ban being rendered infinitely more farcical by the book being sold and reported on in Scotland the whole while until the ban was quietly dropped. The only real effect was to greatly boost sales of a rather mediocre book and enrich the author somewhat.
This is the future of the online safety bill and it is already happening: a few major porn sites are requesting age verification and most are completely ignoring the UK government and its petty local laws. The only way the Government might credibly fight this is with a totalitarian Great Firewall of Britain which in the face of pervasive VPNs is doomed before it even gets going.
bbc news had a story about a porn star who had her insta blocked by meta.
never heard of her. A quick searck on the usual web sites and let's just say that you do not need to go to any porn site to be satisifed
makes a mockery of "think of the children"
Block the search engines and then what will kiddies do for their homework ?
The Bible maybe misclassified and not be in the correct document-drama section by in Waterstones, but what it does say about Love, Judgement of others, Charity & helping others, money lenders, tolerance, peace and forgiveness … is far more powerful than MAGA Provocateur, aggressive debater and Foghorn Shitposter General Charlie Kirk (or flag waving tosspot Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon) on socials.
‘Love never fails’.
We see that already with sites about suicide, alcohol or gambling abuse being blocked 'just in case'.
We also see that effect where american morals pervade the internet... any amount of nudity is not allowed but guns and violence are perfectly fine, and people self censor words like s*x and f**k and use grape and end and whathaveyou, even on platforms where those words are ok.
The HoL consists of unelected members. A few are hereditary, a large number are retreads from the HoC, political donors and party workers. That still leaves space for enough people, possibly including some of the hereditaries, with few if any plotical obligations but with real expertise over a wide variety of important topics that pass over the heads of the majority of HoC members. It can do a better job of scrutinising government legislature than the HoC. For that reason it is invaluable.
It’s possibly the least shit of current options…. and thankfully almost no hereditary left any more … but stuffed with political appointments - see. BoJo - instead.
As seen around the world 2 chambers elected with the same political demographics of the is just a waste and duplicative.
Ideally you need an independent chamber able to hold the primary to account, without fear or favour.
Answers on a postcard ….
> Answers on a postcard ….
If you ***really*** were going to have them elected then how about:
a) Proportional Representation voting
b) Elected for a longer period, say 10 years (or even longer but have a minimum age to be eligible) for some stability
c) re (b), however 10% (assuming 10 year term) up for re-election each year (just like the local councils often are a third or half at a time)**
d) no more honours lists of course, so your chums, donors etc as it would not be democratic
This way you would have a more up to date selection reflecting the mood of the country at the moment from the new-elects, a more representative group based on numbers of votes cast (so yours WOULD count) along with a degree of longer term thinking/stability (as opposed to for life or thinking about the next GE as the HoC).
Yeah, that is either a rather large postcard or very tiny print.....
** does not need to be a big bang either, just remove 10% of the current lot based on time already served then elect a smaller number to replace them, repeat for the next 9 years until they are all elected
Set up a system by which a person can be forwarded to be considered for appointment to the Lords by any one of a great many public bodies, each of which gets only a very few slots each year. Then use the Lords themselves to agree or veto each appointment to fill a small limited number of vacant Lords positions each year, with successful nominees being chosen at random from the pool if the Lords cannot agree on enough of them. Set each appointment to last for 10, 15, or 20 years, one slot per person per lifetime.
Any appointee who does not attend sufficiently automatically loses their slot permanently.
The effect of this is that the makeup of the Lords will be a wide variety and cross-section of society who were not elected and who are not answerable to voters but merely to other Lords (a system whereby miscreants can be ejected must also be present).
Finally, once the House of Lords has been reformed then the Parliament Act must also be reformed; I would suggest that if the Commons and Lords cannot agree on a Bill then vetoing the Bill for at least five years would be the best remedy. After all, what is the point of a revising house if you have a mechanism to circumvent it?
Exactly.
It's always been a tricky subject for me - the whole system is open to abuse, and is truly undemocratic.
However, there are many intelligent people in the Lords who care about rights, and don't give a shit about party-alliance, and time and time again, they have often taken the government of the day down a peg or two, with more common and down-to-earth judgements than the HoC could ever produce.
I'd prefer a Lords enquiry than a HoC one anyway. Which is probably a sad indictment on the whole system, but that's how it is.
>Why would they know any more about how it'll work than the politicians who passed it? Where are the privacy and tech experts?
Such harsh words.
Remember Baroness Martha Lane Fox of Soho sits in the Lords and helping them out with tech things like this was why (we were told) she was put there. She's sure to be on the committee ..
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/170/communications-and-digital-committee/membership/
Oh no she isn't! What a surprise.
But not to worry, those who are on the committee seem to have tons of relevant experience. There's a former "smart home technology" boss, a solicitor, a visitor attraction chairwoman, a tv journalist, a retailer, and a bishop.
They won't be invited because that might affect the chances of the government's mostly-predetermined course of action. Check almost all the news articles in the lead-up to the OSA being passed and implemented: quotes from charities lauding the plans brought up multiple times; concerns from citizens and critics are brushed away in a paragraph at the bottom as vague "privacy groups" and immediately countered with a quote from MPs saying how it will be completely safe.
This, completely.
I predict it will be the usual backslapping swinge-fest mostly asking how they can make the controls more onerous and difficult for small and largely irrelevant sites while letting themselves be steered away from examining the role of the large platforms and their lucrative self-reinforcement content selection algorithms.
The future is going to be "If you're Elon Musk you're free to say what you want, and if you're Fred Bloggs of the Little Piddleton Cycle Club website, you're free to come up before the beak for a suspended sentence because you didn't take down a prank post quick enough."
All UK ISPs had been offering porn blocks for years. The OSA is just censorship.
The OSA was a Tory policy they should have been junked, along with all the others. Online porn is digital prolefeed. Ban it and you lose vast numbers of cotes.
Activists have tunnel vision and care nothing for collateral damage. If you allow your legislation to be led by activists, you will just annoy the majority who will then vote against you, or not vote for you. And with Reform waiting in the wings, making enemies of such a large chunk of your voting base is political suicide. Labour have gone from a landslide victory to unelectable in just over a year. The OSA is a big part of that.
"It has kpr0n blocks but not pr0n blocks"
No.
Any UK residential ISP I'm aware of has a default-on Adult Content filter. This means any device connected to your home router already blocks adult content.
The choice to allow this onto your home network is, appropriately, explicit.
The big four ISPs do supply network-level blocking via a control panel, but ISPs like Zen, A&A don't. Zen supply a Fritz Box router which has somewhat configurable router-level parental controls but it's up to you to set up an allowlist/denylist for URLs. A&A leave entirely up to you.
OSA age verification (server-side) != Cleanfeed (what I was referring to above) != big four ISP category selection with control panel.
Not once at any ISP I've ever used (for Internet to a building, like say BT etc) have I been asked about content blocks or had any applied by default
The only time I've ever had such content blocks applied by default was for mobile only
this is the experience of most people I've ever heard from on the subject so I'm not sure about the whole default-on argument especially for residential home ISP connections
"The OSA was a Tory policy they should have been junked, along with all the others."
I don't know why anyone might have expected that. Labour have a long history of control freakery. This is heading towards the digital ID cards they tried to get away with last time they were in power. It was a gift for them - they didn't even have to do the work of passing it.
Labour have gone from a landslide victory to unelectable in just over a year. The OSA is a big part of that.
Not so much a Labour landslide victory as a Tory landslide loss. Labour 'won' the election with 500,000 fewer votes than they had in 2019, but the Tories lost 7m votes.
Even if Reform win the next election, I think it will be very difficult for them to repeal the Online Safety Act. There would be opposition from all the groups that got it passed & lots of negative headlines about children being put at risk.
The Lords are an anachronistic and pointless bunch of has-beens that cost a fortune to maintain in the manner that they've become accustomed to at our expense.
Quite why we need over 800 ermine gowned buffoons to (literally) lord it over us is beyond me. The yanks "make do" with 100 senators who are also as mad as a box of frogs but given the size of the US of A and our comparatively small population are at least perhaps proportionally far cheaper and are democratically elected (at least until the orange buffoon decides otherwise).
The Commons are claiming that they've got nowhere to go during repair works and so it will cost us a vast amount more. How about, we shovel the present occupants of "the other place" (to use the ridiculous term beloved of our antediluvian parliamentarians) to the care homes where they should be residing ("Yes dear, you are still the 13th Duke of Wybourne. Now be a good boy and eat your cauliflower cheese whilst you watch Eastenders") and send the MPs over whilst we've have actual elections (a revolutionary idea I know, other countries have trusted their populace with democratic elections to a 2nd chamber for 100s of years but apparently we're too simple to be trusted with a vote in the UK) for a 2nd chamber of no more than 100 that can be based in a cheap office block in a suitably prosaic location, e.g. Slough.
Icon because I'm disappointed in El Reg commentards on this article not having used it already.
The fascists are crawling out of the woodwork, cloaked in child-protection rhetoric. Ofcom, the Lords, the professional campaigners - all suddenly so comfortable dictating what can be said, what can be watched, what can be thought. They call it “safety”, but it’s slavery by the backdoor.
Once you concede that every word and gesture online must pass through an Ofcom-approved filter, the slope only gets steeper. Tomorrow it will be every message, every photo, every joke, screened for alignment with government guidelines and sanitised until nothing remains but state-approved mush. Wrongthink scrubbed, free expression throttled.
This is not “protection”, it is a control system. A society where all conversation goes through a gateway that judges its ideological fitness for the recipient is not a free society at all - it’s a digital gulag. And the truly deranged part is how normalised this has become. These people talk openly about mass biometric harvesting, surveillance-based censorship.
In reality, anyone peddling this as “safety” belongs in a sack. Either they should be sent through Prevent, since this is just another strand of terrorism against civil liberty, or sectioned for thinking authoritarianism is the cure to all ills.
The Online Safety Act is about power. And unless there’s resistance, the fascists will keep marching.
Absolutely. "Fascist", like "Nazi" is thrown about far too easily. And often by people associated with the SWP, which is authoritarian, antidemocratic, campaigns for the mass killing of its political opponents and whole sections of society and believes that Jews are responsible for the world's ills. SWP members do not have much sense of irony.
Fascism isn’t just jackboots and mass killings - that’s the extreme end. It’s the spirit of centralised control, suppression of dissent, and enforced conformity.
Look at the UK since 2016: both Tory and Labour governments dismantling SMEs, funnelling capital to multinationals, and asset-stripping the public. That’s economic corporatism - a hallmark of fascist regimes. Pair it with censorship dressed as “safety,” surveillance infrastructure, and the presumption that the state decides what speech is permissible. That’s authoritarian, yes - but authoritarianism alone doesn’t explain the marriage of state and corporate power we’re watching.
Censorship is inherently patriarchal: the “father knows best” instinct, silencing in the name of protection. Tie that to enforced hierarchies, suppression of opposition, and “national interest” rhetoric, and you’re well within fascist territory.
You don’t need the textbook definition line by line - fascism evolves with the times. What matters is the trajectory. And right now the trajectory is unmistakable.
Thanks for the explanation but I don't agree that the meaning of the word should evolve. That's confusing and unnecessary. Use new/different words. You're helping muddy history otherwise. What is happening today is not good but it is not what was happening in the 1930s. Yes, some things are similar, but much is not.
The “don’t call it fascism, that muddies history” line sounds uncomfortably close to what people in the 1930s said: it’s just strong leadership, unpleasant maybe, but not the same thing. That minimisation is how it was allowed to harden.
History doesn’t repeat in uniform and salutes, it rhymes in patterns: suppression of dissent, merger of state and corporate power, censorship framed as protection, small enterprise dismantled in favour of cartels. If you only recognise fascism once the camps are built, you’ve already missed it.
The word isn’t what confuses people. Pretending the word can’t apply until the worst atrocities arrive is what guarantees we’ll sleepwalk into them.
Well, I stand corrected. It seems objecting to how the word is used/misused is a battle others have fought many times, and all it seems have lost.
So I give up. Use the word however you like.
Something Orwell wrote in 1944 was for me quite the eye-opener - had me laughing too.
https://thephilosopher.net/orwell/wp-content/uploads/sites/391/2024/10/What-is-Fascism-George-Orwell.pdf
> What is happening today is not good but it is not what was happening in the 1930s. Yes, some things are similar, but much is not.
But aren't you yourself guilty of evolving the meaning of words?
You seem to imply that "fascism" should only apply to the extremities of the Nazis.
If you like, they were "extreme fascists", but you don't have to go as far as the Nazi's did to be validly labelled a fascist.
An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.
The term Fascism was first used of the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime of Mussolini in Italy (1922–43), and the regimes of the Nazis in Germany and Franco in Spain were also Fascist. Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, a contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach.
The name comes from Italian fascismo, from fascio ‘bundle, political group’, from Latin fascis ‘rod’.
The term Fascism was first used of the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime of Mussolini in Italy (1922–43), and the regimes of the Nazis in Germany and Franco in Spain were also Fascist. Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, a contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach.
When something is put clearly like this, it is absolutely evident that the USA is already a fascist state. It's not "leaning that way" or "on the way", it is wholly and utterly there. All empowered by a mass of ill educated people prepped to believe anything without, or despite, evidence, just so they can project their inner hatred onto others. The UK is not close to fascism yet, but the likes of Reform UK Ltd are pushing very hard towards it and almost nothing is being done about it. Fascism, or anything bad like it, tends to happen when people are complacent - it's not a sudden revolution, it goes step by step, one little push at a time, each step normalising the steps before them.
Why call 'em fascists?
Absolutely. Call them what they are- Terrorists. The Terrorism Act 2000 uses a definition along the lines of:
'The use or threat of action where the action is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause'
This whole chain of action on their parts seems to fit squarely in that bracket.
It's neither fascism nor extreme socialism; this is authoritarianism, which is completely orthogonal to the overused left/right political axis. As with everything, a sensible medium is the correct solution; the opposite of authoritarianism, is libertarianism, which inevitably leads to societal breakdown, as everyone does whatever they like, and damn the consequences for everybody else. Both are idiotic.
Quote: "........A society where all conversation goes through a gateway...."
True!
But in addition there needs to be control over group meetings....say in a coffee shop, or in a restaurant, or in a private dwelling..............
Hah.......CCTV needed everywhere!!! ........but we've already got that - and more:
- Installed in the streets (by "the authorities")
- Installed in private dwellings (by private citizens, you know....."security" cameras)
- Face recognition technology driven by all of the above
- Credit card scanning.....to find out where you are.....if none of the above gives you away!
- Vehicle number plate scanning.....if none of the above gives you away!
............no escape really!!
Where can I sign up for a credible resistance movement? None available......60 million sheeple already comply!!!
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This is all very well but Ofcom are going after the wrong targets - and will continue to do so because its easier than going after the real targets - the Hyperscale SoMe owners.
So we mum and dad scale hobby sites having to close down due to cost of implementation and those that damage kids an incalculable amount on daily basis go about their business as usual.
Its a joke - as are Ofcom on this issue.
before any site offering any kind of streaming will be saying 'prove you are over 18 by signing up to a random 3rd party who may or may not look after your data'
Or who may turn around and say "Due to the costs and risks of complying with the OSA, we will not be allowing access from UK based IPs" I'm thinking discord , steam, youtube et al.
But then I'm just a simple user of steam from 2004 who trying to figure out why I have to prove I'm over 18 to it to see games with sexual images in them, yet no problem with games that dismember people with a chainsaw, oh and I work with someone younger than my steam account too.
That's some of the ridiculous bits about it isn't it? You have had your steam account for 21 years, all running against their previous verifications and I suspect quite a few payments to Steam (naturally for games that are never played :p) and yet they will still feel a need to question your age.
Oooh, that's a point. Maybe something demonstrably "good" being taken down by this ridiculous OSA might, eventually, get through to people.
When it comes to content that is also unpleasant, any site that has the bible stories on it must also be blocked because codified slavery, infanticide, genocide and murder are all bad. Oh, and abortion too, because the bible is in reality pro-abortion.
"forcing people to share private information – any of which creates a loot-bag for abuse,"
And yet, not once has anyone from the government or Ofcom made any public statements about this.
Not once has anyone in a position to scrutinise, from TV reporters to now the house of lords, ever challenged a a minister or a spokesperson about the obvious GDPR violations this births.
The only time it gets mentioned is the obligatory paragraph in reports like this, which make it LOOK like it's something that gets considered.
What is this controlled scrutiny? Do the government make their presence in interviews contingent on nobody genuinely challenging them on the damning privacy abuse?
@AC
Quote: "...abdicating their responsibility to the state...."
NO!! NO!! NO!! Actually abdicating their responsibility to Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, and so on!!!!
"The State" will be doing NOTHING about enforcement..........NOTHING AT ALL!!! See a comment above:
Quote: """
Yup.....no one is enforcing the 30mph speed limit in streets in London.
Yup.....GDPR is a joke.
Yup.....Ofwat can't stop our rivers overflowing with sewage.
Yup....."PREVENT" doesn't prevent anything.
Yup.....millions are using VPN technology....and the Online Safety Act is also a joke.
....and now we find out that the Plod can't police anything.
"""
The Plod comment refers to link: https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/09/nca_legacy_tech/
"The regulator also wants sites to deploy hash-matching to spot known illegal content – everything from CSAM to non-consensual intimate images"
Why not take the simple route and say "if you display illegal content on your website, you will go to jail"? And don't let the website owners hide behind the excuse of "it's not us, it's our users". That might focus their minds on the problem a bit more.
Ok, so what with international borders etc. I know prosecuting website owners might be tricky, but it's a start towards getting the site owners to take some responsibility.
It's past a fools paradise when these so-called moral protectors delusionally think they can stop kids.
A couple years ago setup a Chromebook for grandson for his secondary school, and Mother Google saw his age and enacted protections. All that did was inflict countless arguments with him on why he couldn't install X, or Y, or Z. Once he turned 13, Mother Google removed all protections and the arguments ceased as he had unfettered access to everything.
Moral?
None of this crap the luddites try to turn into law works.
"Legal but harmful" isn't crawling awfully close to censorship, it IS censorship!!
And that's apart from the fact that sexual explicit images shown to minors have never proved to be harmful in the first place. This has only been assumed or stoked up by some NGO. It's a ploy and excuse to push-through Orwellian legislation.
Democracy in the UK is all but dead now that even "aggressive communication" is branded a felony, warrants a visit by the police and arrest. Neither the public nor the MP's are doing anything about it, merely seeking "clarification" from their peers or the government. Thirty people a day are being arrested in the UK for making "hateful" online speech.
