Last week, the United Kingdom began enforcing sweeping new verification rules as part of its 2023 Online Safety Law (OSL). The Act’s requirements, meant to prevent minors from accessing explicit materials, have triggered a significant public backlash, with pressure mounting on the Labour government to repeal the OSL.
Resistance to the law’s implementation stems from the British government’s overapplication of the verification system. When initially proposed in 2019, the system was meant to prevent minors from accessing pornographic material by requiring age verification on explicit sites. Since then, the number of affected platforms has steadily grown to encompass any platform that allows user-generated content.
Now, U.K. users are expected to submit age verification to access Google, YouTube, Instagram, Discord, Reddit, X, Snapchat, Twitch, Steam, Roblox, PSN, Xbox Live, Epic Games, Spotify, Apple Music, and more. These extensive verification requirements extend to the majority of websites users access on a daily basis. McAfee reports that over 6,000 websites have implemented an age verification process, leaving few corners of the internet untouched.
Even for platforms not specifically mentioned in the Act, the risk of reprisals has pushed companies to voluntarily implement verification systems. The Act uses broad definitions of key terms such as “harmful content,” “search service,” and “likely to be accessed”—terms left poorly defined, leaving enforcement decisions to the discretion of the Office of Communications (Ofcom).
Unfortunately, Ofcom has demonstrated that this ambiguity is an intentional feature. In its risk assessment guide, Ofcom states:
“It is the service provider’s responsibility to determine the distinct services it has which are in scope of the Act,” placing full liability for compliance on service providers.
As intended, the Act requires each company to conduct its own risk assessment to determine whether compliance is required. For companies that fail to make the correct judgment, penalties are severe: the Act gives Ofcom the authority to levy a fine of up to 10% of a company’s global revenue.
The Act follows in the footsteps of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which established strict requirements for digital platforms’ handling of sensitive data. Enacted in 2018, GDPR has become a costly endeavor. Compliance alone is estimated to have reduced global profitability by 8%, while the law has been used to issue over 1,000 penalties in its first five years of enforcement—the largest fine costing Amazon €746 million in 2023.
The verification requirements of the OSL risk being even more extreme. The threat of large penalties, paired with the uncertain nature of the Act, has left companies scrambling to ensure they meet any possible interpretation of its requirements. This impact isn’t confined to Europe: YouTube has already announced it would expand its age verification system worldwide. The U.K. has strong-armed companies into complying with its digital policies, making global adoption the only surefire way to satisfy government regulators.
The Act’s broad implementation and strict requirements have led to public outcry over concerns of regulatory overreach and attempted censorship by the U.K. government. In less than a week since implementation began, over 450,000 U.K. residents petitioned to repeal the OSL, while surpassing the 100,000-signature threshold required to trigger a debate in Parliament in just two days. Meanwhile, VPN usage has skyrocketed: Proton VPN alone reported a 1,800% increase in user sign-ups following the law’s implementation.
The message is clear: the U.K. public oppose the government’s attempt to broadly assert its authority over every asset of the digital landscape.
The provisions of the bill go far beyond its original mandate to crack down on explicit material—limiting access to large swaths of the internet, raising the cost of compliance, and leveraging uncertainty to demand punitive fines from American tech companies.
Americans and American enterprise must not be forced to abide by U.K. regulations that attempt to limit the personal freedoms of the billions who use the internet every day.
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Author: Caden Hubbs
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