As many readers will know, the Online Safety Act is now in operation in the UK. I have checked with Ofcom to see if this site is impacted and based on the answers that I provided, this is their response:
That makes life easier for me.
However, the Act has serious consequences for others. Hardly noticed in the news media (which is exempt from the Act, and so very biased) has been the result of Wikipedia's legal action to ask that it be exempted from the requirements of the Act. It has lost its appeal on this, as the Brighton Argus (making its first appearance in these pages) reported:
Wikipedia has lost a High Court challenge against the UK Government over verification requirements in the Online Safety Act.
They argued that compliance with the new law would mean Wikipedia would have to impose verification on people who did not want it or limit the amount of monthly UK users.
But in a judgment on Monday, Mr Justice Johnson rejected those claims, saying there may be ways to work within the law “without causing undue damage to Wikipedia's operations”.
This is very obviously absurd. As a consequence of this ruling, those under 18 (as well as everyone else) will now have to prove their age on Wikipedia to gain access. Additionally, Wikipedia will need to rank all its pages to block those that should not be accessible, which will be nearly impossible. It's as if our government and those right-wing think tanks behind this legislation (most especially Carnegie UK) wanted to deny access to non-mainstream media sources of information in this country.
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The whole Online Safety Act shenanigans makes me angry. Experts were telling the Government for years that it is impossible to do what they are trying to do. And it’s ridiculously easy to circumvent the rules for anyone who actually wants to view adult content.
The net result will be little restriction on children viewing adult content, and massive costs and hassle for the rest of us. Not least, restricting access to news and other stuff we should want people (even children) to access.
Fundamentally, this seems to be an exercise in Victorian prudery, which as in Victorian times will just succeed in driving the problem underground and into the hands of criminals who will be stealing identities and god knows what else.
Was this really the top problem facing UK in 2025?
In a word, no.
Not just Wikipedia – many sites, especially useful specialist forums, are shutting down in the UK or geoblocking UK users – there’s a list building up here: https://www.blocked.org.uk/osa-blocks
Ah so the voting age is being reduced to 16 but between this age and 18 young voters can’t access the useful information that Wikipedia provides particularly on matters economic and political. Joined up thinking obviously not currently a UK government speciality!
Unkess we prove our age, none of us will access it.
Get used to it: you are goimng to have to prove your age a great many times over coming weeks.
It’s as if by using some kind of moral imperative, our overlords want to stop and hinder people from seeing and speaking the truth and speaking any kind of truth to power. Surely that can’t be right? That only happens in China or Russia or Tajikistan or somewhere else, not the UK?
You’ll be suggesting next we are not a representative democracy anymore or a land overflowing with freedom, milk and honey, but rather a backward and regressive and grubby and proto fascist society run by the wealthy for the wealthy as a corrupt kleptocracy and money laundering operation where rules and regulations and law do not apply to the elites and wealthy and connected and the poor and disabled are punished in some kind of monstrous and disgusting perversion of real justice but the msm and political class rubberstamp it all by being bribed and bought and paid for?
I do hope you’re not suggesting anything of the sort Richard, because it couldn’t be further from the truth.
So GROWTH predicted for the VPN business, until gov catches up with it.
Savvy youngsters of all varieties know how to beat this anyway.
Digital privacy campaigners warned about all the bad side-effects of poorly managed age verification, with the major one being the absolute total certainty that their databases would be a goldmine for hackers and identity thieves.
(and no doubt a marketing opportunity for both honest and crooked “security” consultants, and identity-theft-protection services.)
Know any big organisations that HAVEN’T had a data breach in the last 2 years?
More gov lunacy to “protect the children” which WONT protect the children and will harm everyone else except crooks and opportunists.
I wonder how X and Meta will handle this? I am certain they will tell the UK Gov’t what they will tolerate znd the UK gov will simply agree.
And what about search engines?
Oh well, time to find a reliable VPN.
Good article here on the subject:
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/were-losing-the-internet-but-its
It was noted that the main gainers will be companies that offer age verification systems – many are Israeli & thus one could characterise this as Yvette Cooper (a zionist) doing a favour for her Israeli chums (also zionists).
VPNs are one way around it, but the link to the (other) blog contains quite useful info on making it difficult for governments etc to track you/monitor you.
Cooper is one in a long line of chancers & liars & con-artists who want to improve societal controls better to tell you what to think – or chuck you in jail if you utter incorrect phrases and don’t think like LINO liars.
Thanks
I’m wary of the Brave browser recommended in the ‘donotpanic’ article. It was founded by Brendan Eich after he was forced to resign from Mozilla, when it emerged he opposed same-sex marriage, and it’s also part-owned by Peter Thiel – known fascist close to Musk – and it’s heavily into cryptocurrency.
Steer clear then
I think the judgement is a bit more nuanced than you are representing it: there is still some scope for challenge by judical review and for the Government to not put Wikipedia in Category 1.
More details in the Register coverage.
But I don’t remain hopeful: looks like I will need to get a VPN.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/11/wikimedia_foundation_loses_online_safety/
I keep saying this to the apologists and uncritical thinkers, this act does not protect anyone’s privacy as private companies outside the UK are collecting ID’s and photo scans of everyone in the UK now. When, not if, these get leaked it’s going to put everyone including children at risk of impersonation, fraud and especially children to blackmail.
In addition a nefarious actor may target children through free circumventing software or verification companies. The reality is this act makes us less safe online not more safe and the government has shirked it’s responsibility entirely, look at how the EU is handling this.
MP response:
Dear Alex
Thank you for contacting me about the Online Safety Act. I am strongly in favour of free speech and agree that freedom of expression and the right to privacy are of crucial importance.
The Online Safety Act was passed by the previous Government. I believe it takes a proportionate approach by focusing on addressing the greatest risks of harm to users, while protecting freedom of expression. The Act does not ban end-to-end encryption.
Protecting free speech should not stop us from tackling the growing epidemic of online harm. The safety of children should be at the foundation of our online world, and the age verification rules were introduced to ensure service providers protect children from harmful content, including pornography, and the promotion of suicide and self-harm.
The implementation of the Act must be compatible with the European Convention of Human Rights, including in relation to freedom of expression. I am assured that safeguards for freedom of expression have been built in throughout the Online Safety Act. This will be particularly important for Ofcom – the regulator in charge of implementing the Act – as it makes enforcement decisions.
To ensure the Act does not disproportionately harm content creators, it sets out the need for robust complaint systems on tech platforms in the case of accounts being suspended unfairly. In addition, Ofcom is legally required to ensure burdens on providers are proportionate to their risk factors, size, and capacity, with the online digital toolkit, aimed at helping smaller organisations with compliance.
I hope that the safeguards in place help reassure you that protecting freedom of expression and the right to privacy is in place.
Thanks
And that was waffle, as I am feeling generous so far this morning.
Thanks Richard. I’m mainly highlighting that at least my MP is not engaging honestly in any discussion about it. As evidenced when Peter Kyle tried to licken opponents of the act as child predators.
I will vote for any party that repeals this act and I hope Jeremy Cobyns new party rightly wants to remove this.
I think that most people would agree that allowing children access to hardcore pornography is not a good idea. ISP’s family safety features are poor. Given that, I don’t think it is reasonable to expect any govt to sit idly by and allow unfettered access to, quite frankly, horrific content. I’m going to be unpopular, I fear. I have a 12 Yr old son. I used to work in IT and I still have conversations with people who do and I know this is a difficult problem to solve. My son’s devices are locked down as is the Internet at home. He has no access to the worst excesses of the Internet except through his friends devices. Whilst I do have the technical expertise to protect my son, most parents haven’t a clue. Should we not make any attempt to protect all children? We have made virtually no attempt to protect children from this stuff in 30yrs, isn’t that long enough to do nothing?
Tell me how a solution that locks people out of YouTube and Wikipedia whilst requiring the disclosure of a lot of personal data to potentially deeply unreliable third parties is a good idea?
And for the record, porn was available in my school when I was aged 12 in 1970. Not as bad as now (no doubt) but I am no expert on this (without apology) but let’s not pretend you or anyone else can prevent your son seeing porn – because you can’t, I am certain. Sorry – but the best you can do is talk about it, why it’s dangerous and why the attitudes displayed by it are wrong, and hope you gave some impact, because you’re not going to stop its availability.
It’s hard because the will to tackle the issue in the right way isn’t there due to generally legislators acting in their own interests and often being woefully under informed about technology.
Mandate all devices that can connect and feed content from the internet to have a kids mode, a.k.a. parental controls active.
This kids mode sends a standardised flag to all services saying that this request has parental controls active.
Service then displays kids version or safe version.
This then puts the onus on parents to use these modes which are on most devices. While making private companies accountable for not moderating their own content.
Bonus points for segmenting the parental controls between standard and safest and say “teen” where some extra content at the private companies discretion can be displayed.
And you think they could not get into their parents’ machines?
You want to base an argument on access to YouTube and Wikipedia?
I agree with other posters though, that our politicians have a woeful misunderstanding of tech. There are bound to be better solutions that a wider debate might have thrown up. But the notion that we throw our hands in the air and do nothing for fear that people miss a YouTube vid is, I think deeply irresponsible.
If the Web had never been invented and a private company announced a new service that it were about to release that would pump hardcore porn, suicide promoting material, graphic violent videos and nazi propoganda into our homes there would be calls to ban it altogether.
You think access to access to YouTube and Wikipedia does not matter.
Frankly, how miserably elitist of you.
And how utterly absurd your last paragraph is. Arguing based on reality is what I do. Like someone who obviously thinks he is an academic, you are arguing in absurdum. I am not interested, anbd I doubt anyone else is. Please don’t call again.
I work for a large publisher, for last month across 13 websites, 81% of our traffic is mobile, 17% desktop, and 2% tablet. Most adults will have their phones on them and so children aren’t going to be getting into them. Desktop computers are decreasing in adults, often replaced by work laptops and for many reasons these should be more secure. Yes I am aware adults aren’t always but if someone isn’t securing their work computer from their kids they have bigger issues.
However we shouldn’t get caught up on preventing all access to adult content to everyone under the age of 18, to do so is impractical without turning us into a police state and massively underestimating the lengths and resourcefulness of teenagers. Instead we should make a system where it’s very easy for parents to exercise control over what their child is exposed to, easy for private companies to know they’re dealing with a child allowing for a child only restriction and thus keeping the vast majority of adult content from children without asking the entire population of a country to compromise their privacy if they want to discuss beer on reddit.
However, parental control tech has been around since I was a child. At what point do we have to say it’s the parents not engaging with the tools to keep their child safe online? If easy parental controls that pop up on first boot are mandated on all devices a child reasonably might have (phone, tablet, chromebook, video device) then the onus is on the parents.
I don’t think anyone (except those making money out of child pornography) wants children exposed to pornography, violence or economic exploitation.
The “we must protect the children” argument is a dangerous one though. Fascist are currently using it in a racist way to argue against immigration.
It IS possible to protect the children (although protection against economic exploitation never seems v high on the government or religious lists) but the Online Safety Bill is an awful way of failing to protect children while destroying the freedom we enjoy to access internet information and express opinions that the powerful dont like.
My arguments are:
1. It won’t work. Kids can and do evade the controls.
2. Age verification databases in private foreign hands will be misused by foreign states, or will be hacked. (Blackmail, extortion, identity theft)
3. Legal activities will be severely curtailed either by sloppy legislation or deliberately dishonest manipulation (eg access to Wikipedia, or Signal messaging pulling out of UK – I use both.)
This CAN be achieved, but not by this legislation. This law is NOT about protecting children. If govt cared about children, they would have to do so many U turns they would get dizzy.
I’ve been arguing this since the early noughties as a digital privacy campaigner. I’ve experienced personally malicious state and commercial surveillance and learned how to protect myself (but I know that if the state or a foreign state really wants to spy on me, they will – eg: Pegasus software) . But Ive never been so worried about the internet as now. It is being stolen from us, under the guise of “protecting the children”.
You and I DO want to protect the children, but government doesn’t, corporate finance doesn’t, and foreign states don’t. What they want is authority, and control, surveillance, & profit.
It’s another case of “won’t somebody think of the children” politics, whilst really being about control. It’s the same group behind these plans in America, Australia, and here (surprise surprise, the anglosphere again), and is more about tracking people than protecting kids. Children are more vulnerable to exploitation when in poverty. Start there, maybe?
So while I also have some concerns about the OSA I can still access Wikipedia and a few of the sites I tried from blocked. The only sites I can’t access without age verification are those with obvious adult content. I have a VPN for use on unsecured networks but turned it off when trying this. So while I think we should be concerned as it can be used incorrectly and more concerningly malevolently by future bad actors, are we sure that it doesn’t do more good than harm? I would have liked to have seen more public debate about the other methods of doing this as I am not going to give any information to a random age checker on every site that is deemed age sensitive. But I would like to see some data on exactly what has been blocked rather than a few examples that appear to be wrong.
Many sites have yet to ask for age verification as yet: that is why.
I had thought that this was just a British issue based on the act recently implemented. But I watched a YouTube video by an American creator which describes the same age verification being implemented by Google on Youtube in early 2026.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB7INRHrObI
You can fast forward to 13:40 for his amusing song on the subject.
If these rules are being implemented outside the UK then I suspect the architect of the rules is from outside the UK, I wonder who that is?
I have been giving some consideration to the future of the internet for a while, I think it was since the coms cable was cut under the Baltic Sea. In the same week I read about a Russian ship being escorted out of the Irish Sea. That got me thinking about what risk there is to the global communications networks business and private life is dependent upon now. In addition the cybers attacks, attacks on important hubs on the network is something a hostile entity may use to disrupt and destabilise the west. I have also considered the implications of AI, it is going to increase the amount of traffic and the storage requirements, and if badly implemented will bots in one server farm being talking to bots on other servers farms and us humans won’t get a look in. Could greater demand being put on the global network for both transmission and storage lead to an issue with the business plan? Much of what we use on the internet depends on advertising and marketing budgets to pay for it? We only pay for it with our willingness to consume advertising. Is big tech foreseeing a time when there will not be sufficient income to fund the investment in hardware required to meet the demand? Are these ‘online safety’ rules are a smoke screen to regulate demand? All this may be the result of an over imaginative mind (I do have ADHD) but I’m fairly certain the internet of the future will not be the same as the one we use today.
I have tried to find if there is an index monitoring global marketing budgets, but I’ve not been able to find one, it would be interesting to know what the trend is. If someone knows of such a thing please post a link.
Global ad spend is estimated at >$1Tn but obviously it’s a bit difficult to get a good handle on it due to many companies taking slices of the spend along the chain and general opacity.
You’re not wrong with these thoughts and it’s not hard to see why. There’s millions of videos made a day that only a few people see and it all needs processing, storing, caching etc. Ad revenue isn’t what people think it is. A big highly impactful ad might earn you a $3+ CPM but low value ads less than $0.01 in some areas. CPM is cost per mile, which is ad tech lingo but essentially means that much revenue divided by 1000. So that $3 ad actually earned you $0.003, not even a cent.
Anyway I don’t want to constantly add comments to this thread but thought I could give you some information.
https://www.adexchanger.com/content-studio/the-new-ad-tech-compass-how-to-guide-media-performance-with-precision/
Thanks for the reply and the link.