The UK’s Online Safety bill is one of the most far reaching pieces of legislation ever proposed in the UK. It has now passed its final hurdle to become UK law.
The idea of the Online Safety Bill dates back before the infamous 2017 Digital Economies Act and attempts for a “Porn Ban” seen in many headlines. What they created was a problem in search of a solution and that solution was The Online Safety Bill and its infamous “Legal but Harmful” wording:
With the passage of this extraordinary legislation, it is important to understand what the legislative and especially the enforcement environment will be.
You cannot explain the implementation of The Online Safety Bill without talking about OFCOM, and how it serves as a media super-regulator set up by the Blair government. It is currently a sleeping giant, but it has always had sweeping powers:
The Online Safety bill and its remit has already been tested, ahead of its implementation OFCOM was given limited oversight of online video providers based in the UK, and immediately set about using BitChute—what was the UK’s leading dissident video platform—as something of a head on a spike. This seems to be the trajectory the UK government is gearing up to take with platforms such as Rumble, who must soon choose between capitulating or being shut out of both the EU and UK market entirely:
These plans have been decades in the making, with interlocking legislation going back to the first Blair government. These plans have been slowly and quietly revealing themselves, but to most this will all look like a sudden blind-side.
We have always strived to make out work a resource for research and a node to build on for even deeper dives, as such we are making available for free three sets of our Research Notes we supply to paid substack subscribers, who also get ad free audio podcast versions of our streams. All three of our Online Safety Bill and OFCOM notes are now also available for a limited period:
We hope these resources prove useful in understanding the changes that are to come. Good luck out there.