Ofcom is turning the UK into an international laughing stock
ANDREW TETTENBORN
We know that the Online Safety Act (OSA) is a disaster. The group it is billed as protecting, children and young people, is not only rebellious: it is precisely the class most adept at using VPNs and other devices to circumvent it. And this is even before you get to the unintended consequences. The more we try to regulate the semi-respectable internet sites out there, the more we push thrill-seeking young people to the darkest and most frightening corners of cyberspace, where they can suffer serious harm. Furthermore, the greater the pressure on the young to sign up to dodgy free VPNs, the greater the likelihood of their later suffering trolling and identity theft. Some protection.
Meanwhile, adults, whose rights to view and read what they like are ostensibly unaffected, increasingly face exasperating demands to prove their age in order to watch not only pornography (possibly fair enough), but a great deal of other material too, including political stuff. And a number of wholly admirable sites like Wikipedia, caught arbitrarily in the headlights of a juggernaut that was never aimed anywhere near it but now is near-unstoppable, are seriously thinking of limiting their presence in the UK, and hence UK citizens’ access to the information they provide.
But what has gone less noticed in this respect is the harm done by the OSA to Britain’s reputation abroad. When people like JD Vance call out the UK’s descent in 50 years from robust defender of free speech to obsessive would-be regulator of just about anything that moves in cyberspace, the progressive establishment may sneer and point to the Trump administration’s own free speech record (which is by no means impressive). But the fact remains that Vance has a point, and we should take notice.
Even worse, however, is the way the Act is causing us to interfere in the affairs of foreign countries in a way that would outrage us if the boot were on the other foot. Imagine that a London-based website concerned with international affairs, blessed with a large African following, gets a formal letter from a civil servant in, say, Burkina Faso. This letter states that because people read the site in Burkina Faso, it is ordered, on pain of massive penalties, to moderate its tone on African affairs and file formal documentation with the Ministry of Communications in Ouagadougou demonstrating its commitment to obey Burkina Faso law. You’d see this as a comic opera effort to muscle in on matters that were none of that country’s business. If the letter came from Beijing and referred to Chinese law, you’d add that it looked like serious censorship.
Yet that is precisely what we are now doing to sites abroad. This year, Ofcom, which administers the OSA, wrote formally to American online forums Gab, Kiwifarms and 4Chan, demanding that they agree to obey UK law and file vast amounts of OSA-required compliance paperwork with Ofcom to prove it. Since none of these sites have any presence or assets in the UK (although they are popular here), they gently reminded Ofcom of the existence of the First Amendment, and less gently told it to go knit. We don’t know what happened to Gab or Kiwifarms: but Ofcom has now, apparently with a straight face, fined 4Chan £20,000 and threatened further daily fines until it complies. Understandably 4Chan is unamused. It has said that it won’t, and that there’s nothing Ofcom can do. And of course it is right: as its Connecticut lawyers said with nice understatement in their response to Ofcom, ‘American businesses do not surrender their First Amendment rights because a foreign bureaucrat sends them an email’.
Comic opera this may be, and 4Chan will doubtless carry on as it always has. But the harm has been done. For one thing, letters like this make Britain look simply ridiculous. When King Cnut told the sea to keep away from his feet, with predictable non-results, he was at least demonstrating to his entourage the futility of such an enterprise: Ofcom’s missives ordering US websites about are, by contrast, apparently serious.
But more to the point, they portray the UK in a more sinister light. As a result of episodes like this, the country where we live comes across as as a would-be bully, that thinks nothing of ordering foreigners around in their own country. It also appears as a country that wishes to place all sorts of restrictions on internet speech, and at times to set up a kind of Great British Firewall; it will not have been lost on US websites that in the last resort it has the power to UK ISPs to block foreign sites that do not do as it says.
Didn’t someone in Government once say that Britain wants to be well-placed to benefit from the information economy? If it does, it certainly seems to be going about it in a mighty queer way.
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This article (Ofcom is turning the UK into an international laughing stock) was created and published by CAPX and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Andrew Tettenborn
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