UK Lords take aim at Ofcom's 'child-protection' upgrades to Online Safety Act
- Reference: 1757923242
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/09/15/uk_lords_take_aim_at/
- Source link:
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 Safety Act (OSA). Andy Burrows of the Molly Rose Foundation, Rani Govender from the NSPCC, and Baroness Kidron OBE of 5Rights will be asked whether the changes will actually deliver more safety – or just more compliance burden, privacy nightmares, and unintended consequences.
Ofcom's [1]amendments aim to beef up the OSA with a fresh set of obligations for platforms. This includes more aggressive age-assurance rules to determine when users are children, new restrictions on livestreaming that require platforms to disable comments, virtual gifts, and reactions when minors are involved, as well as blocking viewers from recording children's livestreams altogether.
[2]
The regulator also wants sites to deploy hash-matching to spot known illegal content – everything from CSAM to non-consensual intimate images – and roll out automated tools to flag grooming, fraud, self-harm, and suicide content.
[3]
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The House of Lords says it will quiz the online safety campaigners about the likely effectiveness of Ofcom's proposed new protections and whether the proposed new protections around livestreams are adequate, or if children should be banned from livestreaming altogether.
Where it all went sideways
The Online Safety Act, pushed through in 2023 as the government's shiny new child-protection regime, promised to strong-arm platforms into compliance and scrub the internet into something safe enough for under-18s. But critics have been warning since day one that it hands ministers and Ofcom powers broad enough to steamroll free speech and snoop on users.
[5]Experts scrutinized Ofcom's Online Safety Act governance. They're concerned
[6]UK toughens Online Safety Act with ban on self-harm content
[7]Good morning, Brit Xbox fans – ready to prove your age?
[8]Google yet to take down 'screenshot-grabbing' Chrome VPN extension
Civil liberties groups [9]argue "legal but harmful" content rules creep dangerously close to censorship, while large parts of the Act risk being unworkable or undermining encryption. Meanwhile, tech firms and privacy advocates warn that "highly effective" age assurance could mean collecting biometric data, verifying IDs, scanning or estimating ages from faces, or forcing people to share private information – any of which creates a loot-bag for abuse, hack, or mission creep by government agencies.
There has also been a backlash over enforcement mechanics. Some porn-site operators and smaller platforms say the cost and complexity of compliance are already driving them to block UK users or shut down entirely. [10]VPN usage has surged as people try to sidestep geo-based blocks, age verification, or identity checks.
In Tuesday's hearing, the Lords will almost certainly press the witnesses on whether these new age assurance and livestreaming proposals will exacerbate those controversies.
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The Register will be watching for whether the answers suggest that Ofcom's proposals will be a genuine advance, or yet another heavy-handed policy that promises safety but delivers expense and erosion of digital freedoms. ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/consultations/category-1-10-weeks/consultation-online-safety---additional-safety-measures/main-documents/consultation-additional-safety-measures-30-july-2025.pdf?v=399432
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aMfjt4ZQk6iRcUzdhmcK2gAAAA4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aMfjt4ZQk6iRcUzdhmcK2gAAAA4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aMfjt4ZQk6iRcUzdhmcK2gAAAA4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/11/concern_and_sympathy_as_experts/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/09/selfharm_online_safety_act/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/xbox_online_safety_act/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/freevpn_privacy_research/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/the_uk_online_safety_act/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/08/proxy_usage_jumps_in_uk/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aMfjt4ZQk6iRcUzdhmcK2gAAAA4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"We Are Doing Something"
....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!!
Re: "We Are Doing Something"
You forgot about this gem: https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/09/nca_legacy_tech/
Yup.......Plod don't have the technology to police anything!!!!
Re: "We Are Doing Something"
It's also a gem, because shows incompetence of the watchdog if they say something like this:
The watchdog argues that the NCA has also been slow to fully embrace the benefits of cloud-based technology, which has adverse practical consequences.
just bollox
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 ?
Privatized Great Firewall
Since anyone providing unfiltered internet will go to jail, and the definition of "banned" content is arbitrary, capricious, and subject to interpretation on the day, simple fear will cause the open internet to die.
House of Lords
Isn't that Mandelson's club?
So they're going to hear from three online safety advocates whether the measures they advocate for will work. They say "Yep, it's fine" and we all knock off for lunch?
Why would they know any more about how it'll work than the politicians who passed it? Where are the privacy and tech experts?
The UK already had porn blocks. It didn't need the OSA.
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.
Re: The UK already had porn blocks. It didn't need the OSA.
It has kpr0n blocks but not pr0n blocks... there's a difference.
Well...
Maybe the lords should just ask themselves [while not sleeping at £350/day] whether the entire point of the 'online safety' act, from day one, is to enable and empower mission-creep as its primary purpose.
Govts just love free speech and freedoms [not]
UK Fascism
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.
The "no recording of childrens livestreams" basically lets Labour and Tory paedophiles say really dirty things to children and then have plausible deniability.
Thats its entire purpose. So they can get their sick thrills, and no media outlets can prove they did it.