Ofcom Watch

Three years after the UK's Online Safety Act received Royal Assent, no-one is happy and the air is thick with complaints.

Supporters say that implementation has been too slow, too cautious, and that the Act hasn't made any real difference. Enforcement is said to be a paper tiger: Ofcom is too risk-averse, interprets the Act too narrowly, doesn't have strong enough powers, or all three. Ofcom stands accused of failing to meet the expectations of Parliamentarians.

Critics of the Act complain (among many other things) of lack of clarity on scope, baked-in over-removal of user content, chilling effects on small low risk forums, privacy impacts, and overreaching age-gating of user content.

In parallel we have the forthcoming under-16 social media ban. That, according to the DCMS Minister in a recent e-petition debate, will capture user-to-user platforms whose purpose is to enable online interaction and which allow users to post material, alongside having an algorithm. The Culture Secretary has recently suggested that that might extend to online marketplaces with messaging functionality.

All this is taking place against a background of US political perception that UK and EU online safety laws are guilty of extraterritorial overreach.

Can the Online Safety Act be fixed?

See article from cyberleagle.com

Repressive new online safety measures have failed to limit the proportion of children suffering harm from social media, the UK's internet censor has admitted.

The proportion of children being fed unsafe content that often left them frightened, confused and upset, was almost unchanged, according to an Ofcom review of the first nine months of supposedly strict requirements on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.

Under the Online Safety Act, the tech giants had to protect children from harmful content including pornography, serious violence, suicide material, racism, misogyny and bullying, with a series of specific duties introduced in summer 2025. But Ofcom found that at a total level there was no significant change in the proportion of children encountering harmful content over the first nine months after the children's safety duties came into force in July 2025. It called the finding concerning and said there was no evidence indicating a change in the severity of harm.

The regulator is already facing a wave of legal actions from tech companies challenging its powers including the Instagram operator Meta, as well as TikTok and X. It has warned it risks being absolutely clobbered legally by deep-pocketed individuals and firms.

Of course Ofcom has spun the abject failure as a reason for doubling down on censorship. The censor has proposed adding additional censorship rules banning content that makes children feel bad about their bodies or else somehow makes them feel unhappy (with the right think terminology  equivalencing this to mental health issues like depression).

Ofcom were grilled by Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 20th October 2026. The committee is investigated the effectiveness of Ofcom in enforcing internet censorship laws contained in the Online Safety Act.

The act has been in force for about 15 months and in that time Ofcom have issued 11 fines mostly to porn websites for failing to implement ID/age verification. Other websites targeted were the US based free speech forum 4Chan, and also the widely reviled Sanctioned Suicide forum.

Ofcom boss Melanie Dawes admitted that tech firms have paid just the two smallest of the eleven fines handed out under the Online Safety Act since March last year. She conceded nine remain unpaid, albeit one of these has not yet passed its due date and another is being appealed.

She did point out that two of the nine have now implemented the required ID/age verification and four have self geo-blocked all users with a UK IP address. Three are totally defying Ofcom by continuing on unchanged.

Dawes added that enforcement measures have run against a brick wall for foreign companies without a presence in the UK. She said:

We won't be able to recover every single fine on online safety. If foreign courts decide try and get in our way, there will be a point at which we have to accept that we won't be able to recover that money.

The US lawyer representing some of the US victims of the censorship law Preston Byrne had been particularly vocal about Ofcom's censorship attempts by shredding Ofcom's censorship letters and using them at hamster litter. He continually challenged Ofcom to fight him in the US courts where the famous First Amendment to the US Constitutions guarantees free speech for all Americans. Byrne colourfully explains:

Unless Ofcom is prepared to sail a British invasion fleet here and land ground troops, enforcement would indeed have to proceed through American courts. Which presents the following problem for Ofcom:

American courts generally decline to enforce foreign judgments that violate the United States Constitution.

It would be a gift to 4chan if Ofcom decided to show up in an American court after all this, waiving sovereign immunity and thus facing the prospect of an adverse merits ruling in the process. Filing that lawsuit would be suicidal, leading to virtually certain defeat and total loss of enforcement credibility in the United States. It will almost certainly never happen, not for 4chan, and likely not for any other American target, either.

What will happen next is that Ofcom is going to go back to Parliament to ask for the authority to obtain interim business disruption measures --  i.e., more or less unilateral censorship powers to block foreign websites in the UK before starting an enforcement process, rather than after. These powers were explicitly rejected by Parliament the last time around and have even now been repudiated by Nadine Dorries, the former MP who introduced the Bill, having seen what a mess Ofcom has made of it. These powers will also be easily defeated through the use of a VPN.

The UK thus continues its authoritarian backsliding. Sorting out their own country is, ultimately, a matter for the British, and opposing the grant of new powers for Ofcom -- an agency which was held off by a pair of American solo lawyers working for free -- on domestic policy grounds is a task for the growing UK free speech movement to take up, with urgency.

Ofcom bosses also explained to the parliamentary committee that geo-blocking UK users from access to website is as far as censorship actions can go. If a website self-geo-blocks there is little point pursing an ISP block as that effectively adds nothing further to the censorship. UK VPN users will still be able to access the website either way.

Update on existing investigations: Provisional Decisions

Web Prime Inc

On 29 September 2026, we issued a provisional notice of contravention to Web Prime Inc as the provider of:

• anysex.com
• fapality.com
• mylust.com
• xcafe.com
• yourlust.com

This notice sets out our provisional view that we have reasonable grounds to believe that Web Prime has failed to comply with its duty to use highly effective ID/age assurance. We have also provisionally found that Web Prime has failed, and is failing, to comply with its duties  to respond to a statutory request for information.

The websites are currently self blocked to readers with a UK IP address but may be accessed using a VPN.

 

The provider of porntrex.com

Ofcom came to the same conclusion about the website porntrex.com. Again this website is currently self blocked to readers with a UK IP address but may be accessed using a VPN.

 

First Time Videos LLC -- case closure

Ofcom closed its investigation into First Time Videos LLC in relation to its failure to implement adequate ID/age verification. Ofcom had imposed a penalty on First Time Videos of £80,000.

In response to our investigation, First Time Videos LLC has implemented a block to restrict users with UK IP addresses from accessing its service and has advised Ofcom that it will put highly effective age assurance in place on its services. For the moment the FTV websites still give the impression that they are available after paying with a debit card or credit card.

First Time Videos LLC has paid the penalty set out in the Confirmation Decision. This investigation is now closed.