- UK Parliament held a debate on the Online Safety Act (OSA)
- This comes after a petition contesting the law amassed 500k signatures
- MPs mostly agreed OSA should not be repealed, suggesting stricter rules
After officially becoming law in October 2023, the Online Safety Act was back in the UK Parliament yesterday after a petition calling for its repeal gained over half a million signatures.
The petition argued that the law “is far broader and restrictive than is necessary in a free society.” However, most MPs suggested that rather than being repealed, the legislation should actually be strengthened.
Brits have long been concerned about the Online Safety Act’s potential to encourage online censorship, and have repeatedly highlighted the negative impact mandatory age checks could have on privacy and security.
Despite not leading to immediate changes, the debate offered an opportunity for MPs to challenge the government on the law’s implementation. Here are the main takeaways.
What MPs are saying on age verification
Most of the MPs taking part in yesterday’s discussion argued that the OSA is a crucial piece of legislation to protect children online. However, some MPs did raise a few challenges around its implementation.
Specifically, lawmakers discussed concerns around freedom of speech and referenced examples of political discourse being unnecessarily age-gated.
“What is or is not age-restricted needs to be far clearer, more consistent, and more proportionate,” said Independent MP for Dewsbury and Batley, Iqbal Mohamed.
Some MPs also echoed experts’ and citizens’ concerns about age verification’s negative impact on privacy, with Victoria Collins, a Liberal Democrat MP, arguing that “age assurance systems also pose a problem to data protection and privacy.”
But MPs seemed to be in agreement that none of these challenges warranted a real discussion about the law’s future. Instead, the focus remained on refining how the law is implemented.
A particular area of focus was the use of VPN apps.
While many people have turned en masse to the best VPN apps to protect their privacy, lawmakers expressed concern that children could use these apps to evade checks. Consequently, the UK Lords proposed a ban on VPNs for children last week.
From the debate, it’s clear that lawmakers will continue to monitor VPN usage and have not ruled out introducing stricter rules against VPN providers in the coming year.
Encryption – not a main concern for MPs
Besides age verification, digital rights advocates and technologists are aslo concerned about other controversial provisions that are yet to be fully implemented and could pose a risk to end-to-end encryption.
After all, the UK regulator Ofcom has already shared plans to double down on file monitoring in 2026, expanding detection requirements of illegal materials to more online services, no matter if these are encrypted.
Before the debate, Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO at the Index of Censorship, also told TechRadar to be especially worried about the prospect that end-to-end encryption could be broken by future implementation of the law.
“These apps are a lifeline. Even setting aside the high price that dissidents would pay if they lost that privacy. The average person should have it as a natural right,” said Steinfeld. “I then think it’s really good that we’re having this debate right now.”
Yesterday’s debate, however, only touched briefly on this point. This shows that MPs do not share the same concerns as experts, with Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, Emily Darlington, referring to “easy technological fixes” to avoid breaching encryption protection already existing. Tools that, however, experts have repeatedly said they still break encryption when they were proposed in the EU.
What’s next?
The OSA debate wasn’t a turning point. No, lawmakers have no intention to scrap the Online Safety Act, either – not even its most controversial provisions.
The discussion gives us an interesting insight, nevertheless, into what MPs are most worried about right now.
The harm of harmful algorithms and generative AI is certainly what most MPs are pushing to be dealt with next. Yet, as many MPs recognized, there are still many issues with the current implementation as it is. It’s then a good sign that this discussion is ongoing.
That said, to get real change, words may not be enough. Commenting on this point, Director of Government Affairs and Advocacy at the Internet Society, Callum Voge, told TechRadar: “This week’s debate will not be enough to reopen the controversial provisions alone. There will need to be continued public pressure on these issues to ensure that the concerns are really heard and addressed.”
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chiara.castro@futurenet.com (Chiara Castro)
