The UK's new tech law triggers upheaval

Politico

3 days ago

For would-be American tech regulators — and the companies in their sights — the last four days in the UK offer a bracing lesson in unintended consequences.
A new law to promote online safety in the United Kingdom has swept up a lot more content than social media users expected, and a wide range of advocacy groups and disgruntled consumers are rising to object.
The UK's Online Safety Act took effect Friday to shield minors from 'harmful' content — not just pornography, but also material that is hateful, promotes substance abuse or depicts 'serious violence.'
The rules apply to any site accessible in the UK, even those based in the U.S. This means sites like Reddit, Bluesky and even Grindr now have to abide by the OSA's speech regulations to stay online in the country.
'It doesn't matter where in the world it is, and it doesn't matter what they're focused on,' said Preston Byrne, managing partner at the tech law firm Byrne & Storm. 'Much of what we consider the ordinary sturm und drang of American political discourse — the ordinary back and forth — in the United Kingdom is unlawful.'
Over the weekend, major U.S.-based platforms implemented measures to comply with the law, and promptly became harder to access. By using a VPN to simulate UK web browsing, DFD was able to confirm reports that content relating to Gaza on X and cigars on Reddit was more restricted in the UK than in the U.S. Some required verification checks necessitating a photo ID or a selfie to verify age. Other content was blocked entirely, though some X posts on Gaza were later restored.
The UK law may not strictly apply to such content, but social media companies apparently aren't chancing it. Gab, a U.S.-based platform that hosts Nazi and other extremist content, has gone completely dark in the UK to avoid financial and criminal penalties under the safety act.
'Many platforms may [...] err on the side of caution to avoid getting caught up in that, and age-gate more than is necessary,' said Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow at the Cato institute.
The parallels with U.S. age laws aren't exact — the First Amendment has more robust protections for hate speech and other content than UK law — but to many watchers, the rollout is a lesson in what happens when lines start to be drawn around the free flow of online information.
The debut of the OSA has been met with swift pushback. After a petition to repeal the act received more than 350,000 signatures, the UK government responded Monday that it had no plans to do so. Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right Reform UK party, has also pledged to repeal the act. VPNs, which route a user's internet traffic through another country, have hit the top of the UK's app download charts.
President Donald Trump seemed fairly unbothered by the law during his trip to Scotland on Monday, joking about how it might impact his platform, Truth Social. When asked about it during a joint press conference with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump said, 'Well, I don't think he's [Starmer's] going to censor my site, because I say only good things… will you please uncensor my site?'
Proprietors of other U.S.-based social media sites aren't so sure. Reddit, X, Discord and BlueSky have all implemented age verification checks and other measures to abide by the safety act. Wikipedia is also challenging the act in a UK court, though the lawsuit regards a different provision that would require it to identify many of its contributors.
The penalties for failing to comply may be severe. The country's Office of Communications, which oversees the safety act, has sent enforcement letters to at least three websites operating outside of the UK in March and April. Byrne exclusively provided DFD with letters that Ofcom sent to Gab and a site that promotes suicide, and directed DFD to another sent to Kiwi Farms, an online forum that has been criticized for enabling harassment and cyberstalking.
The letters demand that the sites conduct 'illegal content risk assessments' and provide a report to Ofcom of the presence of CSAM, material promoting drugs and weapons, hate speech and other types of 'illegal content.' They also note that failure to comply with the directives could result in a fine of £18 million or 10 percent of worldwide revenue, and 'may also constitute a criminal offence.'
Ofcom did not respond to DFD's questions about the letters.
Gab CEO Andrew Torba told DFD that Gab has reached out to the U.S. government for help. '[W]e hope President Trump will remind the British that American speech is governed by the Constitution, not British prosecutors,' he wrote in an email. The White House referred DFD to Trump's exchange with Starmer when asked about the matter. Kiwi Farms and the site promoting suicide did not respond.
The implementation of the OSA comes shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court effectively upheld age verification laws that at least 23 states have in place. While those laws focus on pornography and are more limited than the UK's law, the rollout of the safety act may offer certain lessons for states passing and enforcing age verification requirements.
'We're seeing that regardless of where you implement these laws and these measures, users are still frustrated,' said Paige Collings, senior speech and privacy activists at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who pointed out that Florida also saw a spike in searches for VPNs after it implemented an online porn law in January
'The more of this that we see, it feels like it should be harder for policymakers to continue ignoring the mounting pressure and continue pursuing this approach,' she told DFD, adding that more targeted regulation for data collection and content moderation algorithms could be a better method of keeping kids safe online.
EU agrees to buy €40B in U.S. AI chips
After European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the European Union would continue buying U.S. semiconductors in a meeting with Trump on Sunday, the bloc has put a price tag on that promise.
As POLITICO's Pieter Haeck reports, the EU announced on Tuesday that it would buy '€40 billion worth of AI chips' from the U.S., which it said was 'essential to maintaining the EU's technological edge.' The purchase is part of the trade deal that von der Leyen and Trump struck over the weekend, which allows the U.S. and EU to steer clear of a tariff war.
The semiconductor purchase pledge is a win-win. Trump has not only wanted to increase exports, but is also pursuing a strategy of aggressively disseminating chips around the world to keep other countries reliant on the American tech stack. Meanwhile, the EU has no domestic production capacity to manufacture advanced chips for AI — Intel notably canceled plans last week to build fabrication plants in Germany and Poland.
Subsea cables are making a comeback
There's renewed policy interest among Big Tech firms and in Congress surrounding subsea cables, which lie thousands of feet below the sea and are crucial to global telecommunications, POLITICO's Anthony Adragna reports.
Subsea cables are one of those seemingly niche policy areas that keep very large companies up at night. Google, Meta and Microsoft have lobbied Congress during the second quarter on the national security concerns related to the cables. Warfare or maritime accidents could sever digital communications between countries — fewer than 500 undersea cables accounted for 99 percent of transoceanic digital communications in 2022, according to a Congressional Services report.
Lawmakers are mobilizing around the issue. China Committee Chair John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Fla.) and Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) sent a letter to Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta inquiring about potential vulnerabilities last week. The House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced a bill in April to prevent foreign adversaries from building their own cables, while another pending bipartisan bill would institute more measures to protect this subsea infrastructure.
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