To get around the new law, the use of virtual private network software that can mask a person\u2019s location, also known as VPNs, has surged in the U.K.<\/a><\/p>\n The primary argument of U.S. politicians who oppose the law is that they don\u2019t want American tech companies to have to comply, even if they\u2019re serving British customers.<\/p>\n House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said he raised his objections with U.K. government officials during meetings in London at the end of July. In a statement after his return<\/a>, he said the law and other European regulations \u201ccreate a serious chilling effect on free expression and threaten the First Amendment rights of American citizens and companies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe absolutely need to protect children and keep harmful, illegal content off these platforms \u2014 but when governments or bureaucracies suppress speech in the name of safety or regulation, it sets a dangerous precedent that threatens the core of Western democratic values,\u201d Jordan said.<\/p>\n The issue may come to a head in a couple of different venues. That could be the courts if any tech companies file lawsuits over the law, or it could come up in trade negotiations if President Donald Trump decides to press the issue with British politicians, although they say it\u2019s not open to debate<\/a> in trade talks.<\/p>\n Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and Meta board member with close ties to the Trump administration, recently called U.K. leaders to complain about the law, the Financial Times<\/a> reported Friday. A spokesperson for Andreessen said the report was not true.<\/p>\n The U.K.\u2019s Online Safety Act is one of the most comprehensive national laws that any democracy has ever passed to try to curtail potentially harmful content online in the name of children. Parliament passed the law in 2023, and the government went through two years of writing detailed rules before putting the law into effect last month.<\/p>\n The law is notable for a combination of reasons: the variety of content it applies to, the potential fines and the possible international reach.<\/p>\n A wide array of content is at issue. While the \u201cprimary\u201d focus of the law is online material such as pornography and suicide, it also requires websites to age-gate<\/a> content with bullying, serious violence, \u201cdangerous stunts\u201d and \u201cexposure to harmful substances.\u201d That has covered relatively mainstream services such as Spotify<\/a> and Microsoft\u2019s Xbox gaming system<\/a>.<\/p>\n Companies that don\u2019t comply face potential fines of up to 10% of their global revenue, which for the biggest companies could be billions of dollars. The British regulator Ofcom, short for Office of Communications, says companies must use \u201chighly effective age assurance<\/a>\u201d to restrict the riskiest types of content.<\/p>\n And the U.K. has not been adamant that it won\u2019t allow international borders to stymie enforcement. Ofcom says it plans to apply the law to services with \u201ca significant number\u201d of U.K. users, services where U.K. users \u201care a target market\u201d and services that are \u201ccapable of being accessed\u201d by U.K. users with a \u201cmaterial risk of significant harm\u201d to such users.<\/p>\n The law appears to retain strong support among the British public. About 69% said they supported the new rules in a YouGov poll<\/a> taken after implementation began, and 46% said they supported it \u201cstrongly.\u201d But 52% said they do not think the law will be very effective at preventing minors from accessing pornography.<\/p>\n The law was passed during a previous, Conservative-led government<\/a> and took effect under the current, Labour-led government.<\/p>\n But the far-right party Reform U.K. is pushing for a repeal of the law. Party leader Nigel Farage, a former member of Parliament, has called it<\/a> \u201cstate suppression of genuine free speech,\u201d and his party is running high in polls<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMillions of people have noticed that what they\u2019re getting on their feeds is different to what it was,\u201d Farage said at a recent news conference<\/a>.<\/p>\n Farage also met with visiting members of Congress last week, and the talks turned heated with Farage and Democrats exchanging insults, according to Politico<\/a>, although the dispute appeared to be more about Trump\u2019s free speech restrictions than about the U.K. law.<\/p>\n Most U.S.-based tech companies say they are complying with the new law. Microsoft said in a blog post<\/a> that Xbox users in the U.K. would begin seeing notifications \u201cencouraging them to verify their age\u201d as a \u201cone-time process,\u201d with actual enforcement starting next year. If users don\u2019t comply, Microsoft warned, they\u2019ll lose access to social features of Xbox but will still be able to play games.<\/p>\n Discord said it was implementing new default settings<\/a> for all U.K. users, in effect treating everyone like a minor with heavy content filtering unless they verify that they\u2019re adults. Discord says users can choose to verify their age<\/a> either with a face scan or an ID upload.<\/p>\n Elon Musk\u2019s X has also restricted posts, including information about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, according to the BBC<\/a>. X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n But a few services are not complying. The far-right social media site Gab, which allows white supremacist views and other extremist content<\/a>, said in a notice on its website<\/a> that it had received notices from Ofcom and, rather than comply, decided to block the entire U.K. from accessing its site. The company said in the notice: \u201cWe refuse to comply with this tyranny.\u201d<\/p>\n Preston Byrne, a U.S. lawyer who specializes in technology issues, has said on X<\/a> that he plans to file a lawsuit soon on behalf of an unnamed client seeking to quash possible enforcement of the British law within the United States.<\/p>\n The subject has been simmering for months ahead of the law\u2019s implementation, and it came up in February when British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited the White House.<\/p>\n In an Oval Office meeting, a reporter asked Trump what he thought of the U.K. approach to free speech, and Trump tossed the question to Vance, who expressed concern<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the U.K. and also with some of our European allies. But we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British \u2014 of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them \u2014 but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Starmer defended his government\u2019s approach.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time. Certainly, we wouldn\u2019t want to reach across U.S. systems and we don\u2019t, and that\u2019s absolutely right,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n British Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy later said the U.K. would not make any changes<\/a> to the Online Safety Act as part of trade negotiations with the Trump administration.<\/p>\n American privacy advocates are watching the debate play out with alarm, concerned that similar age verification laws \u2014 like new state laws targeting the Apple and Google app stores \u2014 would upend the internet closer to home.<\/p>\n \u201cYoung people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without the government making decisions about what speech is permissible,\u201d wrote Paige Collings, a senior speech and privacy activist at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a blog post Tuesday<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A growing number of U.S. politicians are condemning a new British law that requires some websites and apps…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[64,63,237,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-57221","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-internet","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Nigel](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/240604-nigel-farage-wc-0951-c0c5c3.jpg\")
Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage.Dan Kitwood \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n