When the parent does the enforcement themselves then they can be put under direct pressure by their children to drop the ban. When the government does it then the parent can say, honestly, sorry, there’s nothing they can do about it: It’s out of their hands. The child only has access to tier 1 support [parent] and the support agent’s only response is “sorry, corporate policy [law] requires AV for certain sites, there’s nothing I can do. Is there anything else I can help you with today?…”
I don’t say this to make the laws easier to swallow but the social economics of it make it more understandable why this law might be so popular with anyone already overloaded with angry teenagers.
Next up: the Bedtime Is At Nine PM Act 2026, Tuck Your Shirt In Act 2027, and No We Have One At Home Already Act 2028.
My son figured out free VPNs when he was 8-9. This is only stopping adults.
In the era of LLMs this is even more true. Every single chatbot I tried (DeepSeek, Grok, Claude, ChatGPT) except ChatGPT immediately gave numerous and detailed instructions on how to easily bypass the bans. I'm sure one could trivially push ChatGPT outside its love for big brother as well, if they cared to do so.
It's not clear to me who exactly such bans are effective against, and to what end. Obviously the government gains an immense amount of power so they're going to love it, regardless of its efficacy.
The “think of the children” angle is certainly there to make the bill more morally appealing, but is it actually popular with parents? Or anyone, other than politicians?
The kids in question are those of millennial and Gen-Z(!) parents. They’re not a generation that doesn’t understand the internet.
That’s not to say that some restriction wouldn’t be welcomed, but did the OSA really come from these parents?
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50
"All providers of regulated user-to-user services that are likely to be accessed by children must comply with the following duties in relation to each such service which they provide—
(a)the duties about children’s risk assessments set out in section 11, and
(b)the duties to protect children’s online safety set out in section 12(2) to (13)."
(so-called ""extreme porn"" was banned entirely by UK law a year or two ago)
This is funny but actually has sort of existed for decades, in the sense of the TV watershed – no adult content before 9pm, after which point it's assumed children are in bed and not watching TV.
And yes, you are absolutely right that parents do often like these laws. Being a parent is hard, whatever the age of the kids, and parents will be in favour of things that make it easier. Whether that's making TV default-safe in the daytime, or making adult websites harder to access.