I think the important thing to remember is that almost every single UK politician I’ve ever heard discuss these matters is a slack-jawed moron when it comes to technology policy.
Keir Starmer is giving tech companies three months to activate on-device content scanning and age verification across all smartphones and tablets sold in Britain – or face fines and potentially criminal liability. Framed as a child safety measure, the proposal has drawn fierce criticism from privacy advocates, civil liberties groups and free speech lawyers who warn it amounts to building a mass surveillance infrastructure under the pretext of safety. The messaging app Signal has already said it will not comply – will others follow?
In this week’s episode of the Capitalist podcast, Preston Byrne, free speech lawyer and counsel to some of the internet’s most controversial platforms, joins me to discuss what this proposal could mean for Britain’s tech sector.
Below, you’ll find a short excerpt from our conversation.
Marc Sidwell
Editor, CapX
Preston Byrne on UK tech policy
I think the important thing to remember when it comes to internet policy is that everybody in Parliament, almost every single UK politician I’ve ever heard discuss these matters, is a slack-jawed moron when it comes to technology policy.
And this is not an exaggeration. These people have no idea how the internet works. They have no idea how computers work.
The policies that they’re proposing are sufficiently over-broad and described in such general terms that it doesn’t really provide a whole lot of guidance to tech companies as to how they could comply with them, except by doing what we’ve seen Ofcom do over the last year, which is that they kind of make it up as they go and political pressure is applied on the agency or on Parliament to do more.
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There are plenty of applications that if a parent wants to do this, they can lock down their kid’s phone so that a kid can’t get messages.
These tools already exist, right? And they’re optional.
All of the tools that Apple has: you can make sure that your kid can’t download apps that are unauthorised. You can lock down a kid’s phone plenty.
What the UK is proposing to do here in this case – and it remains to be seen what exactly they will do. We’ll have to wait and see what statutory instrument the DSIT secretary decides to publish for approval. But in this case, everybody’s best guess is that what will happen with the age verification on devices is that the UK will compel the manufacturers to require an age verification solution, which will be provided by an age verification company.
And you won’t be able to access the internet as in anybody in the UK – adult, child or otherwise – without first getting your identity verified, which is an intrusion on privacy.
But if you’re just talking about child protection as the objective, the tooling already exists. The issue is that nobody uses it because what happens?
They lock down the phone. You know, the kid goes and uses the phone. There’s some feature that needs to be unlocked. The parent gives up and they say, okay, well, we’ll turn off the feature because we want the kid to go use the phone.
So this is something where if you want to, as a parent, protect your child from the internet, you already have the tooling available to do that on a voluntary basis without the government intruding in American companies’ supply chains and encryption to do it.
