Last week marked three years since the UK Government enacted the Online Safety Act (OSA). Now, the impending UK under-16s social media ban and questions over the effectiveness of current measures threaten to push VPNs back into the spotlight. Speaking to TechRadar, VPN providers said the law has been a "heavy-handed approach" that’s only been "partly" successful. But some aspects have seen success. Companies now have obligations to proactively detect and remove child sexual abuse material (CSAM), several specific harms were criminalised, and penalties have been introduced for non-compliance — although not all have been paid . With Ofcom announcing steps for an under-16 social media ban last week, VPN providers are warning that repeating the same age-gating playbook will only backfire. ‘No significant overall change’
The Online Safety Act was introduced to protect children and vulnerable adults online. But, as Dr Peter Membrey, Chief Research Officer at ExpressVPN, notes, the bill has so far only been "partly" successful. "The Act has put children’s online safety firmly on the agenda, which matters. But Ofcom’s own report this month found no significant overall change in the share of children encountering harmful content, so there’s more work to do," he explained. This view is supported by several charities, including the Molly Rose Foundation , which warned that "timid regulation will cost lives." Much of the problem comes down to enforcement. While it’s simple enough for larger platforms to monitor content and their users, some smaller sites struggle to implement (or deliberately ignore) the law and slip through the net of checks. Age verification measures are another case in point: if a mainstream site introduces age-gating checks, a child may just find a smaller site. As a Proton spokesperson explained: "Under 18s are being driven towards riskier, unregulated sites and apps — ones that pose greater risks than the very sites the Online Safety Act is trying to protect them from."…