GUEST POST This blog is not suitable for kids

With the open web under threat in Britain, Laurence Warner argues that it may be time to make it a child-free zone. 

Last year I warned Lib Dem Voice not to follow Iran in banning encrypted messaging like Signal and WhatsApp. Ofcom now can, since the Online Safety Act passed near intact through parliament. 

Just as Big Tech finally adopts encrypted messaging - with Apple on Google’s RCS and Meta the Signal protocol - Britain’s two illiberal governing parties called law’n’order on progress. 

Whilst a Lib Dem Lord who watched the act sail by assures me Ofcom’s "expert" won’t pull the plug until (implausible 'cake and eat it') tech is in place, I believe we need to be proactive at encouraging Ofcom to direct their new regulatory powers in one specific area: children’s safety. 

The internet is not, and probably cannot be, safe for children. Being reached by bad people - cyberbullies or predators - and bad content – addictive or Adult material - is putting a generation in danger. 

I know this first-hand: I was exposed to Adult content online - like a quarter of British GenZ - by age 11. We only know this shocking statistic due to a Children’s Commissioner survey that Ofcom commissioned; it’s still a taboo topic for many parents like mine. 

Only through paternal supervision (an internet firewall and therapy) was I able to kick the habit. It’s why on my upcoming 2024 collection of Big Tech diss-tracks Ctrl-Alt-Rap, I’m taking aim at porn barons in Recovered to inspire us to destroy their business model of addicting young people like our parents were by Big Tobacco. 

Look, deregulation has been a great strength of the web: permissionless publishing and access, coupled with encryption, has been the unlikely open-closed blend that’s made the web a place where Brits want to spend a quarter of their waking lives. 

But if we continue to let youth harms spiral, those building blocks - of free expression and the right to privacy - will be entirely swept away for everyone by a Chinese approach infantilising all citizens. 

I believe Ed Davey’s care-full Liberal Democrats can strike a winning balance on this: maintain core digital privacies like encryption and rights to access content for adults, whilst actively seeking to protect children from such harms. 

Ofcom has floated efforts to cherry-pick age-gating Adult websites. And though these are popular in principle (80 per cent of voters), Open Rights Group - whose Don't Scan Me! campaign I supported at parliament - warn that botched implementations might threaten all citizens' privacy. We may need to consider more radical approaches that ask whether any of the web - including social media - should be accessed by children. 

Any such radical policies would involve thorny implementation questions: such as whether the age cutoff would 13, the earliest age US law lets Silicon Valley grab their data, or 18, the age which Tristan Harris’s Center for Humane Technology is advocating. I personally think 16, the age at which Brits gain the majority of citizen freedoms such as being able to leave home, seems like a realistic target. 

Until then, the government should build upon their phone-free classroom policy and force caregivers (90 per cent of whom currently abdicate their responsibility) to use Big Tech’s monitoring tools at home too. 

How likely would such a seemingly paternalist policy be from our Liberal party? At Spring Conference’s tech policy huddle in York, I saw both sides: on the regulation side, a concerned mother from the Smartphone-free Childhood community worried about her kid turning 9, versus an employee who wants to protect Big Social’s ability to operate amongst over-13s and trusts in Asimov's First Law (AI can protect young humans). 

The only sensible approach is that liberal policies shouldn’t automatically be applied to children to whom we owe care, as even Rousseau argued. 

Gen Alpha is just turning 11: this year we have an opportunity to help them spend the next five or seven years free of unsought exposure to Adult content (and degenerate adults), until they gain full citizenship rights to choose to access it. 

We would do better to target internet regulation specifically at children rather than risk the whole of Western society going behind a Great Firewall. 

Sorry kids, you won’t like this. 

Laurence Warner is a singer-songwriter-rapper at LaurenceWarner.com, currently making Alternative-Rap about Big Tech’s social impact. He’s also a Lib Dem member in his hometown Eastleigh and blogs about the arts and tech at wa.rner.me.