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Dear America, Ofcom has sent you a bill

Dear America, Ofcom has sent you a bill

/ Internet regulation, Regulated Without Representation / By / Leave a Comment

Dear America,

Let me begin with a confession. I am a lawyer, and lawyers are the reason you have never read to the end of anything about internet regulation. We write as if the reader were another lawyer, or a judge, or a wall. I am going to try not to do that here, because what has happened in Britain over the last three years deserves a wider audience than the people who are paid to understand it, and because some of it is, in its way, a very good story.

Here is the story in one paragraph. Britain has built a machine for regulating the internet. It is a large machine, run by a regulator that has nearly doubled in size to operate it, and it has one unusual feature: the companies it regulates are expected to pay for it. Most of those companies are American. None of them has a vote in the Parliament that built the machine. Some of the services it reaches have never had an office, an employee or a bank account on this island. And while the machine was being built, Britain also arrested about thirty-four of its own citizens a day for things they had said, and drew up a plan to decide which news outlets the rest of us should see first when we pick up our phones.

If the first part of that rings a faint historical bell, it should. In 1765 Parliament tried to make the American colonies pay for the army that policed them. The colonists had a slogan about it. You may have heard it.

Who is writing to you

I have been an internet lawyer in London for nearly three decades. In this country that means defamation, harassment, impersonation and the long argument about what platforms owe the people who use them. I act for people who have been wronged online and, more often than you might expect, for people accused of wronging others. I have watched this corner of the law grow from a curiosity into an industry, and I have watched the people who run the industry, on both sides of the Atlantic, stop understanding each other.

Once a year or so I brief a network of American internet lawyers who meet in Las Vegas on what Britain has been up to. This year, when I sat down to prepare the briefing, it would not fit on the slides. There was too much of it, and too much of it was strange. So I am writing it out instead, in six chapters, for anyone who wants to read it: the general counsel in Menlo Park, the man who runs a forum from a spare room in Ohio, the journalist who suspects there is a story here but cannot find the thread, and the British reader who has not been told what is being planned for her.

Every claim I make is linked to the law, the judgment, the official document or the parliamentary record behind it. Click if you want to. Ignore the links if you do not. I would like journalists to be able to check me, and I would like the people I am criticising to be able to check me too, because I expect some of them will.

Three things to hold in your head

First, who Ofcom is. The Office of Communications sits in a glass building on the south bank of the Thames and regulates Britain’s broadcasters, telephone companies and radio spectrum. Think of your Federal Communications Commission with a slice of the Federal Trade Commission. In 2023 Parliament handed it the internet as well. It employed an average of 1,665 people last year, its budget this year is £233 million, and for the first time in many years the majority of that money comes from the companies it regulates rather than from the spectrum receipts that would otherwise go to the Treasury.

Second, what the Online Safety Act is. It is a law of 241 sections and 17 schedules, 303 pages in the official print, and it applies to any online service with what it calls “links with the United Kingdom”. A significant number of British users is enough. So is treating Britain as a market. Where the company is incorporated is beside the point. Ofcom’s own estimate is that more than 100,000 services are caught, from the largest platforms to the smallest hobby forum, and Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee was told that most of them would be small businesses, based overseas, or both.

Third, whose law it has turned out to be. In July this year Ofcom published its register of the largest services, the ones that attract the heaviest duties. There are eleven names in the top tier. Ten are American. The eleventh is TikTok.

Ofcom said the first invoices for this regime would go out in September 2026. As I write, it has not confirmed that they have gone. When they do, they will be addressed, for the most part, to the American west coast.

Why nobody has told you

There are, I think, three reasons this story has not reached you in a form you can use.

The first is complexity. The Act is long, the secondary legislation is longer, and Ofcom’s guidance runs to thousands of pages. Complexity is a very effective form of secrecy. Nobody has to hide anything if nobody can bear to read it.

The second is the framing. Every piece of this regime is presented as child protection, and nobody sensible wants to be seen arguing with child protection. I have spent my career acting for victims of online abuse, a good many of them young. I am not going to tell you the harms are imaginary. I am going to tell you that the design is wrong, which is a different thing.

The third is more awkward. The people who would normally explain this to you, the established press and the broadcasters, stand to gain from one part of it: the plan to push their news to the top of your feed. I will come to that in chapter 5. It is the part I most want British readers to understand, and it is the part where I will say something about my own community.

What is coming

Chapter 1, the history. How a law written in 1935 to protect telephone operators from rude callers became one of the most used speech offences in Britain, and how a 2019 white paper on “online harms” grew into a 303 page Act. The tools are much older than the internet, and that is the key to everything.

Chapter 2, the bill. Taxation without representation, 2026 edition. Why Meta, Google and the other large American platforms are being billed for Ofcom’s wages, how the fee is calculated on worldwide revenue, why the regulator’s income now rises with the revenue of the companies it polices, and what the men who drafted the Stamp Act would have made of it.

Chapter 3, the reach. The hamster, the judge and the regulator. How a British regulator serves formal notices on American businesses by email, what happened when 4chan answered with a picture of a hamster, why a federal judge in Washington ruled this month that Ofcom, as an arm of a foreign state, could not be sued in this way in an American court, and why Ofcom has admitted to Parliament that most of the fines it has imposed have not been paid.

Chapter 4, the people. Thirty-four arrests a day. What Britain does to its own citizens for words: the childminder who got 31 months for stirring up racial hatred in a tweet she deleted within hours, the comedy writer met at Heathrow by five armed officers, and the repeal of the “grossly offensive” offences that the Government accepted in writing in 2022 and then quietly did not do.

Chapter 5, the feed. Who decides what you read? Imagine Washington ordering Google to put CNN first; Britain is about to do it with the BBC. Who decides what is “trusted”, why the outlets that would benefit already depend on the state, why the communities that trust them least, British Jews among them, would be shown them first, and why the United States Government has formally asked Britain to drop the idea.

Chapter 6, the consequences. When the Americans say no. Tariffs, visa restrictions, congressional bills, the seventy or so sites that have already left, and what I think should happen instead. Because the time will come when the American companies either shout loudly enough to be heard or simply leave, and I do not believe anyone in Whitehall, the district of London where the government departments sit, has costed either outcome.

A word about tone

I am not against regulating the internet. I have argued for years that the online world should be governed by the same laws as the offline one, enforced by the same institutions, and not by whoever happens to run a platform’s trust and safety team that month. My complaint is not that Britain has acted. It is that Britain has acted in a way that bills the wrong people, criminalises the wrong speech, and hands ministers a lever over what their citizens read. If the aim was to irritate our most important ally while narrowing the freedoms of our own people, it is a work of some genius. I do not think that was the aim. I think nobody sat down and added it up. This series is my attempt to do the adding, and to make the adding readable.

Yours, from a small office in Soho,

Yair Cohen

For the serious reader
If you run a website or app with British users, chapters 2 and 3 are about you. Read them before the email from Ofcom arrives. If it has already arrived, do not ignore it: under the Act, failing to answer a formal request for information is itself a breach that Ofcom can fine, and it can be a criminal offence for which a named senior manager is personally liable.
If you are a journalist, every chapter has a source list at the foot. Use it.
If you are British, chapter 5 is the one nobody has explained to you.

Next: Chapter 1, From the telephone operator to your timeline. How a ten pound fine for swearing at the switchboard became the law that fills British police cells.

Sources for this chapter

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