In 2013 I was privileged to be invited to the Supreme Court to take part in the Model Law Commission, a project run by Big Voice London with the support of the Supreme Court and the Law Commission, in which a group of sixth-form students from London state schools are encouraged to design law reforms based on their own experience of what society needs, with the help of legal practitioners. The students write up their findings in a report with recommended laws and present it to Parliament (the ICLR on the project).
It was rather surprising to see the sort of internet laws that the young people of Britain wanted to see introduced. They included a limit on the right to post anonymously, a uniform panic alarm to be installed on all major social media sites, and a minimum level of customer support, meaning someone on the other end of the line for them to speak to when they felt frightened online. Their priority, clearly, was their own safety. They wanted some level of policing introduced to the internet so that they would feel protected. Interestingly, freedom of speech and the erosion of privacy were not seen by the sixth formers as sufficiently urgent matters to ask Parliament to legislate on.
What became of their asks
A decade on, most of what the students asked for has found its way into the Online Safety Act 2023, though not in the form they imagined. Every platform with UK users must now operate a system for reporting harmful content (section 20) and a complaints procedure that is easy to use, including by children (section 21), which is the panic button and the minimum level of support in statutory form, though nothing obliges a company to put a human being on the other end of the line. Anonymity was not restricted, but the largest services must offer adults the choice to verify their identity and to see only content from verified users (section 64), which is the students’ idea turned into an option rather than a rule. The policing they wanted arrived too, in the shape of Ofcom, with fines of up to 10 per cent of worldwide turnover. What the students did not ask for, protection for free speech and privacy, is where most of the argument about the Act now takes place, and where I have my own reservations, set out in my 2026 series on the regulation of the internet. The teenagers of 2013 turned out to be a fair guide to what Parliament would do.
First published 10 September 2014. Reviewed and updated 28 September 2026.