The UK Online Safety Act: 3 Months On
In July the UK Government introduced the Online Safety Act which requires age checks for accessing sexually explicit content online. As a result of this, Pornhub, the 19th most visited site on the internet, has reported a 77% decline in UK traffic. Furthermore, according to the UK regulatory body, OFCOM (The Office of Communications), overall visits to pornographic websites from the UK have fallen by 33%. Naturally, those who championed this legislation are claiming a moral and political victory. However, once you consider what these facts actually mean, they paint a somewhat different and potentially more worrying picture. It would be staggeringly naïve to think that UK visitors to Pornhub have ceased visiting such sites due to the age verification requirements. The more likely explanation is that UK porn consumers are now using VPNs to circumnavigate these restrictions and that this traffic to Pornhub is now recorded as coming from elsewhere.
In July the UK Government introduced the Online Safety Act which requires age checks for accessing sexually explicit content online. As a result of this, Pornhub, the 19th most visited site on the internet, has reported a 77% decline in UK traffic. Furthermore, according to the UK regulatory body, OFCOM (The Office of Communications), overall visits to pornographic websites from the UK have fallen by 33%. Naturally, those who championed this legislation are claiming a moral and political victory. However, once you consider what these facts actually mean, they paint a somewhat different and potentially more worrying picture. It would be staggeringly naïve to think that UK visitors to Pornhub have ceased visiting such sites due to the age verification requirements. The more likely explanation is that UK porn consumers are now using VPNs to circumnavigate these restrictions and that this traffic to Pornhub is now recorded as coming from elsewhere.
According to independent research by Cybernews, the UK has become one of the world’s fastest-growing VPN markets. The UK ranks eighth worldwide for VPN adoption at the time of writing and is now the leading G7 nation in terms of VPN use and one of only three European countries included in the top 10 list. Data shows the UK logged over 10.7 million VPN app downloads in the first half of 2025, surpassing countries such as the US, France, and Germany. One vendor of VPN services for smartphones saw an increase in downloads of 1,800%. All of which indicates the inherent flaw in the OSA, that it can be easily bypassed by using a VPN. Clearly this law is not supported by a substantial number of UK citizens. According to Google, prior to the OSA, eight million users from the UK visited a quarter of a million pornographic websites each month. Such a market doesn’t just vanish overnight.
The Online Safety Act is a typical piece of UK Government legislation, insofar as it is well intentioned in seeking to protect children from harmful content online. However, the parameters of this act and the manner in which it strives to enforce its mandate are ill considered. Clearly those involved have little or no understanding of contemporary information technology and infrastructure. It can also be argued that they have underestimated human nature. The result is legislation that can only deal with the symptoms of a problem and furthermore, only in a binary fashion. Any site that is deemed problematic has to implement age verification. If it will not or cannot, it is blocked by UK ISPs. At best it is a rather blunt tool. At worst, it has provided the current and all future UK Governments with the means to censor content with impunity.
I am not an absolutist libertarian but I do prefer the state to minimise its involvement in social issues. I believe that there is a duty of care to protect children from specific online content but I do not think that is the sole job of the UK Government. Parents, guardians and carers should be the first and foremost group involved in such an undertaking. Those who are legally responsible for a child’s welfare should know exactly what a child is doing online and police it accordingly. Sadly, we have a generation of parents who are just as enamoured with social media and online culture as their children and therefore are hardly best equipped to deal with this matter. Levels of IT literacy are also quite low in many adults. Despite a superficial “monkey see, monkey do” ability to use technology, there is seldom any functional understanding of how such things actually work.
Three months on from the launch of the OSA in the UK, I personally have not been greatly inconvenienced by this legislation so far. I’ve had to verify my age once for Instagram. This used an AI to look at an image of my face and determine if I am over 18. It was hardly a chore and I didn’t expect my age to be disputed. Beyond this one time, I have bypassed any issues as I have a VPN extension installed in all my web browsers and a year’s subscription to Surfshark. Outside of my personal experience, numerous websites that deal with sexual health and wellbeing have been blocked. Even Wikipedia has had to age gate certain content. All of which is troubling. Unfortunately, I can only see this matter getting worse over time and becoming more of a political football, driven by hot takes and showboating. Poorly conceived legislation often fails and brings the law into disrepute. In the meantime are children any safer? I doubt it.
VPNs, Web Browsers and Synchronising Bookmarks
I tend to compartmentalise my online activities. I use different browsers and apps for specific tasks. For example, I specifically use Opera to access websites that are geo-blocked in the UK. This is because it has an integral VPN that up until today, has been free. Sadly, it is now disabled by default and requires a subscription to activate. I’m not really surprised by this move. It was free while being developed and tested and naturally during this period of time, many users have become reliant on it. The cost of a subscription from Opera is no different to that of any other established VPN provider, although they offer a lot more functionality. So I decided to take advantage of the current Black Friday sales and bought an18 month subscription to Surfshark, which comes with a lot more bells and whistles. This includes extensions for all the main web browsers along with more complex VPN tools.
I tend to compartmentalise my online activities. I use different browsers and apps for specific tasks. For example, I specifically use Opera to access websites that are geo-blocked in the UK. This is because it has an integral VPN that up until today, has been free. Sadly, it is now disabled by default and requires a subscription to activate. I’m not really surprised by this move. It was free while being developed and tested and naturally during this period of time, many users have become reliant on it. The cost of a subscription from Opera is no different to that of any other established VPN provider, although they offer a lot more functionality. So I decided to take advantage of the current Black Friday sales and bought an18 month subscription to Surfshark, which comes with a lot more bells and whistles. This includes extensions for all the main web browsers along with more complex VPN tools.
As a result of this change, I no longer have any need for Opera and so I have uninstalled it. I use Chrome and Firefox for everyday use. I run Chrome on my primary monitor for general browsing and Firefox on my second screen specifically for Twitter/X, Mastodon and Blue Sky. I like to keep an eye on my various social media timelines for breaking news and to see what my internet chums are up to. Both browsers have AdBlocker Ultimate and Adblock for YouTube extensions installed. I simply wouldn’t browse the internet without them. I have some additional quality of life extensions installed on Chrome, such as an audio recorder and a Flash emulator. I also have a very useful add-on called New Tab Draft which allows you to write in plain text on any new tab opened. These are kept permanently until deleted. It’s very useful for quickly copying and pasting information or writing some notes on the fly.
For convenience, it is useful to synchronise bookmarks between web browsers. Until recently, this was something I did manually but it was a pain in the butt. I would often forget to copy links over, so there were frequent discrepancies between browsers. However, like so many online “problems”, you can always find someone who has already encountered it and addressed it. xBrowserSync is a free service that allows for seamless synchronisation of bookmarks via a simple extension. It is quick, easy and password protected. Having such a facility also encourages me to undertake regular housekeeping with regard to bookmarks. I recently purged several dozen, many of which were for obsolete services or for websites that don’t even exist anymore. Bookmarks are a worrying catalogue of all my passing interests and I had many for video games and TV shows that have “been and gone”.
After 30 years plus of internet access, it is nice to finally have my browsing requirements so well catered for on PC. It is a shame that the same cannot be said for web browsing on a phone or tablet. I may be incorrect but there just doesn’t seem to be the same ecosystem of extensions and add-ons available. I tend to avoid web browsing on my phone as it quickly becomes a hellish nightmare of pop ups, autoplaying videos and pervasive advertising. Combined with the ongoing “enshittification” of apps, the whole matter gets worse over time. I will look for workarounds in the New Year and see if internet access via your phone can be made more manageable. I suspect it may well be a harder problem to solve than PC web browsing but again, I’m sure some smart people have already taken steps to address the matter.
