Britain's Online Safety Act Shambles

Everything fundamental about computers started as a fully formed concept in a single mind. I find this ceaselessly amazing. Granted, Alan Turing's concept didn't have a screen, a keyboard, or a mouse, but it precisely defined what computation is, making Turing the progenitor of our Information Age. He was arrested by the British authorities for homosexuality, chemically castrated, and died by suicide aged 41.

This article is not a gay rights piece — it's 2025, I like to believe Britain has moved on. This is an article about British law thwarting innovation and preventing Britain from becoming the technology superpower it ought to be.

Consider this mind-bender. The first general-purpose computer (technically known as Turing-complete) was the American ENIAC in 1945… except that's not quite true. ENIAC was the first computer that was designed to be Turing-complete and was successfully built as such. An earlier design, however, beat it without its engineers realizing. The British Colossus was a set of ten machines used in code-breaking, none of which was a real computer in its own right. But, had they been rigged together as a cluster, the cluster would have been. This went unnoticed until 2009 because British authorities ordered Colossus to secrecy for fear of an enemy state seeing it.

If necessity is the mother of all invention, fear has to be its executioner. On Friday 25th July, the British government enacted the Online Safety Act through fear.

The core aim of this legislation is to protect children from online harm. This is a good aim. Today's online world is a tangled nightmare compared to the fun internet that I had as a teenager. Yes, there were creeps on it, and there was smut (I found lots!), but there wasn't anything like the algorithmic content we have now.

I'm not concerned about my son finding naked people on websites, I'm worried about him finding Andrew Tate on social media. I'm worried that a few tiny, seemingly inconsequential decisions on his part — liking a post about trad wives, sharing a meme about vaccines — will trigger an algorithm into serving more and more of the same content until that becomes the virtual totality of his online experience. I'm worried that my son's young brain will be deluged by so much rubbish that his mind corrodes.

And I want my government to take legislative action to protect him — I am pro-legislation. But the Online Safety Act is nonsense. Let me wind the clock back to show what good legislation looks like.

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