No, Prime Minister, emphatically no! Why the UK Government's ill-judged VPN clampdown plans smack of desperation and danger

Be careful what you wish for, they say. ‘They’ are quite correct. It’s just over a week since I praised Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for moving beyond political platitudes and announcing an immediate action plan to regulate social media, a plan that sent Elon Musk into a foul-mouthed scatalogical tirade on X.

I stand by my support for Sánchez in his endeavors, which mirror those of the Australian Government last year.  I also said at the time:

The sooner Macron, Merz and Starmer - or whoever is in charge of the UK by the time you read this! - follow his lead in Europe the better.

(For non-UK readers, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was facing a coup to oust him just over a week ago, an exercise in over-excited careerist politicos making an ass of themselves for 24 hours before the ruling Labor administration took a long, hard look into the electoral abyss that the polls has its members tottering on the edge of and decided now was not the time to jump in and see how far they fell!)

Well, Starmer has taken action and well, I sort of wish he hadn’t as the UK strategy looks to be being executed with the ineptitude that has led the current government to 14 policy u-turns in just over a year - and this with a massive electoral mandate that provides it with absolute control of the House of Commons.

The 'plan'

So, what’s Starmer planning to get through the legislature “in months, not years”?  - we really are in the ‘Something must be done!’ rhetoric zone now! - that is so troubling? On the face of it, he’s following the lead of Australia and Spain and proposing banning under-16s from signing up to social media platforms. 

Now, leaving aside criticisms that he’s also pushing to give 16 year-olds the vote - down from the current age of 18 - having an age cut-off for legal use of social media is just what the other two countries have done. I mean, it’s utterly impractical and hideously unenforceable in practice - kids under 18 aren’t allowed to buy cigarettes or booze legally in the UK and any street corner in the country will show how well that works in reality - but it’s an important line in the sand and something that puts the likes of Musk on the block in terms of being seen to be reined in and have to fall into line with being told, ‘No!’.

There’s also a lot of ‘something must be done’ flim-flam about blocking ‘porn loopholes’ and clamping down on what chatbots can say. You can tell how well-thought through these ideas are as the Minister sent out to do the media round yesterday to pitch the idea was Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Science and Technology. She told us earnestly:

We will close the gap in the law around AI chatbots. We’re really concerned about the impact that those are having on children and young people, but also to make sure that they are not allowed to spread illegal content online.

Liz - if the content is illegal, they’re already not allowed to spread it online or otherwise, surely, so what is it EXACTLY that you plan to do here to make a difference? Oh, there’s going to be a consultation! So, you don’t know what you're actually going to do in practice, just the headline-grabbing soundbites? OK, fair enough, we can come back to that one. (Never mind, lots of lovely public appearances for you today. Won’t do your profile any harm when the Party decides to have another go at toppling Sir Keir, so not a wasted day, was it?)

To be fair, there is some stuff here that has merit. At Davos last month, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff raised the horrifying subject of teens being driven to suicide by AI systems, the focus of an alarmingly large number of court cases around the world. Tackling this does need to be priority and the Starmer plans do include a requirement to make it automatic that coroners have to notify regulator Ofcom to keep data relating to interactions between AI and dead kids in case, as Kendall put it, “it’s had an impact on children’s deaths”. That’s a sound enough idea, albeit one that is closing the stable door after the horse has tragically bolted, and one that will be dependent on forcing AI providers, mostly US, to keep and hand over such private data. Stand by for howls of ‘fascism’ and so-called freedom of speech protests on that, but then we're used to that sort of full diaper tantrum by now.

But the VPN stuff...

But it’s Starmer’s plans to clamp down on VPN usage by under-16s that is the really problematic sticking point with his plans as they stand today. This is pitched as necessary to stop them from using the tech to bypass age-verification requirements to access certain websites, as required by the rushed-into-law - ‘Something must be done!’ etc - and deeply flawed UK Online Safety Act.

But the main problem here is that the only way - literally the only way - to do this will be by forcing age verification on everyone using a VPN, regardless of their age. This in turn creates, essentially, a digital ID regime by the back door. Plans to enforce a UK digital ID were among the 14 u-turns (and counting) to date of the Starmer regime, so this usefully kills two birds with one stone. 

To access a VPN, everyone would have to use a government-mandated form of ID, something like GOV OneLogin, or indeed the putative BritCard token that was being floated as a ‘Something must be done!’ only a few months ago.

Privacy and civil rights campaigners have already hit out at the Starmer VPN idea. For example, Maya Thomas, Legal and Privacy Officer of BigBrotherWatch said:

Having to provide ID or a biometric face scan to access a VPN utterly defeats the point of a technology designed to enhance privacy online. The ability of adults and children to enjoy the enhanced privacy provided by VPNs is a sign of a healthy liberal democracy.

The thing is, you don’t teach kids road safety by banning them from the highways until they’re adults; you teach them how to cross the road! As Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, argued last month, you don’t legislate to keep them safer online by just shutting down access to being online:

For child safety, we should be teaching children about Internet safety - including why you should use a VPN to protect your privacy, block malware, etc.

My take

Currently VPNs are illegal in Belarus, Iraq, North Korea, and Turkmenistan, while use is monitored and restricted in China, Iran, Oman, Russia, Turkey and the UAE, so Starmer’s plans would put the UK in a pantheon of ‘interesting’ company!

If he gets his way, the Starmer vision of a world for a 16 year old UK kid after the latest 'Something must be done!' has been done would mean you can have sex, vote for a government, join the armed forces, fight and die for your country, or get married. Just don’t touch that VPN!!!

And for the rest of us, get your government digital ID out if you want to use a VPN, not to chase up porn or to engage in anti-social or illegal activities, but just for security and personal privacy protection. (Watch those online fraud rates soar if this comes to pass - stand by for ‘Something must be done!’ there!)

And, of course, the VPN provider response to all this will be to take steps to escape being under the legislative purview of the UK.   

This is all making me feel as though I’m coming over a bit Muskian and I really, really don’t like that feeling.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) says that it recognizes that VPNs can be used for “legitimate purposes” - that’s big of it! - and that it wants to hear from “all stakeholders, including VPN providers” to make sure the government plans are “proportionate”.

Easy - they’re not! Or at least, not as they have been leaked out over the past 24 hours. (It’s worth noting that as recently as late last year the UK Government insisted there were no plans to ban VPNs in any form.)

While the Starmer administration hopes to bounce all this through under blanket cover of the wider Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill and is making no secret of the fact that it wants legislation ready to go before the Party conference season in the Fall - Sir Keir Starmer, the man who saved our kids from the evils of the Internet! Standing ovations all round! - there is still time to raise objections to this badly thought out VPN idea and diginomica encourages every one of our UK readers to do so.

Social media and AI regulation does desperately need to be a priority for every civilized government around the world. The vendors cannot be left to their own devices on this one. Remember what Salesforce’s Benioff said in Davos:

These US tech companies, they hate regulation...They hate regulation.

Look no further than Musk’s X feed daily for evidence of that.

But we need considered, informed, consistent regulation and legislation, not an unseemly scrabble not only to clamber on the passing bandwagon, but to try to look as though you’re up front steering the damn thing when you don’t actually know how to drive!

Something must be done - yes!

This is something - well...yes?

So, this must be done - emphatically no!!!