Multiple notable groups, including Stop Killing Games, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and numerous others have come together to pressure the UK government to stop “[undermining] the open internet.”
In a joint statement, 19 organisations (listed below) wrote that “the open Internet is a global public resource that has long since become foundational to the flourishing of individuals, businesses, and societies… This openness and the opportunities it affords are coming under threat in the UK.”
The letter refers specifically to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which passed the final stages of the UK’s legislative process on April 29, but the British government has been at this kind of thing for a while. Last year’s Online Safety Act has—as UK readers will be excruciatingly aware—made using the internet in the country a great deal more invasive and tedious, as various services are now compelled to verify their users are over 18 years of age.
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The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 grants the government new powers to impose restrictions on social media use for under-16s (after an ongoing consultation closes on May 26) and implements a statutory ban on smartphones in schools.
“Ministers are consulting on which platforms and specific features should be placed behind age gates as part of a national consultation on online harms. This approach focuses on restricting young people’s access, rather than ensuring services are designed to uphold their rights and interests by default,” says the joint statement from Mozilla and co.
“Even targeted age restrictions of specific features could mean that all users are required to complete intrusive age assurance processes to retain full access… Implementing such access restrictions hinges on all users having to verify their ages, not just young people, and places the burden on providers to comply in ways they consider appropriate.
“As the UK’s experiences with age assurance under the Online Safety Act have shown, deploying age assurance technologies at scale comes with significant trade-offs: Existing age assurance technologies are either insufficiently accurate, undermine privacy and data security, or are not widely available across populations.”
In other words, measures such as those implemented by the UK government in the past two years are a sledgehammer approach that makes life harder for everyone without really doing much to protect the kids it ostensibly hopes to. If nothing else, they can always draw on a moustache.
The statement also rings alarm bells for kids seeking information they might not otherwise feel safe to access. “The internet is an essential resource that enables young people to engage with the world in a way that transcends their immediate environment, as well as find information they may not feel safe to access offline, such as about family abuse, politics, or their sexuality. At the same time, however, digital spaces can carry risks for different populations, including young people. These risks are real and require thoughtful policy interventions that address the root of the issue, not just simplistic policies like access bans.”
For its part, the British government has previously said that it has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and has shown no indication that it will change that position for the online portions of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026.
Here’s the full list of signatories to the joint statement:
- Big Brother Watch
- Defend Digital Me
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- ExpressVPN
- Gamers Voice
- Global Partners Digital
- Index on Censorship
- Internet Society
- IPVanish
- Mozilla
- Mullvad VPN
- NO2ID
- Open Rights Group
- Privacymatters
- Proton
- Stop Killing Games
- Tor Project
- Tuta
- VPN Trust Initiative
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