Overview

• A High Court judgment this week found that the Act’s ambiguous platform definitions could unintentionally include sites such as Wikipedia and highlighted Ofcom’s lack of data to confirm which services qualify as Category 1 for another year.
• Age-verification obligations for pornographic, anorexia-related, and suicide-related content came into force earlier this month as the first requirements of the Online Safety Act.
• Ofcom’s provisional Category 1 criteria rely on UK user numbers and recommendation algorithms, triggering mandatory identity-checked filtering functions that volunteer-driven platforms cannot feasibly implement.
• High Court records show that ministers including Michelle Donelan and junior minister Baroness Jones warned against scope mis-targeting and cautioned that quick legislative tweaks could introduce new loopholes.
• The delayed decision on platform categorisation places responsibility on incoming minister Peter Kyle and prolongs legal, operational, and political uncertainty for regulators and online services.