Ofcom has announced that it has exhausted all legal options under the Online Safety Act to take action against a suicide forum. The regulator said it had “no further legal routes available.” This is what happens when you write legislation to control the internet and then discover the internet does not care about your legislation.
The Online Safety Act was supposed to be Britain’s answer to tech regulation—a muscular, comprehensive framework that would finally bring Big Tech to heel. Instead, it has become a very expensive way for Ofcom to learn that you cannot sue the internet into compliance when the internet is specifically designed to be hard to sue.
What exactly happened here? A forum promoting self-harm exists. Ofcom found it. Ofcom tried to regulate it. The forum did what forums do when regulators show up: it became harder to find, moved jurisdictions, or simply ignored the letter. Ofcom checked the rulebook. The rulebook said “no further routes.” This is the regulatory equivalent of a bouncer discovering the door is locked from the inside.
The absurdity deepens when you realize this was entirely predictable. The Online Safety Act was written by people who believed you could regulate speech by threatening the platforms that host it. But a suicide forum is not hosted by a platform—it is the platform. You cannot fine it. You cannot threaten its shareholders. You cannot even find the person running it if they do not want to be found.
Ofcom is not incompetent. The legislation is just written by people who thought the internet worked like television. It does not. It never will. The regulator has discovered this the hard way, which is the only way British regulators ever discover anything.