Recommendation 27

The government considers that, with the Online Safety Act, the UK will be the first country to regulate such a comprehensive range of online harms, and the Department told us that a lot of what it described as ‘nascent legislation in this space’, particularly around Europe and elsewhere, looked a lot like the Act.63 In developing the legislation and regulatory regime established by the Act, both the Department and Ofcom have engaged with overseas regulators as they recognise that online safety is a global problem and that hardly any of the companies subject to regulation are based in the UK. Ofcom has also liaised with other UK regulators.64