We don’t publish the full details of our correspondence with regulators or Governments, because they don’t like it… and we have some sympathy with that position.
Instead, avid readers of this blog will have to be satisfied with little breadcrumbs we drop here and there.
From my recent posts, you’ll know I am a fan of the concept of mere conduit, but we have also been critical of a lack of enforcement of existing rules relating to nuisance and malicious calls.
In 2021, Ofcom admitted it had taken neither formal nor informal enforcement action in relation to GC C6.6… and it hasn’t, to our knowledge, taken formal action since (we haven’t redone the 2021 FOI request to know the informal answer). The extent of Ofcom investigations into the entire field are two… both in relation to the suballocation of telephone numbers and not in terms of messing with CLIs. One of which is investigating an entity that failed KYC here within thirty seconds of adult review. In other words, measuring an 11 on the scrotitude scale.
Yet Ofcom managed to fine OnlyFans over a million quid for inadequately explaining how they prevent teenagers from seeing boobs on the internet. This is more, in absolute terms (and maybe real terms if I were to do the math) than some fines for highly egregious 999 outages.
I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I think a seventeen-year-old seeing nudity is a less serious issue in society than your grandma being robbed of her life savings.
And there’s the rub – these unreconcilable datapoints are a function of the various pieces of legislation that provide Ofcom with its raison d’etre. Far from being the villain in this story, Ofcom is a child of Parliament, and only Parliament can make the necessary change.
That’s what we’ve just written to a Home Office minister about: that Parliament needs to better express its will in relation to addressing harms in our sector, and that the upcoming Statement of Strategic Priorities might be a good starting place.
All without undoing mere conduit. There be dragons there. Big ones. Beyond St. George’s skill to vanquish.
