LONDON—Members of the House of Lords, the upper house of the United Kingdom's bicameral Parliament, have opened an inquiry to seek feedback from the general public on the effectiveness of age-verification enforcement under the sweeping Online Safety Act (OSA) of 2023.
The inquiry was announced following several data breaches reported by age- and identity-verification vendors. For example, a vendor for Discord suffered such a data breach.
Amid the documented history of data breaches and other concerns related to privacy, the Lords Communications and Digital Committee announced the formal inquiry on Monday. And in a first, lawmakers are asking whether the compliance mechanism they adopted is the problem, not the enforcement pace by digital regulator Ofcom.
Ofcom released its first annual report on age verification usage and adoption earlier this summer. The regulator deployed the age verification enforcement mechanisms last year and began investigating dozens of allegedly noncompliant adult entertainment platforms and collecting hundreds of millions of dollars from tech platforms, many from the United States.
Despite this, lawmakers are concerned. Baroness Barbara Keeley, a Labour Party MP and member of the Lords, serves as the chair of the committee. According to Keeley, the Online Safety Act was adopted to bring forward groundbreaking online safety regulations in the United Kingdom's digital space. However, there are serious allegations of ineffectiveness.
Ofcom has faced criticism for its implementation and the consistency of its enforcement mechanism. Baroness Keeley explained, "It is now clear that the Act is not working as well as it should. We want to understand why." Keeley's committee issued a "call for evidence" to applicable stakeholders from domestic and international industries, including porn.
The inquiry is very clear. The "call for evidence" announcement notes, "It will consider Ofcom’s interpretation, implementation and enforcement of the OSA’s provisions; whether these have led online services to make meaningful changes to their systems, processes and design; and the impact of the OSA on children’s and adults’ online experiences.
"The committee will also assess whether there are shortcomings in the OSA itself that limit the regime’s effectiveness and identify what further action may be required from the government, Ofcom, providers of regulated services or Parliament to drive improvements," the announcement reads. "The inquiry will address the effectiveness of the regulatory framework established by the OSA, rather than re-examining the full range of issues considered during the development of the legislation."
The deadline for written submissions to the committee is 5 pm (UTC/GMT +1) on Monday, September 7. Questions posed by the committee are available on the committee's webpage. One noteworthy question asks: "What evidence, if any, is there that U.K. users are less exposed to illegal content and activity since the OSA illegal content duties came into force?" In fact, the Online Safety Act has made it harder for platforms to conduct self-regulations and carry out trust and safety programming without governmental intervention.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) highlights data privacy concerns in an analysis published on the organization's Deeplinks blog in August 2025.
Paige Collings, EFF's senior speech and privacy activist, wrote, "The Online Safety Act is a threat to the privacy of users, restricts free expression by arbitrating speech online, exposes users to algorithmic discrimination through face checks, and leaves millions of people without a personal device or form of identification excluded from accessing the internet."
Despite this observation and many like it, many applicable stakeholders confirmed to AVN that they intend to submit written testimony.
Iain Corby, the executive director of the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA), said, "We welcome this inquiry and agree with the committee chair’s view that ‘any law is only as good as its enforcement,' and we have consistently reminded Ofcom that it is imperative that it creates a level playing field by enforcing at scale."
He added, "And while 'issues with the legislation itself' are also in scope, having spent four and half years passing the Online Safety Act, recommendations on how to accelerate the impact of that existing law will have a far more immediate effect.”
Stakeholders who are far more critical of the Online Safety Act, namely the adult industry trade group the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), intend to tell Parliament, "we told you so."
"In the year since the Online Safety Act went into effect, some adult platforms have experienced overly aggressive enforcement by Ofcom despite making good faith efforts to comply, while some of the worst actors have exposed limitations of one country’s ability to police the entire internet," said Alison Boden, executive director of the FSC.
"FSC will be submitting evidence to Parliament to help shape future legislation," Boden added.
Corey Silverstein, an attorney focusing on the online adult entertainment industry, is critical of age verification legislation in the United States, the United Kingdom and abroad. Silverstein said that he "strongly welcomes" this inquiry.
"I strongly welcome the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee’s inquiry into the implementation and impact of the Online Safety Act," Silverstein said. "Protecting children online is an important objective, but invoking that objective cannot exempt a law from scrutiny of whether it actually works—or of the harms it imposes on millions of law-abiding adults. The inquiry should examine both Ofcom’s implementation of the Act and the legislation’s underlying assumptions."
He added, "Child safety and adult privacy are not mutually exclusive. Effective policy must protect both. I hope this inquiry produces an evidence-based reassessment of age-verification mandates and ensures that lawmakers do not repeat the same mistakes as other jurisdictions consider similar legislation."
