LONDON, UK – In front of Downing Street today, United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced he will resign and remain as caretaker until the Labour Party selects a successor.
“Keir Starmer leaves office having done more to shrink the open internet for British consumers than any prime minister in living memory,” said Yaël Ossowski, deputy director at the Consumer Choice Centre. “His government treated adults like suspects and the internet like a crime scene. That is the legacy he hands to his successor, and it is a legacy that should be dismantled, not inherited.”
The Consumer Choice Centre has been among the most consistent critics of the Starmer government’s digital agenda, including the aggressive enforcement of the Online Safety Act, limits on free speech online, the push toward an under-16 social media ban, and the age-verification regime that has effectively introduced a proof-of-age requirement for everyday Britons to access lawful content.
“The age-verification mandate was sold as child protection, but what it built was the architecture of a permanent digital ID,” Ossowski continued. “Adults are now forced to hand over government identification, facial scans, or credit card details to faceless third-party intermediaries just to log on. Every one of those checkpoints is a honeypot for hackers and a chokepoint for free expression.
“Consumers understood the risk immediately — that is why VPN searches spiked the moment the rules took effect. When your safety policy drives millions of ordinary users to route around it, you have not protected anyone. You have simply taught a generation that the law treats them as the threat,” said Ossowski.
Ossowski argued that Starmer’s approach repeatedly substituted heavy-handed mandates for the kind of targeted tools that empower families and consumers directly.
“There was always a smarter path — device-level controls, parental tools, real choice for households — but this government reached for the bluntest instrument available every time,” he said. “The under-16 ban is a false choice that cuts young people off from genuine benefits while pushing them into the unregulated corners of the web. It is regulation that fails the very people it claims to protect,” concluded Ossowski.
The Consumer Choice Center urges the incoming Labour leadership and all parties to commit to a full review of the Online Safety Act‘s age-verification provisions and to abandon plans for a statutory under-16 social media ban.
For more on the Consumer Choice Center’s work on tech innovation, visit consumerchoicecenter.org.
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About the Consumer Choice Centre
The Consumer Choice Centre is an independent, nonpartisan consumer advocacy group championing the benefits of freedom of choice, innovation, and abundance in everyday life for consumers in over 100 countries. We closely monitor regulatory trends in Brussels, Washington, Ottawa, Brasilia, London, Geneva, and more.
