Trumped?
“This Safer Internet Day 2025, the internet may be as safe as it will ever be as Big Tech appear to be holding all the cards having leveraged President Trump and the promise of trade deals (or the threat of tariffs) to influence government policies affecting their interests, from online safety to artificial intelligence and copyright. ”
On the eve of Safer Internet Day 2025, the Labour government was forced to deny reports published in The Telegraph on Sunday 09 February 2025, that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was willing to “rework” the “Orwellian” Online Safety Act 2023 amid fears it - or its enforcement by online safety regulator Ofcom - could block any UK/US trade deal or lead to US tariffs being imposed. Dame Angela Eagle asserted that she had seen “no corroboration” of those claims (not quite a denial), and Downing Street issued a statement that “The Online Safety Act is already law, it’s already being implemented and over the coming months it will introduce strong protections for children in tackling illegal content online”.
The effectiveness, or otherwise, of the Act will be determined by its implementation and Ofcom has already been criticised for its approach, and potential lacunas have been identified in its guidance as demonstrated by recent events such as the posting of CSAE content on the Mumsnet forum.
Regardless, it had been Labour’s position that the Online Safety Act 2023 didn’t go far enough and would need to be supplemented. The Labour Party’s manifesto committed to “build on the Online Safety Act, bringing forward provisions as quickly as possible, and explore further measures to keep everyone safe online, particularly when using social media. We will also give coroners more powers to access information held by technology companies after a child’s death.” As recently as January 2025, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle told the BBC that he considered the legislation to be “unsatisfactory” and “uneven”, calling in particular for stronger powers to address legal but harmful content. He stated that he would “focus on getting all the powers I can have implemented” but that “we will have to legislate into the future again”.
He laid down the gauntlet to Big Tech critics of the law, having earlier suggested that they should be approached with “humility”, asserting that “Access to the British society and economy is a privilege, it is not a right. If you come and operate in this country you abide by the law, and the law says illegal content must be taken down”.
Now, however, with President Trump reported to consider the legislation a “roadblock” to a trade deal and the most prominent member of his administration, Elon Musk, having lobbed insults at the European Commission over the Digital Service Act and Australia’s eSafety Commissioner over what he considers to be censorship in the name of online safety, all mention of further strengthening of the Online Safety Act 2023 appears to have been dropped.
Online safety isn’t the only area of UK government policy that may be bending to Trump’s will.
One of returning US President Trump’s first actions on taking office was to rescind President Biden’s Executive Order 14110 on the Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence which, among other things, provided for the reporting of test results on AI models to the government and establishes the US AI Safety Institute. Executive Order 14110 was almost immediately replaced with President Trump’s own Executive Order on Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence, which requires the creation of an action plan to “sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance” but doesn’t reinstate any obligations pertaining to AI safety, reporting or testing.
As the follow up to the UK’s AI Safety Summit, the AI Action Summit, continues in Paris, a leaked draft declaration entitled ‘Statement on Inclusive and Sustainable Artificial Intelligence for People and the Planet’ omitted key commitments made at Bletchley Park and failed to build on the Bletchley Declaration recognition of risks and proposals for the safe and responsible development of frontier AI and the Summit’s concluding commitment to a “ground-breaking plan on AI safety testing” and the Seoul Declaration committing to building AI safety frameworks. It was also reported that the US delegation had insisted that the final statement excluded any mention of the environmental cost of AI, existential risk or the role of the United Nations.
Having made the manifesto pledge to “ensure the safe development and use of AI models by introducing binding regulation on the handful of companies developing the most powerful AI models and by banning the creation of sexually explicit deepfakes”, Labour confirmed in the King’s Speech that it would introduce “appropriate legislation to place requirements on those working to develop the most powerful artificial intelligence models”.
When the Prime Minister launched the AI Opportunities Action Plan in January 2025, he struck a cautious tone on legislation stating that “We will test and understand AI before we regulate it to make sure that when we do it, it is proportionate and grounded in the science”, and by 07 February 2025 Politico was reporting that despite a consultation on AI regulation being “ready to go” this had now been postponed to spring 2025, as “thinking inside the U.K. government has changed” and Ministers have dropped from the proposed AI Bill “language about forcing AI companies to give the AISI [AI Safety Institute] pre-release access for testing”. A spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology insisted that the government “remained fully committed” to legislation that would be brought “as parliamentary timetables allow”, but confirmed the proposals for AI regulation were being reviewed, stating that “We are continuing to engage extensively to refine our proposals and will launch a public consultation in due course to ensure our approach is fit for purpose and can keep pace with the technology’s rapid development”.
Add to that the government’s move to pre-empt its own consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence by introducing new clauses 135-139 Data (Use and Access) Bill to establish the framework under which would operate the proposed amendment to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to permit data mining / web crawling / scraping for any purpose (not merely for text and data analysis for non-commercial research as currently permitted by section 29A Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988), where there is lawful access to the relevant copyright work, but with a carve out such that the exception could not be relied upon where the rights holder had reserved their rights through an agreed mechanism or an effective, accessible, machine-readable format (by blocking generative AI web crawlers using robots.txt, for example, or associated metadata or even third party registries).
Having played Trump, Big Tech seem to be holding all the cards.
Find out more about our Online Safety, Online Harms, Content Moderation and Content Regulation services.
Find out more about our responsible and ethical artificial intelligence (AI) services.
Find out more about our data protection and data privacy services.