The UK government's "Watch this Space" Green Paper wants platforms like YouTube to give guaranteed prominence to the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. A separate but related wave of rules will ban under-16s from social media outright from Spring 2027, and terrestrial TV itself is scheduled to be switched off entirely, either in 2034 or, at the outside, 2044. I've spent the last few weeks responding to the formal consultation as an independent content creator, and I want to lay out here why I think the direction is wrong, not because trusted news or child safety don't matter, but because the tools being reached for are the wrong ones, and the bill is likely to land on exactly the people who had nothing to do with the problems being solved.
Defining a Few Terms
Prominence mandate is a legal requirement that a platform's ranking or recommendation system give guaranteed visibility to a specific, government-designated organisation, regardless of how that content performs on its own merits.
Geo-blocking is what happens when a website detects a visitor is browsing from a particular country and simply refuses to serve them the page, typically because the operator has decided that country's legal requirements aren't worth the cost of compliance.
DTT to IPTV transition refers to switching television distribution from broadcast signals received by an aerial (Freeview) to delivery entirely over an internet connection.
The Market Already Got There First
During Covid, YouTube began surfacing NHS and WHO guidance through information panels, without anyone legislating for it. The BBC and YouTube announced a direct content partnership as recently as January this year, with the BBC now producing news, entertainment and children's content specifically for the platform. My view is that mandating an outcome the market is already delivering voluntarily doesn't add safety, it adds cost, rigidity, and a permanent mechanism by which the state decides who counts as trustworthy, a mechanism that will still be sitting there under governments neither of us has met yet.
The Overregulation Data Point Nobody Wanted
The UK's age-verification requirements under the Online Safety Act, in practice document uploads, credit card checks, or facial age estimation, have already produced a measurable side effect: a meaningful number of smaller platforms and forums have chosen to geo-block UK users entirely rather than build or buy compliance infrastructure for a market our size. That's the opposite of what child protection regulation is supposed to achieve, and it's an observed outcome, not a prediction. Every additional layer of UK-specific compliance is a further barrier to entry that only the largest incumbents can absorb, which tends to kill off the next generation of small platforms and independent creators before they get started, not the illegal content the rules were aimed at.
The BBC's Licence Fee Was Built for 1997
I don't watch BBC television, and I don't think I'm unusual in that. The current licence fee model, £180 a year for a colour set, and a genuinely peculiar £60.50 for a black-and-white one, was designed for a broadcast monopoly that simply no longer exists. My proposal is to split the BBC in two: a smaller, publicly funded core covering news, the World Service, BBC Worldwide's international functions, and radio, funded by a much reduced licence fee or general taxation, and a fully independent, commercial entertainment arm that raises its own revenue and sells its own content on its own merits. If the entertainment output is as good as its defenders claim, it will do fine without compulsion. If it isn't, that's information worth having too.
There's a related point about diversity worth making here, and not the sense of diversity usually meant in these debates. A prominence mandate for a small, fixed list of legacy broadcasters structurally advantages a handful of institutionally similar newsrooms over the far more varied range of independent creators now available on YouTube. Any equalities assessment of these proposals ought to ask whether they affect the diversity of content actually reaching audiences, not merely the diversity credentials of the organisations being promoted.
Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription: the Under-16 Ban
The planned ban on under-16 social media use, covering TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook and X, has genuine public support, with the government citing backing from nine in ten parents, and I don't think the underlying concern is manufactured. UK teenagers spend a genuinely striking amount of time on these apps daily, and there's a real, evidenced case that endless algorithmic feeds affect sleep, mood and attention, particularly late at night. That's a real problem, and I don't want to wave it away.
But a blanket ban is not obviously the fix. Australia ran this exact experiment first: by March 2026, its eSafety Commissioner found that seven in ten children who had accounts before the ban still had them, or had simply made new ones. Bans on determined teenagers with a VPN and five minutes of patience tend to produce workarounds rather than compliance, while pushing the genuine enforcement cost onto platforms and the genuine circumvention risk onto children, who often end up on less regulated corners of the internet rather than better-regulated ones. I'd rather see serious investment in media literacy and parental tools than a rule that mostly teaches an entire generation how to lie about their date of birth.
The Bigger Picture
None of this is happening in a vacuum. According to UBS's 2026 Global Wealth Report, Britain has recorded the steepest fall in average adult wealth of any of the 37 developed economies it surveyed since 2020, driven mainly by a harsh post-pandemic inflation shock and the energy crisis that followed the invasion of Ukraine, alongside a separate, well-documented decline of roughly a fifth in the UK's share of goods exports since the Brexit referendum. Energy costs here remain markedly higher than in comparable economies. None of that is fixed by requiring a facial recognition check to watch a video, and I'd rather see energy costs, tax competitiveness and export capacity get the level of ministerial attention currently going into platform prominence rules.
I'll add the fair counterpoint myself, since it deserves a place here: reasonable people, including many child-safety researchers and a large majority of surveyed parents, genuinely believe firmer platform regulation is overdue, and the Online Safety Act passed with cross-party support for reasons that weren't invented. I don't think that case is baseless. I think it's being pursued through the wrong tools, at a real cost, and I'd welcome anyone who disagrees to make that case in the comments.
The consultation closes 31 August 2026. Whichever side of this you land on, it's worth five minutes of anyone's time.
Link to the Watch This Space consultation here
