United Kingdom: Opened consultation on Ofcom rules on additional duties for categorised services

On 25 March 2024, the Office of Communications of the United Kingdom (Ofcom) opened a public consultation on rules on additional duties under the Online Safety Bill for categorised services until 20 May 2024. Under the Bill, online services that fall within scope must implement appropriate safety measures to protect users from online harms. Categorised services, meeting the thresholds established by the Secretary of State, have to comply with extra requirements if they fall into categories 1, 2A, or 2B. This includes producing transparency reports, operating in line with terms of service, offering user empowerment tools, and preventing fraudulent advertising – depending on the category they fall within. Under the Ofcom draft, a category 1 service either uses a content recommender system and has more than 34 million UK users on the user-to-user part of the service or allows users to forward or reshare user-generated content and use a content recommender system and has more than 7 million UK users on the user-to-user part of the service. A category 2A service is a search service but not a vertical search service and has more than 7 million UK users on the search engine part of the service. Lastly, a category 2B service allows users to send direct messages and has more than 3 million UK users on the user-to-user part of the service.