The late and much-missed Ross Anderson famously wrote: “The idea that complex social problems are amenable to cheap technical solutions is the siren song of the software salesman and has lured many a gullible government department on to the rocks.”
Keen listeners may have also heard Ross yesterday, from wherever he resides in the great beyond, bellowing out to the great dominions: oh for fuck’s sake.
This being why:
Fun fact: the magical child safety solution which Jess Philips cited in her resignation letter is a vendor-specific offering, which benefited from an intense PR and lobbying campaign, and was previously praised by …
Prince Andrew.
I always keep the receipts.
heatherburns.tech/2026/02/20/t…
— Heather Burns (@heatherburnstech.bsky.social) 12 May 2026 at 14:46
That’s a thread, by the way.
Yes, the UK is now entering its tenth straight year of Brexit-era psychodrama, but even by those standards, this incident was remarkable for two reasons.
The first is that on her way out the door, a serving minister essentially regurgitated a private vendor’s sales pitch, a vendor whose years of aggressive marketing and corporate lobbying – not to mention courtship of The Nonce Formerly Known As Prince Andrew – placed them so close to power that their pitch deck was taken as both technical fact and regulatory assurance.
In doing so, it gave the wider public the sense of the magical thinking that those of us in the civil society space have been hitting up against for years. These years when we were portrayed as enemies of children’s safety for pointing out the obvious. These years when we would leave a frustrating meeting with a VIP policymaker thinking “where did she get those ideas from?” and realise that a compliance software vendor got to her before we did. That vendor promised her cheap technical solutions to complex social problems; you, on the other hand, gave her more problems. That’s why things are where they are.
Thanks to that letter, the wider world can see that now.
And that’s the second reason that incident was remarkable.
That’s because, at this point in the game, there was no excuse for it.
These are not the techno-optimistic days of the green and white papers which became the OSA, nor the regulatory-optimistic days of “taking back control” by wiggling out of the EU-derived, human rights-based Digital Single Market framework.
No, we’re way, way, way beyond that now. Things are different. Technology is different. Geopolitics are different. The open internet, or what’s left of it, is different.
Everything has changed.
There were, and are, people in civil society who have devoted years of their careers trying to explain that to government and to Parliament, and who either gave up trying or gave up their careers entirely when their funding was cut in favour of AI hype.
Despite all that, there still are people in civil society who still would have been happy to explain that to government and to Parliament, and to do so with nothing more than a phonecall. As before, they’d have brought stats. They’d have brought reports. They’d have brought legal briefings. They’d have brought the optimism that no vendor’s slick sales pitch can diminish.
Didn’t happen, of course.
And so there it is, on Parliamentary letterhead.
Magical thinking about magical thinking.
Here’s a fun fact for a postscript: I have written two blog posts about my encounters with age verification software providers who were seeking to normalise the implementation of their products into the British internet stack, while also lobbying politicians to expand the legal framework from mere age verification to requiring government ID proofs of citizenship as conditions for website access. In both posts, both sets of editors required me to edit out the narratives of how openly racist the age verification providers were – as in, my accounts of how they were blatantly seeking to leverage the Online Safety Act to use their products to restrict ethnic, racial, and national minorities from being able to access the web – so that the editors didn’t get sued over the articles. That doesn’t change the fact that those conversations happened. That doesn’t change who those vendors are, what they really believe, and what they really want.
