New Ofcom boss Ian Cheshire’s in-tray is full, but one issue will dominate

Ian Cheshire’s Ofcom in-tray is big. It is available online under the regulator’s plan for 2026-27 and covers an array of industries: telecoms, broadband, the postal service, media and the online world.It is the latter that is going to dominate his tenure as chair. Ofcom oversees the Online Safety Act, the legislation that regulates social media in the UK. Much is expected of the act from internet safety campaigners, and a bit less from freedom of speech advocates, which leaves Cheshire in a difficult place.“When Ofcom was formed just over 20 years ago, the communications world was a very different place,” the plan says, with some understatement. “Two-thirds of the UK had no internet. There were no iPhones or smart speakers, no iPlayer, YouTube or TikTok. 4G was still a decade away, and Britons sent three times more letters than they do today.”Influential figures in online safety such as Ian Russell, the father of Molly Russell, the teenager who took her own life after viewing content online, and the peer Beeban Kidron are adamant that the act needs to be toughened up. Last year Russell called for a change in leadership at the regulator after losing faith in its ability to make the internet safer for children, citing the watchdog’s struggle to block an online suicide forum accessible to UK users.At the same time, the technology secretary, Liz Kendall, whose department oversaw the selection process, wrote to Ofcom saying she was deeply concerned about delays in rolling out parts of the Online Safety Act (OSA), a landmark piece of legislation laying down safety rules for social media, search and video platforms.Updating the act is not Ofcom’s job, although any connections Cheshire has with the government could help prod ministers into action, once he has undergone a hearing with a parliamentary committee as the government’s preferred choice for the job. Despite being passed into law in 2023, implementation of the act has only just got going under Ofcom under the chief executive, Melanie Dawes, with last year’s introduction of rigorous age-gating a moment when the act started to intersect with people’s lives meaningfully.There is also the job for which Ofcom was created in 2003: overseeing public service broadcasting such as children’s programming and impartial news broadcasting (Cheshire, who has good experience with TV as a former chair of Channel 4, will be getting to know GB News); ensuring the universal postal service requirement covers all UK addresses six days a week; monitoring the UK’s access to decent broadband and mobile phone coverage. It is clear the government wants Ofcom to move quicker on online safety despite its vast responsibilities in other areas.An ongoing investigation into the partial nudification of women and girls by the Elon Musk-owned AI tool Grok will be a test of the act’s, and Ofcom’s, mettle. In the meantime, that 2026-27 plan is waiting to be implemented. The online section alone lists projects ranging from preventing illegal content from going viral to updating on the amount of harmful content to children found online and updating on the effectiveness of age-gating. Extra measures for the big platforms such as Google and Instagram, held up by a court case, are yet to be introduced.The act is still being bedded in but incidents leading to a flurry of calls for action, such as misinformation spreading in the wake of the Southport killings and X hosting AI-generated misogyny, will keep occurring. The legislation is there for Cheshire, but not the patience.