Summary

  • From 25 November, Ofcom plans a public consultation on its transparency-notice impact assessment and a parallel written-representations process on service-specific draft notices sent to categorised providers. Both are scheduled to close on 20 January.
  • The reporting regime will be judged by the questions that survive that process: what each service must disclose, in what format, by when, and whether readers can compare the results.

The first report is a form

A transparency report looks like an answer. Its real first draft is a question. Ask how much harmful material was removed and a service can supply a removal count. Ask how many users probably encountered it before removal and the conversation becomes harder. Ask whether the same measure can be repeated next year and compared across services, and the form turns into a test of institutional nerve.

Ofcom is approaching that test with two doors open at once. Its October industry bulletin says that on 25 November it will start two parallel eight-week processes, both ending 20 January. The public will be invited to comment on the impact assessment for the proposed way to develop transparency notices. Providers of categorised services will receive draft notices for their own services and can comment on the information Ofcom proposes to make them publish, the report format and the publication timetable.

That is a difference in the object of review. The public sees a proposed method; the service sees a draft demand addressed to it. Neither channel holds the final pen. Ofcom does. Yet the service-specific draft is where a disputed field, definition or deadline can be negotiated before the public ever sees a finished report. A regulator can quite sensibly ask a provider whether it can collect a metric. It should be equally clear, afterward, which question emerged from that exchange.

The statute gives Ofcom the pen

Section 77 of the Online Safety Act makes the notice the controlling document. Once a year Ofcom must give a provider of a Category 1, 2A or 2B service a notice requiring a transparency report. A provider with more than one relevant service gets a separate notice for each. The notice specifies the information, format, submission deadline and manner and date of publication. The resulting report must be complete and accurate in all material respects.

The Act also draws boundaries around the questions. Category 1 and 2B notices concern user-to-user information; Category 2A notices concern search-engine information. Combined services have a more detailed rule for when both types can be required. The category is therefore a reporting jurisdiction, not a decorative label at the top of a PDF. Ofcom's public register identifies the services within those duties; its separate emerging Category 1 list does not itself impose the extra duties.

Ofcom's final transparency guidance turns the statute into a sequence. First, the regulator sends a draft notice. A provider can make written representations about scope, format, a template where relevant and the time allowed. Ofcom considers those representations and chooses the final requirements. After issuing the notices, it plans to tell the public broadly what information it requested. The finished provider reports, and then Ofcom's own synthesis of patterns and good practice, arrive later.

The sequence matters because a public report is constrained by the questions it is asked to answer. A number absent from the notice cannot be recovered by scolding a later report for omitting it. The arguments over question design deserve attention before the first tables are filled in.

A public microphone, a provider's marked-up draft

The provider channel is specific, but the public is not silent. Ofcom invited civil society and public views on desired reporting information in an earlier engagement notice. Its guidance promises engagement with researchers, civil society and people with relevant lived experience while notices are developed and while Ofcom prepares its own analysis. On 25 November, the announced public process concerns the impact assessment; the announced provider process concerns each service's draft notice. Those routes allow different kinds of intervention.

The distinction can improve a notice or dilute one, depending on what Ofcom does with the evidence. A provider knows its systems, capacity and definitions in a way an outsider may not. A child-safety researcher may know which apparently tidy count tells readers almost nothing about exposure. The regulator has to put those claims against one another and commit to a final question. Calling every comment “stakeholder input” would hide the fact that one side can annotate the exact demand it will later have to satisfy.

There is a second design fight inside the form. Ofcom's guidance considers information that can be tracked across years, information that might illuminate one year's theme, and fields that can be compared across services. It also recognises that a bespoke question may fit one service better. Comparison wants common definitions; relevance sometimes wants different ones. The final notices will show how Ofcom handles that trade-off. A neat cross-service table built from unlike denominators would be a triumph of layout over meaning.

Ten perfect bespoke reports, each speaking a private dialect, would leave the public unable to compare them.

Confidentiality adds a sharper pencil. The guidance allows providers to raise commercial-sensitivity concerns during the draft stage. Ofcom says it will weigh those concerns against the public value of disclosure and can consider an alternative measure if it still serves the transparency purpose. The important future record is therefore the public overview of final requests and the eventual reports: which questions remained specific, which became comparable, and what useful information was replaced by a thinner substitute.

This is a practical test of authority hidden inside participation. The chairs at the table matter less than the decision trail. The statute leaves the final decision with Ofcom. The public can judge that decision if the final reporting demands and later outputs make the choices visible.

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