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James Ball is a fellow at Tech Policy Press

June 22, 2026—Andy Burnham with colleagues from the Parliamentary Labour Party in Westminster Hall at the Houses of Parliament in central London, as he returns to the House of Commons to take up his seat after winning the Makerfield by-election. (Yui Mok/Press Association via AP Images)


Andy Burnham only secured his return to Westminster in the early hours of the morning last Friday, when he was 

 for the constituency of Makerfield. By Monday lunchtime, he was the prohibitive favorite to be the UK’s next prime minister.

Burnham has spent the last decade in local government as the mayor of the Greater Manchester region, largely excluding him from the cut and thrust of national politics and policymaking for much of that time.

Beyond that, Burnham will arrive in Number 10 next month as something of a blank slate, including on matters of tech policy.

Despite this, there are some clues in his public remarks over the last decade, especially when it relates to the contentious under-16s social media ban announced by Keir Starmer last week, the implementation of which will now inevitably fall to Burnham’s administration.

During his previous tenure as an MP, Burnham served as culture secretary, before becoming health secretary and then, when Labour entered opposition, served as shadow education, health and home secretary respectively.

As shadow home secretary under the left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn, 

 about government efforts to expand its surveillance powers, arguing that should the Investigatory Powers Bill become law – which eventually it did – “the UK will be the only country in the world to have a policy of capturing and recording every citizen’s internet use,” adding that “we will be the envy of states such as North Korea, China and Iran.”

More recently, while attending the 2025 Labour Party Conference, Burnham was asked about Keir Starmer’s proposals to introduce mandatory digital IDs in the UK. A petition opposing the plans had accumulated more than two million signatures within a matter of days, raising the profile of the issue. Asked whether he supported the ID proposals, 

As mayor, Burnham’s main areas of focus were improving Manchester’s transport network and building more housing, but he 

supported an effort to encourage responsible AI use across the region

, and his office launched an initiative to address its “digital divide”, with 

Burnham arguing that “digital access is considered a basic human right”.

The most pressing – and highest-profile – technology issues facing Burnham as prime minister, though, will involve social media, especially given Keir Starmer’s decision to announce plans for a 

possible social media curfew for 16-to-18-year-olds

It seems likely that Burnham, as prime minister, will keep these plans. In an interview with 

 in April 2025 (during which he claimed he no longer wished to be prime minister), Burnham spoke favorably of the need to regulate social media for teenagers.

“It’s clear that from a mental health point of view this is harmful. Why are we equivocating? If it’s not a ban it needs to be something. We’ve got to start to think differently about tech,” 

Burnham went further in January 2026, when the Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch endorsed a social media ban. “I find myself agreeing with a lot of what Kemi Badenoch is saying about children and social media,” 

 “It seems to me parents would welcome a cross-party consensus around much bolder action.”

Given he ran ahead of Keir Starmer on an under-16 social media ban, Burnham is unlikely to change course on the policy – but it will be down to his administration to navigate the necessary legislation through parliament, and for his ministers to manage its implementation.

Some parliamentarians have already called for restrictions on VPNs – virtual private networks, which can be used to bypass age restrictions – to be introduced as part of the bill, to ensure greater compliance than in Australia, where 

around 60% of young people claim they are bypassing the ban

. There are also live debates about the scope of a ban, in terms of what qualifies as social media.

Passing and implementing this legislation will be a complex task for Burnham’s ministerial team, but it will not be the only one they face regarding social media. The previous UK government, with support from Labour, passed the extensive Online Safety Act in 2023, and its provisions relating to child safety only came fully into force in summer 2025.

To date, there have been no major enforcement actions against the largest platforms under the Act, while the government has also faced criticism for its unwillingness to tackle online radicalization on social media, particularly Elon Musk’s X – which has been 

connected to multiple outbreaks of rioting and unrest across the country.

The White House has complicated social media regulation for the UK and EU by 

 it would act against countries trying to enforce their own laws against US tech companies, leaving the government in a dilemma, balancing diplomatic relations against domestic unrest.

Internet regulation in the UK falls to Ofcom, an agency overseen by two government departments – the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The ministers in both of these roles are likely to change under Burnham, for different reasons, giving the new prime minister an opportunity to raise the profile of technology issues, and a battle with social media giants, should he so wish.

 but is a longstanding friend and ally of Andy Burnham, and is expected to be promoted as a result.

Technology secretary Liz Kendall, by contrast, is generally held to be a competent minister, but is from the right-wing flank of the Labour Party, while Burnham has challenged Starmer from the left – and so she is likely to be moved or fired when Burnham appoints his first Cabinet.

Some voices within the Labour movement have suggested to Burnham’s team that he could appoint Wes Streeting, a strong media performer, former health secretary and a one-time rival for the party leadership, to the Cabinet in a role to take on big tech and shepherd through social media regulation, though it is not known how seriously the team are considering those proposals.

Absent further surprises, Andy Burnham is expected to become prime minister by July 17, having never been required to set out his policy platform to a selectorate of Labour Party members, let alone to the national electorate.

That means there is plenty of scope for surprises – but on tech policy, at least, the signs suggest continuity more than change. Burnham is likely to adopt Starmer’s flagship social media policy, but refresh the team in charge of delivering it. Whether or not he answers calls among his supporters for a more aggressive posture towards big tech, though, is very much an open question.

David Greene is senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

When I first began working on free speech issues full time in 1997, I worked on lots of challenges to freedom of speech based on feared harms to children. At the time, the perceived threats to young people were supposedly Satanic lyrics in heavy metal and violence on television. In conversations with fellow advocates on both sides of the issues, I was frequently admonished "Just wait until you have kids of your own. You’ll feel different then."

I found this warning odd at the time. I was young enough to remember what it felt like to be on the other side of that generational divide. My response was usually a non-committal, "Maybe. I guess we’ll see."

I did become a father a few years later. In fact, this year marks the 25th anniversary of that milestone. But becoming a parent didn't make me want the government to restrict the world for my children; it made me realize how vital it was that they be allowed to inhabit it freely. Rather than make me doubt whether young people had free speech rights worth protecting, it made me feel even more strongly that they did.

Parenthood, even in the earliest days, made it clear to me that my children were not mere balls of clay for me to mold. They were, and are, their own people. They are individual human beings with their own burgeoning interests, their own voices, and also their own rights and intellectual self-determination. As a new parent, I felt an even greater obligation to advocate for my and all young people’s rights, not to empower the state to restrict them. This feeling only got stronger as my child, and then children, grew older.

We are currently witnessing a massive, international 

 banned young people from accessing social media late last year, 

 have all announced or enacted similar proposals. Over 

 US—from conservative legislatures to traditionally progressive states—has already moved toward requiring age verification for often broadly defined sexual content or outright banning social media access for minors. But in this haste to "protect" children, we are fundamentally mischaracterizing who young people are and what speech rights they have.

I fear the danger here is that the national and international conversation has skipped a vital step. We have moved directly to "How can we implement age-gating while protecting privacy?" without properly considering, "Should we be doing this at all?"

I am not denying the fear and concerns that many parents have about their children using social media and other online services too much, and their desire for help. In my own home, there were plenty of times I disagreed with my children’s choices or worried about the media they consumed, and how much they consumed it. We talked about those things deeply, and often. We talked a lot about how to navigate this complex world, both online and off. We considered the available access-limiting tools and whether to take on the burden of setting them up. Yet never once did I want the state to step in and make those decisions for us.

We must resist the urge to solve complex sociological problems like children’s safety or mental health with blunt-force censorship. There is not likely a single solution for all online harms to young people – we should address criminal law concerns like predation far differently than we should address concerns about harmful speech or habit-forming use. Age-gating simply and bluntly cuts young people off from the online world, and in doing so, the offline world as well.

And it lacks the precision that freedom of speech requires when we seek to address harmful effects of speech. International human rights law recognizes that young people have the right to speak and access information, as well as to “

participate freely in cultural life and the arts.

” US law has similarly acknowledged the rights of young people. In the landmark 2011 Supreme Court case 

Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association

, which addressed a law that placed age restrictions on violent video games, the Court was clear: "Minors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them." The Court 

And mandated age gates create risks for all of us, adults and young people alike, by creating a 

 of all users. Age verification threatens the anonymity of even adult users, a limitation that tends historically to affect the most vulnerable among us most severely. By forcing every user to verify their identity to access broad swaths of the internet, we aren't protecting kids; we are surveilling everyone and infantilizing the next generation of voters, activists, and thinkers. We are telling young people that their curiosity is a liability and their autonomy is a myth.

As I celebrate 25 years of parenthood (happy birthday, kid!), I am more convinced than ever that an important part of protecting our children is to respect and advocate for their rights. We should be teaching them how to use their voices, not cutting them off from online communities and information. The momentum for age-gating may be strong, but the First Amendment was designed specifically to withstand the winds of popular panic. I will keep trying to defend it.

Apar Gupta is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

On the afternoon of June 16, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology 

disable its message editing feature until June 30

. The Department of Telecommunications was to 

instruct app stores and internet providers to pull the app

The order carried a final instruction, under 

, that "no part of this communication should be made public." Public notification was instead provided on the morning of June 16 by the 

, which reasoned that the ban would be temporary. It was tied to one event, the 

re-examination of the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test

, the medical-college entrance exam that about 

2.2 million students were due to take onJune 

21. As per the government justification — which was then 

subsequently accepted by the High Court of Delhi

 — this was a narrow, time-bound measure in response to an emergency.

I litigate blocking and shutdown cases, and I have read several blocking orders and challenged them in legal proceedings. The Telegram ban is a dangerous escalation by the government — one that should worry anyone who uses a smartphone in India, not mainly because of what it did to one app for six days, but because of the legal precedent cemented by it.

While blocking orders are shrouded in secrecy, the 

 describes a rapid process. On May 21, the 

NTA wrote to the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MEITY)

formal authority to issue blocking orders

. Acting on it, MeitY issued a notice on June 1 and met Telegram and NTA on June 3 

. On June 9, the Ministry sent Telegram a list of URLs, channels, accounts and bots which resulted in the platform 

. It is pertinent to note that Telegram is used by

 approximately 150 million accounts in India

the highest number of law enforcement requests

Despite these compliance actions, MeitY passed the 

, which resulted in the entire platform being blocked and Telegram 

challenging the move in the Delhi High Court

, so the block was to be lifted on June 22.

It is important to consider that this timeline runs straight through the court's 

. This is an annual break from the normal functioning of the Delhi High Court when it rises for about a month and the Chief Justice 

 to take urgent matters. They sit both singly and in division benches on fixed days, and a party with something pressing files a form for urgent mentioning and asks to be listed.

Justice Tejas Karia, sitting as Vacation Judge

. Many legal observers were left wondering whether a constitutional question about the State's power to switch off an entire platform used by 150 million people being argued and decided inside a vacation window

against a clock the government itself had set

was the best legal strategy. However, such comment fails to recognize the massive harm to free expression as much as the commercial interest of any technology service provider due to the 

rapid attrition of users following even short service disruptions

Telegram suffers a defeat in Delhi High Court

The statutory power to issue blocking directions originates from 

Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000

 which lets MEITY block "public access of any information through any computer resource" where the Ministry is satisfied that this is necessary and in the interest of, among other things, public order or to prevent incitement to a cognizable offense. An intermediary that disobeys can be 

, which provide a hearing for the affected party before a decision (Rule 8), an emergency route that skips that hearing where no delay is acceptable (Rule 9), and the confidentiality clause the order used (Rule 16). Above these rules sits the constitutionally protected fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression under 

 and the restrictions that are contained under Article 19(2).

Telegram argued that the blocking orders were beyond the statutory power for blocking content, as it permits blocking specific information and not "

a blanket restriction on an entire intermediary platform

." The company further submitted that it ignored the more than 

 who rely on Telegram, including students and teachers sharing study material. Telegram relied on 

Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, (2020) 3 SCC 637

, which requires the least restrictive measure. As 

 reported, in its petition, which the government kept off the public record, Telegram argued that the order rested on the "impermissible premise that misuse by a subset of users justifies blocking of an entire platform."

The governing authority on website blocking powers in India beyond the statute is contained in the case of 

Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, (2015) 5 SCC 1

, where the Supreme Court upheld 69A precisely because it read the power as narrow, exercised through reasoned written orders open to challenge. However, over time, the Union Government has sought to apply this power expansively, repeatedly arguing that the nature of digital communications—due to their speed and scale—requires a lower constitutional threshold for judicial review. While this argument was rejected in Shreya Singhal, this was a central feature of the government’s defense, which premised its legal arguments on 

, specifically its cloud storage, large public channels, bot ecosystem, usernames in place of phone numbers, and editable and self-destructing messages. Layered on top of this argument, the government held that "information," as defined in the Information Technology Act, 2000 includes not only specific posts and files but "

" through which content moves, so that an application is itself blockable information. The phrase "any information," as the court 

, is "sufficiently broad to encompass all information hosted by an intermediary where the scale of harm so warrants." The Attorney General added a sharp proposition by 

 that an entity that is by its own design "structurally incapable of ensuring accountability" cannot invoke proportionality, and a "profit-driven commercial platform" cannot selectively rely on it. This inverts the constitutional doctrine of proportionality which requires the least restrictive measure and provides for a complete bypass to its application.

 on both questions it framed. On reasons, it held that 

the emergency made the reasons sufficient

 and that the later final order could fortify them. It also held that, as per its reading of the power of the Government under the Information Technology Act, 2000, there was "

no reason to exclude an application or platform

" from the meaning of "information," so MeitY could block Telegram itself. When applying the proportionality doctrine, it accepted the architecture argument almost whole, 

 against mirror channels and bots, and rested on the limited duration of the orders, which in its view made them 

. Doing so it dismissed Telegram's petition and curiously, the Shreya Singhal judgment that saved this very power of blocking by reading it narrowly, appears nowhere in the decision.

The conspiracy theory going around is that the real winner in this series of events is Meta, on the premise that WhatsApp will gain users due to the service disruption of Telegram for a week. Telegram founder Pavel Durov spent the week backing the theory, 

 he “wouldn’t be surprised if” Reliance, which he thinks is part-owned by Meta, joined WhatsApp in lobbying for the ban. (

possibly mixed up Reliance Communications

, whose network code he kept waving around, with the unrelated Reliance Industries).

But in the long term, the order doesn't give any single company an advantage. It hands over power to the government, and that power points back at everyone, including Meta. Here, the actual blocking of an entire platform is not necessary, and its value rests in the Ministry setting terms for day-to-day cases of censorship. It includes using this precedent as a threat to secure compliance with broad, political censorship of thousands of accounts or platform changes, such as its 

This is the point where platform-wide blocking stops being a one-off concern and becomes a negotiation ploy where platforms and user rights play to a handicap. Amber Sinha set this out at length 

. So expect a more confident Ministry across every platform, reaching for whatever excuse sounds best that week ranging from morality, national security, public panic, and now — said with a straight face — the integrity of a medical entrance exam. The pending appeal of 

 is testing the Sahyog portal and Section 79(3)(b). Each one asked how hard a platform could be pushed. After Telegram, the answer is that it can be switched off completely. Sinha adds the grim part. With a full shutdown now a real threat, platforms won't wait to be asked. They'll over-comply, ahead of time, with demands they would once have fought.

The bigger shift is in how courts look at any of this. Judicial review is meant to protect speech in India. In practice, however, it checks an application of the principles of natural justice and whether the process was legal. In 

Tata Cellular v. Union of India, (1994) 6 SCC 651

, the Court said as much — it looks at how a decision was made, not whether it was right, and won't replace the official's judgment with its own. So the government can limit a right as long as it produces the right paperwork. The core of that paperwork is a reasoned, written order and this is neither novel and sits within the everyday practice of an Indian constitutional court. For instance, when faced with unregulated phone tapping in 

, the Court didn't strike the power down. It wrote a set of procedural guidelines and left it there. In Shreya Singhal, it upheld Section 69A because of its safeguards. Even 

, for all the praise its four-part proportionality test gets, ended by sending the Kashmir shutdown orders back to executive review committees instead of quashing them.

This judgment is the latest of that kind. Its proportionality finding rests almost entirely on the block being temporary. It does little to ask whether something narrower would have worked. And it should have asked, because the NTA's own Director-General, Abhishek Singh, 

, only fake messages spreading panic about the re-examination. Students were on 

Now for the part that has really changed. If courts only checked the form, then the real limit on censorship was the bureaucracy's own incompetence. In the past, it has been argued that government malevolence is limited only by its competence. Put simply, the sloth of a government office is the best democratic safeguard. That comfort is gone. The orders that used to arrive half-finished now arrive polished, technically literate, and written in the style judges like. It 

 with the company on June 3, recites "exhausted alternatives," and counts channels and bots reaching about 146,000 accounts. It even came with expert backing from two of the country's most senior technologists. IIT Madras's Director, V. Kamakoti, who also sits on the National Security Advisory Board, 

 purporting to show how a PDF posted on Telegram at a fixed time could later be swapped for a different file while the original timestamp stayed frozen, the better to fake proof of a "pre-exam" leak. He declined to reveal the method, calling it responsible disclosure. IIT Kanpur's Director, Manindra Agrawal, 

. He said Telegram lets a user edit a post "without reflecting that edit has been done," and "no other major social media channel has this."

Both claims were promptly contested by the two teenagers who had exposed the CBSE on-screen-marking mess weeks earlier. 

, a nineteen-year-old whom Agrawal's own institute had just hired into its C3iHub lab, replied that Telegram's client is open source, posted the exact code that records an edit's date and time, and noted that a platform-wide block wasn't even technically possible as proxy routes straight around it. 

, the other teenager, who had testified before a parliamentary panel, posted a screenshot of an edited Telegram message wearing a plain "edited" tag, captioned, with due ceremony, as fact-checking the IIT-K director with a "meow meow" message.

The irony was that Telegram's own founder had already conceded the narrow point the directors were overstating. Durov said the platform had removed hundreds of offending channels and was 

 to prevent backdating scams," an admission the government 

And now the part I'm warned not to speculate about—so I will. The same models that can help a citizen draft a writ petition or an RTI (which gave rise to the pop-up campaign by the Cockroach Janta Party or helped the teenagers that exposed the CBSE OSM scandal) can just as easily help a Ministry write a cleaner, well reasoned blocking order, faster, and harder to pick apart. This is part of the 

 of India's censorship machine. Hence, when constitutional courts will merely check the form and trust the substance, without undertaking a substantive examination of the proportionality or reasonableness of the censorship.

So, hello, Claude. Can you help me censor 150 million people today?

I recently witnessed something quite remarkable at a privacy conference in Brussels. Freshly caffeinated, I sat down to listen to a panel on the role of operating systems in secure and privacy-preserving AI deployment. With agentic AI assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex being connected to millions of people’s desktop operating systems every week, I was looking forward to hearing more about solutions to privacy and security challenges.

However, instead of a discussion about design choices and technical privacy and security protections, I found myself subjected to a passionate defense of Google’s right not to open its mobile operating system up to third parties’ AI systems. But it wasn’t Google calling out the European Commission for its proposal on Android AI interoperability measures, referring to them as “a privacy and security disaster” and “a policy incoherence with safety.” It was Apple.

Why might Apple, Google’s great rival in the battle for mobile operating system supremacy, so vociferously defend its biggest competitor?

Fear. Fear of a threat greater than Google’s competition. Fear of regulatory intervention that is forcing it, after a two-decade run, to open its infamously closed mobile ecosystem to third-party alternatives to the App Store and Siri. For this is what the Commission, under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), is moving towards.

Tech giants whose market dominance depends on tight control over closed platforms have responded by strategically leveraging privacy and security language as a shield against interventions that would dilute that control, giving users more choice and rivals a chance to compete.

Moving through the DMA’s gears: the EU’s pro-competitive interventions

Three years after its entry into force, the Commission’s application of the DMA is gaining momentum. This includes making use of some of the most promising tools at its disposal to prise open closed digital ecosystems: interoperability and data-sharing obligations.

 requiring Google to share anonymized search engine data with third parties under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. This means sharing a significant part of its search dataset with other search engines and AI chatbots for the exclusive purpose of optimizing their own search functionalities. Allowing Google to share a meaningful portion of its search data will challenge its dominance, enabling competitor search engines and AI assistants to better compete with Google Search. With AI assistants representing a potential new form of internet search, giving rival AI developers access to this search data will also curtail Google’s ability to leverage exclusive access to its own search data to control the emerging AI market, as it is already doing.

This is part of the Commission’s broader, forward-looking approach to AI. It has already moved to 

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