AC-2025-LON-001365 - [2025] EWHC 2086 (Admin)

The first claimant is a charitable foundation which hosts the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. The second claimant is a user and editor of Wikipedia. The claimants challenge the Secretary of State’s decision to make regulation 3 of the Online Safety Act 2023 (Category 1, Category 2A and Category 2B Threshold Conditions) Regulations 2025. That regulation prescribes the criteria for “Category 1” online services, which are made subject to many statutory duties.

The claimants say that the criteria are logically flawed. They were intended to capture large profitable social media companies where anonymous content can “go viral”. However, they were (say the claimants) drawn too broadly with the result that Wikipedia is likely to qualify as a Category 1 service even though that was never the policy intention. If Wikipedia is a Category 1 service, that will fundamentally change the way it operates. Either the number of people in the United Kingdom who access Wikipedia will have to be reduced by around three quarters, or important functionality corresponding to Category 1 threshold criteria must be disabled, or else the first claimant will have to comply with duties that are not reasonably manageable and which are incompatible with the way in which Wikipedia operates.

Allowing for the way in which the arguments were ultimately advanced (and slightly re-numbering and re-characterising the grounds accordingly), the claimants say that the decision to make the regulation was flawed on the grounds that:

There is a degree of urgency in these proceedings because they are, in effect, holding up part of a complex regulatory process that needs to be worked through before important parts of the Act take effect. For that reason, the claim was listed for hearing on an expedited basis for the court to consider both the question of whether permission should be granted to bring a claim for judicial review and, if so, whether the decision to make regulation 3 was flawed on one or more of the grounds asserted by the claimants.

BLN has filed a witness statement, as has Philippe Bradley-Schmieg who is the first claimant’s in-house lead counsel. The defendant has filed a statement from Talitha Rowland, Director, Security and Online Harms at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Ms Rowland has been in her current post throughout the period when consideration was given to the making of the 2025 regulations. She provided senior civil servant sign off on all relevant Ministerial Submissions, and she engaged regularly with the policy team and with ministers and their officials throughout the decision-making process.