Four years ago, a London-based charity paid a Sacramento lobbying firm $50,000 to help carry a child-safety bill through the California legislature. The charity did not disclose the work as foreign lobbying until two years later, well after the bill had already become law.
Baroness Beeban Kidron, a member of the House of Lords, founded the charity, 5Rights. It is one of five foreign advocacy groups an investigation recently identified as active supporters of age-verification and digital-identification bills moving through American legislatures and Congress.
All five backed the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, passed three years ago. The law made age checks compulsory for online pornography and handed British regulators much greater power over online speech. Similar language is now appearing in bills before lawmakers in Sacramento and in Albany alike.
Four of the five organisations are British. The fifth is a Brussels-and-London consortium with a UK arm of its own.
Five Groups, One Shared Playbook
The charity behind California’s law is only the most visible member of a five-organisation network. 5Rights leads the group, having engaged on forty-two bills across eighteen states, eleven of which have already become law.
Two British Labour strategists founded the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which stands alongside the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based body with government contracts across three continents. Reset Tech, a global consortium with a UK branch, joins the group as a fourth member. The fifth is the Age Verification Providers Association, a British trade group whose members sell the age-verification technology the bills would mandate.
Funding Crossed the Atlantic
A shared funding trail lies behind the shared cause. Reset Tech’s American affiliate spent $1,352,800 lobbying Congress and state legislatures over the past two years, according to lobbying disclosures the investigation examined.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue has collected over seventeen million dollars from Western governments, including grants from the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. 5Rights registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, though its FARA paperwork left the question of foreign supervision blank despite Baroness Kidron’s role as the charity’s founder and then-director.
What the Law Does At Home
Britain’s own experience with the Online Safety Act helps explain why the funding trail earns attention past its dollar total. Enforcement began last summer, and the effects came quickly.
Age checks sent sign-ups for virtual private networks, or VPNs, up by as much as eighteen times within days, as adults searched for a quick way round the new gate.
The model is already spreading past the letter of the law inside Britain itself. Apple added age checks to UK iPhones late last year despite having no legal obligation to do so. A jury separately found Meta and YouTube liable for addicting a child.
A Wider Opening in American Courts
American courts, until recently, gave laws like these little room to operate. The Supreme Court changed the calculus last summer. It upheld a Texas statute requiring pornography sites to verify visitors’ ages under a lower standard of review than earlier rulings had used.
Six justices to three, the Court left American states with far more room to copy the British model. It avoids the constitutional objections that once stopped similar bills.
A separate report examined the same network of groups. It found that the trade association of age-verification suppliers has pushed for checks to apply even to VPN users. This would treat the tool people use to escape a check as grounds for another one.
Transparency is the Real Question
The nationality of a lobbyist is not, on its own, grounds for alarm. Foreign nationals have long organised inside American politics, and disclosure law exists to make the organising visible for everyone to see.
Britain built an industrial empire in the nineteenth century and a financial one in the twentieth. After Brexit thinned its manufacturing and financial base, what remains is a stock of regulatory expertise, and British charities are exporting it the way other countries export steel or software.
The sounder response leaves British charities free to lobby in America, making every dollar and every draft they bring fully visible before a single bill gets a floor vote.
Congress could close such a disclosure gap in an afternoon of committee work. Whether it chooses to is the question the whole affair leaves behind.
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Read also:
No Longer Child’s Play: Shein and Europe’s Digital Coming-of-Age
Spilling the Tea on EU Identity Laws
Britain vs Big Tech: Can the Online Safety Act Really Govern the Global Internet?
