The new Ofcom chair’s first task is to tame Elon Musk

The former television mogul Michael Grade comes to the end of his four-year term as chairman of Ofcom, the UK’s media regulator, later this month. In classic British fashion, the government compiled a shortlist of possible successors drawn straight from central casting: a doughty baroness and a brace of knights. The baroness, Margaret Hodge, was thought by some to be too ancient (though she is of the same vintage as Lord Grade). One of the knights, Jeremy Wright, a Tory MP with a real track record of caring deeply about online harms, was thought to be deemed too dangerous for a timid government. So the position appears to have gone to a City grandee, Ian Cheshire, who has spent his life running big retailers and sitting on the boards of Barclays, Debenhams and BT.

As far as I can see, his only obvious qualification for running a media regulator was that he had once been chairman of Channel 4. Presumably, he at least possesses those accessories so prized by the British establishment: a “safe pair of hands”. Which is good, because he'll need them.

He inherits a powerful agency that has, since its foundation in 2003, been attracting commitments the way a trawler attracts barnacles. Ofcom is now the regulator of television (BBC, ITV, Channel 4, S4C, Channel 5), digital television (cable, satellite and video on demand) and independent local radio, among many other things. Oh, and it has significant responsibilities under the Online Safety Act, the new set of laws to protect children and adults online. And all this has to go on within a single agency.

What the new chairman of Ofcom is about to discover, therefore, is that he is mounting a pantomime horse powered by two very different cultures. At the rear end of the creature is the regulator of broadcast media, deploying a well understood process with leisurely timelines and established protocols. At the head of the beast is a new kind of regulator, charged with taming some of the most powerful corporations on the planet, whose interests are now intimately entwined with a capricious US regime that might interpret any attempt to rein in its tech giants as an act of economic warfare.

Taken together, Ofcom and the Online Safety Act provide a rare example of how the UK could be genuinely inspirational. The existential question for liberal democracies now is whether they can tame tech giants. We know it can be done by authoritarian regimes – as China demonstrates. Democracies, though, are struggling. Any move to challenge tech monopolies involves wading through legal treacle for years, with no guarantee of success.

The Online Safety Act is not the only attempt to curb tech power, but it has some important characteristics that set it apart from the approaches of both the EU and US. It combines content-based duties, design-based regulation, transparency mandates and procedural safeguards – including the duty-of-care concept – in a single framework enforced by a single regulator with substantial powers. The EU’s approach is split across multiple instruments and institutions, and the US has no federal equivalent.

The UK should be capitalising on this – especially now the tech companies have been stunned by their first “big tobacco” moment, when a jury in a Californian court found Meta and Google liable in a landmark lawsuit about social media addiction.

In the UK, hostility to tech is probably the only thing that supporters of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens agree on. Before he takes office, the new Ofcom chair-nominee has to survive a grilling by the science, innovation and technology select committee.

So a good question for the new chairman would be: “What’s your plan for dealing with Elon Musk?”

Photograph by Anna Barclay/Getty Images