Few people in Britain will have heard of the draft Online Safety Bill. Fewer still will oppose it. Protecting children against harm and exploitation online is an entirely rational goal in modern-day society. And when the Culture Secretary is boldly promising, as Nadine Dorries did at the weekend, to ‘bring order to the online world’ and ‘force social media companies to take responsibility for the toxic abuse that floods their platforms,’ it can be quite convincing: painting the web as a virtual Wild West that governments urgently need to regulate.

Doubtless, the internet is home to abhorrent abuse that isn’t acceptable in any circumstance. Beyond that, there are instances of unlawful behaviour and serious crime — and anyone who sees it should alert the police. Many do. Companies also have automated systems that pick up on abuses and file reports. But governments across the globe are increasingly worried about what they consider to be ‘harmful’ content, and measures are being pursued to counter them.

Here in the UK, we are tying ourselves in knots over a draft Bill so complex that its core aims are unclear. It will substantially reimagine the role of the state with respect to ‘safety’, handing extraordinary powers to Ofcom, yet will require censorship of online speech that would be lawful offline. Today, it was announced that the Porn Law — abandoned by Boris Johnson just a few years ago — is back in the draft Bill.

In truth there aren’t any obvious policy solutions that can make the internet (or real life) entirely safe from bad actors. In the offline world, we expect adults to drive safely and reliably oversee children in public spaces. We don’t install surveillance equipment in every home, or CCTV in every playground. There is no reason why we cannot apply the same logic around individual responsibility or good old-fashioned parenting online as we do in the real world.

We’ve lost sight of how online communications, especially in social media, have long been home to liberal principles of toleration and voluntary association. Free speech and (virtual) assembly have flourished and opinions have been expressed, unrestricted by state-sanctioned views of decency or suitability. As a result, knowledge has been advanced, providing a bulwark against tyranny.

Of all the deplorable aspects in the draft Bill, the cost and impact on innovation receive least attention. The government’s impact assessment sets the former at £2.1 billion, with a whopping £1.7 billion being put towards content moderators. But these estimates typically involve vast amounts of guesswork, and governments tend to undershoot by some margin, meaning we can reasonably assume the true costs will be significantly greater.

For a start, the assessment suggests the new legislation impacts 24,000 firms. Subsequent Freedom of Information requests revealed researchers essentially browsed a list of businesses manually and ‘guessed’ if they would be likely to be in scope because the government was unable to confirm the parameters at the time. And now, the Draft Online Safety Bill Joint Committee has recommended the scope of the Bill be expanded to apply to ‘Internet Society Services likely to be accessed by children, as defined by the Age Appropriate Design Code’. The start-up trade body Coadec has warned the number of businesses that would be covered would be 290,000: more than ten times the impact assessment figure.

And as the government’s own research has acknowledged, the burden of implementing online safety measures will not be spread equally across all firms. The cost per user ranged from 25p to 50p for large platforms — but could be materially lower for the largest sites. By contrast, small platforms will be spending over £45 per user.

Many start-ups, therefore, simply won’t engage in this legislation. They’ll either ‘age gate’, massively restricting content that is in no way harmful to under-18s, or fundamentally change their business models. The position of large incumbents will be further cemented, threatening innovation and limiting consumer choice. The UK’s status as a market for start-ups will diminish as companies are discouraged from operating in the UK, further reducing access to growth potential and perhaps even online services.

Politicians cannot continue to hamstring businesses or threaten our standing as Europe’s largest digital economy in the name of virtue signalling. If they’re not over-regulating the energy market, they’re demonising food retailers who dare to produce meals people want to eat, or introducing employment laws that will disincentivise job creation. When it comes to the Online Safety Bill the truth is, as ministers well know, that the only way to ensure the internet is entirely ‘safe’ would be for the Internet to be abolished.