The Three Problems This Addresses

Three problems exist today that no current tool, law or regulation has solved together, and which affect every household in the UK.

Three things are true about most UK households right now, and no existing tool addresses any of them together:

• No household can see where their internet data goes. Every family pays for broadband and mobile data but no dashboard shows how it is actually consumed across their devices. Platforms exploit that invisibility - doom scrolling and binge watching are the commercial outcome of invisible, unlimited, cost-free consumption.
• Every device-level restriction is bypassed by picking up a different screen. A child whose phone is restricted picks up a tablet. A tablet gets restricted, they use a games console, a smart TV, a sibling's device. Every existing parental control operates on one device at a time. The bypass is instant.
• WFH professionals and home schooling families have no protected allocation. A parent on video calls all day and a teenager doom scrolling compete for exactly the same invisible, undifferentiated data pool with no distinction and no protection for what actually matters.

The government's online safety legislation addresses what platforms must do. It does not address the economic architecture that makes harmful platform design commercially rational. Doom scrolling and binge watching are engineered commercial outcomes - platforms exploit invisible, unlimited internet access through variable reward mechanisms that trigger dopamine responses compulsive in nature and disproportionately powerful in adolescent brains whose prefrontal cortex is still developing. Content policy treats the symptom. CIDI addresses the economic architecture: when a Social Media bucket allocation is visible and finite, every scroll becomes a conscious act rather than a passive default. The dopamine loop is not blocked - it is interrupted by awareness. Phase 2 further restructures commercial incentives so that engineering for passive compulsive consumption becomes commercially irrational for platforms competing for conscious household allocations.

This proposal closes that gap.

Building on the Government's Approach

The Online Safety Act 2023 and the proposed restrictions on under-16 social media access establish a necessary legal framework. This briefing does not propose an alternative. It proposes the infrastructure layer that makes the legislation structurally enforceable by closing the enforcement gap that currently undermines it.

That gap is the device-switching bypass. A child whose access is restricted on one device picks up another - a tablet, a games console, a sibling's phone, a smart TV. Every existing parental control, every age gate, every device-level restriction is circumvented the moment a different screen is available. The structural solution must operate at the household account level, where all connected devices are visible as a single home, not at the individual device level where restrictions are trivially bypassed.

The Root Cause

Internet access - whether through mobile data or home broadband - is economically unlimited and invisible to most households. There is no dashboard showing where family data actually goes. A WFH professional, a home schooled child and a teenager doom scrolling social media all draw from the same undifferentiated pool with no visibility, no allocation and no natural friction. Platforms are commercially designed to exploit that absence of awareness. The result is not a content problem - it is an architecture problem.

The Proposed Solution: A Two-Phase Architecture

Phase 1 requires a single government action and is available through existing ISP infrastructure. ISPs provide every household bill controller with an account-level internet management dashboard. Auto-generated category buckets show households where their data currently goes. The bill controller adjusts allocations freely using sliders. Every device on the account shares the same allocation simultaneously across mobile data and home broadband. Switching device does not escape it.

Phase 2 requires no government mandate. Once households can see how their streaming or gaming allocation is consumed across specific platform sub-buckets, those platforms have an immediate commercial incentive to offer data token contributions through an ISP marketplace to protect their share of the household's conscious attention budget. The market builds Phase 2 because Phase 1 makes it commercially obvious.

The Household Dashboard

How This Differs From Existing Device Wellbeing Tools and Parental Controls

Device-level wellbeing tools such as those built into smartphone operating systems manage one device at a time, require manual setup per device, can be bypassed by switching to another screen, and do not cover all operating systems or all networks. The CIDI dashboard manages the household account - every connected device simultaneously, auto-generated from existing data, managed by the bill controller at account level, impossible to bypass by device-switching because all devices share the same allocation. The two approaches are complementary: device tools manage individual behaviour, the CIDI dashboard manages household allocation. Neither replaces the other.

WFH and Home Schooling Explicitly Addressed

The Productivity bucket directly and structurally resolves the gap that all current policy discussions have overlooked. A household with WFH adults simply allocates more to Productivity. A home schooling family ring-fences educational data. No verification, no tiering, no administrative complexity - the household manages it through their own slider controls. In Phase 2, employers can contribute Productivity data tokens for WFH staff through the ISP marketplace, creating a natural B2B commercial layer that benefits employers, employees and network operators simultaneously.

An Unintended but Welcome Consequence - Free-to-Air Television

There is a social side effect of this proposal worth mentioning because it came up naturally in thinking through how household behaviour changes. When streaming and social media allocations become visible, finite and consciously managed, the easiest path for family entertainment shifts back toward shared screens - the living room television, free-to-air content, broadcast programmes that cost nothing against any internet data bucket.

A child whose OTT allocation has run down for the month does not stop watching television. They end up in the living room. With family. On a shared screen. That is not a restriction - it is a behavioural shift that the neuroscience of adolescent development would regard as positive. Communal viewing in a family space has natural social regulation that solitary bedroom device use does not. Public service broadcasters, whose audiences have been eroded by streaming platforms for a decade, would benefit commercially. And the proposal achieves this without mandating any of it - purely through household choice architecture.

The Self-Declared Baseline

Rather than prescribing a specific data allocation, the household baseline is self-declared by the bill controller, supported by Ofcom reference guidelines for different household types. These guidelines are informational, not binding. The existing Universal Service Obligation for fixed broadband provides a floor of connectivity that remains unchanged. Everything above that floor is self-managed by the household through the self-declared baseline.

The Fair Share Argument and Net Neutrality

Network operators have a legitimate and longstanding grievance that platforms extract disproportionate value from infrastructure they bear the cost of maintaining. This proposal resolves that through Phase 2 market design rather than regulatory levy: platforms pay ISPs for distribution access to specific household sub-buckets through commercial partnerships. The ISP earns marketplace revenue. The commercial relationship is rebalanced through negotiation rather than mandate.

Net neutrality is preserved in full. The dashboard categorisation happens at device level, chosen by the household, before data enters the network. The network carries all traffic identically regardless of bucket or platform. No content is inspected, no traffic is throttled. The separation between the household allocation layer and the network routing layer is absolute and enforced by design.

Child Safety and Harmful Content

A child's access to high-volume social media is governed by the Social Media bucket allocation managed by the bill controller, applying to every connected device on the account simultaneously. The enforcement is architectural, operating below the reach of any individual platform, and cannot be bypassed by switching device or network. Harmful content that survives on passive consumption also faces natural commercial pressure: when household bucket visibility reduces passive consumption of low-value content, platforms lose any commercial reason to retain it beyond legal minimum requirements.

The UK Global Standards Opportunity

The UK has a coherent tradition here worth naming plainly. British scientific work helped build the open web that made the internet accessible to ordinary households. The Online Safety Act established the UK as the world's reference jurisdiction for platform accountability. This proposal adds a third chapter to that tradition - defining how households consciously manage the internet resource they pay for. That is not a claim to have invented something new. It is a continuation of what the UK has already demonstrated it can do: contribute meaningfully to how the internet works for people. No country has yet originated the open infrastructure standard that makes online safety legislation architecturally enforceable. The UK can do so first through Ofcom, extending GSMA's existing Open Gateway initiative internationally. An Ofcom-mandated open standard could follow the same global adoption pathway that GDPR followed for data privacy. Australia drew the line. The UK can build the road - and in doing so, add a third line to a national tradition that began with the open web and continued with the Online Safety Act.

Two Things Government Is Being Asked to Do

What I Am Asking For

1. A brief meeting or call with your office or a relevant DSIT or Ofcom contact to explore whether this proposal merits further examination
2. Guidance on the most appropriate Parliamentary channel for a formal written evidence submission
3. An introduction to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Media and Young People's Mental Health if that seems a useful route