• Toby Osbourn
• Nov 2026
• 394 words
• Personal

When I was catching up on some RSS feeds I subscribe to I read Jeremy Keith talking about a government petition worth signing. This was posted a few weeks ago an initially assume I’d missed the boat on signing, but it turns out there is loads of time left, so wanted to add in my two pennies.

The petition is summed up well by its title: Make all UK Government websites free to access without mobile data charges.

Require mobile network operators to zero-rate all UK Government websites and online services, so they never use a person’s data allowance or require paid data.

There are a few reasons why I love this proposal.

A lot of people in the UK use either a pay-as-you-go data plan or are on low-data plans, the more of the internet we can open up for free the better. Especially at a time when the government is asking people to take sensible precautions to be prepared in case of weather or power events. If you can’t get to the shop to top up your phone, how do you get access to information?

As Jeremy mentions, this has a potential for broad support, I could imagine a Tory backing this in the same way I could imagine a Green backing it. I like proposals that can bring parties together.

As a general rule, the more people that know about government websites, or could be signposted to government websites the better. As a society we should want people engaged with government and services. I have to imagine potential future advertising campaigns around this will lead people to learn about a service for the first time.

This feels easy¹ to implement, either at a tld level or as collection of domains. I can imagine operators pushing back, but I could also imagine easy avenues to fund and counter said pushback.

Finally, It could open the door to more things being free (same idea, but libraries and ebooks from those libraries?)

If you’re a UK resident, please sign and share! This is running until 6th April 2027.

To borrow a phrase from Jeremy’s note; this is a no-brainer.