We, as parents, are calling on the leading Internet search providers, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Wikipedia and others, to enforce safe search protection at a search engine level, during the day, before 9pm.

Parents and schools should not have to pay filter companies to protect children from the explicit images they are serving to children on personal and school IT, during school hours.

If the named companies seek access to school IT contracts and education settings, then they must show that they take child safety seriously, do the decent child protection thing, and implement a supply side safe search watershed pre-9pm.

This would bring their free search services in line with the protections that other explicit content publishers provide, and in line with real world explicit media display laws.

Specifically we are asking that:

• Google formally waive patent rights on safe search, and desist from using children's safety as a bargaining chip for commercial gain, and themselves voluntarily implement a pre-9pm safe search watershed

• Microsoft to voluntarily implement a pre-9pm safe search watershed for both Bing and the explicit results they supply to users via Yahoo and other search providers

• Apple, who are paid by Google to promote Google Ads, to voluntarily implement a safe search watershed for Siri results pre-9pm and cease promotion of search engines without a safe search watershed.

• Google and Apple to hide adverts for any apps with a 13+ age limit from their respective app stores pre-9pm

• Wikipedia to hide pages and search results containing explicit videos and images pre-9pm, to enable primary and secondary children to use their valuable search functions without being presented with high res images of female choking, graphic accounts of child abuse, executions, sadomasochism and pages filled with videos and images of adults performing every single sexual practice that are currently hosted on Wikimedia sites.

All these search engine services are already time and timezone aware, the explicit content is already categorised, and the safe search logic already exists.

This daytime enforcement protection is therefore trivial to implement, requires no legislation, does not affect civil liberties, and would be a huge step to protect a generation of children from further accidental online harm.

This Safer Internet Day 2026, we ask the major suppliers of Internet services to take safety seriously.

We ask Microsoft, Google, Apple and Wikipedia to make this change urgently to protect children during daytime hours, by default.