Effective 1 March 2011, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK extends its powers to regulating companies who advertise on the Internet including social networking platforms.

The ASA is the UK’s independent regulator of advertising across all media. It works to ensure ads are legal, decent, honest and truthful by applying the Advertising Codes.

Online advertisements will have to be decent and truthful even for company claims on their own websites. The rules cover statements on sites that can be interpreted as marketing, even if they are not in an advertisement.

The authority will monitor both advertisements and claims on a company’s website which could be interpreted as marketing.

Until now, the ASA’s monitoring role used to be restricted to traditional advertising in billboards, newspapers and television, and has only been able to oversee paid-for ads online.

Now, the UK advertising watchdog gets powers to monitor the claims companies make on the Internet. For a beginning, ASA has been advised by the Communications Consumer Panel (CCP) to ban the advertising of broadband speeds that have the prefix "up to."

The CCP had warned the ASA last week that "the current approach of advertising ‘up to’ broadband headline speeds is no longer credible or sustainable, and is causing widespread scepticism amongst consumers."

The alternative being suggested by the CCP is to have the minimum speed experienced by at least half of an ISP’s customers. The consumer panel is also considering a ban on the use of the word "unlimited" in mobile and fixed-line data advertising.

Since 2008, the ASA has reportedly received more than 4,500 complaints, but could not act on those. Now, though the ASA will primarily aim at sites using the .co.uk domain suffix, its ambit could also cover .com sites if the online space being used was under the control of a UK company.

User-generated content, such as user comments, does not fall under the new codes, but the ASA could take action if a company adopted such content.

The ASA would extend a name-and-shame policy to encourage firms to comply with new rules. The watchdog might also take out adverts to warn people about companies that do not comply with the code.

The new role of the ASA is intended to give powers to internet users who will be able to make official objections about any indecent or misleading information they find online even on Facebook and Twitter.

Matt Wilson, of the ASA had told BBC News, "The principle that ads have to be legal, decent, honest and truthful is now going to extend to companies claims on their own websites."

The ASA, which has spent a year preparing for the reform, is hiring about 10% more staff to prepare for the extra complaints it expects.