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LONDON – The United Kingdom wants to police the internet. It’s a shame the EU got there first.
Brexit was to allow Britain to do things faster. But less than a month after the 27-member bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) came into force, London is still struggling to cobble together its own version of the rulebook, known as the Online Safety Bill.
On Monday he tried again, with Britain’s digital secretary Michelle Donnell introducing a tweaked bill to parliament. It was backed by MPs, but faces a new committee inquiry before going to the House of Lords. And the path to permanent legislation still seems far from certain.
The bill, which seeks to make Britain “the safest place in the world to go online” has not only caused political instability in the country – it has also proved a divisive issue for the country’s ruling Conservative Party, where a minority of backbenchers still see it as an unnecessary restriction on free speech. Sees as
“Far from being world-leading, the government has been hammered in regulating online spaces by numerous jurisdictions, including Canada, Australia and the EU,” said Lucy Powell, shadow digital secretary of the opposition Labor Party.
Powell said the latest version of the online safety bill was also at risk of stalling due to “chaos in government and vested interests”, adding that the bill must pass the legislature by April, when the current parliamentary session ends.
Much of the disagreement over the bill has centered on the so-called legal-but-harmful content rules. It has been largely dropped from the latest version of the planned law, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government bowed to pressure from right-wing MPs in his own party, who argued that the provisions threatened free speech.
In an earlier iteration of the bill, the country’s telecommunications and media regulator, Ofcom, was on the hook for implementing rules that would have required social media giants to take action against the promotion of potentially harmful but technically legal content such as self-harm.
However, the removal of legal-but-harmful content by the government has not been universally welcomed. Nadine Dorries, Donnell’s predecessor as digital secretary, proposed the provisions and already understood that Passed parliamentary scrutiny Before the bill is suspended.
A long and winding road
Britain’s efforts to regulate the Internet have really taken off under Theresa May, who became prime minister following Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and lawmakers are becoming more tech-sceptic.
The Tories’ May 2017 election manifesto promised that “online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline,” but by the time Boris Johnson published his 2019 election bid, the Conservatives had protected the most vulnerable from accessing harmful content. They were also promising to do it. Under Johnson’s close ally Dorries, a version of the legislation tackling the legal-but-harmful content began to make its way through parliament, before being put on hold after she was ousted by Tory MPs.
Johnson, a former prime minister, often seemed torn between his own personal free speech philosophy and his populist tendency to attack Big Tech.
The summer’s Tory leadership contest to replace Johnson reignited debate, with contenders pledging to revisit the law before the legal-but-harmful content provisions are ultimately watered down. Donnellan replaces Dorries, who has become the seventh culture secretary since Brexit.
The EU’s path to its online rulebook has been swift. In part that’s because questions over free speech haven’t yet become the political touchpaper that they are now in the Anglosphere. However, the EU has largely sidestepped the issue by adopting its own rulebook aimed entirely at illegal content, and the European Commission has made it clear that it does not want to create a so-called “ministry of truth”.
It means that the EU has not had to contend with the deep divisions in the UK, particularly among the governing Tories, prompted by the Online Safety Bill.
Instead, Brussels’ institutions are mainly aligned on the key aspects of its structure, the DSA. The European Parliament and the EU Council – which represents 27 European governments – largely supported the European Commission’s cautious approach to legislate under national laws on content that is illegal under the EU, such as child sexual abuse material or terrorist propaganda.
When it comes to legal-but-harmful content, the EU’s approach requires very large online platforms – which have more than 45 million European users – to assess and limit the spread of content such as disinformation and cyberbullying under the watchful eye of regulators. Europe’s rules also go further than those on the other side of the Channel by including mandatory risk assessments and audits for tech giants such as Meta and Alphabet to hold them accountable for potential wrongdoing. In the UK, the main enforcement inquiry is left to Ofcom.
The differences, when they came to Europe, have remained on the fringes rather than at the center of debate. The rows focus on the extent of targeted advertising and the level of accountability for online marketplaces such as Amazon to conduct random checks on risky products on their platforms. In another example, some EU countries such as France and Germany pushed and failed to push for a 24-hour deadline for online platforms to remove illegal content.
Not just free speech
In the UK, it is not just free speech issues that have proved contentious. The EU set separate rules to prevent child sexual exploitation content online, but the UK inserted similar provisions into the Online Safety Bill.
That means high-stakes questions about how and whether monitoring requirements undermine privacy — particularly in encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp — are treated separately in the EU. But in the UK they have been thrown into the same mix as wider-ranging free speech debates.
Differences between rulebooks also create the potential for costly regulatory misalignment. While the UK bill slaps general monitoring requirements on tech companies, these are expressly prohibited by the EU. Last month, the British regulator and its Australian counterpart formed a new Western coalition of online content regulators, though it failed to invite any EU counterparts to the discussions. Only Ireland’s watchdog joined as observers.
“This is about establishing our international engagement in anticipation of establishing our rules,” Melanie Dawes, chief executive of Ofcom, told Politico when announcing that initiative. “The success of this is about bringing international partners together.”
Clothilde Gaujard reported from Brussels.
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