In a previous post (The Vibe of the ECHR) I explored ways in which a regulatory policy agenda could acquire the
halo effect of association with the European Convention on Human Rights. Whilst
that was focused on a
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The Vibe of the ECHR
A thought experiment: suppose I wanted to transform
the European Convention on Human Rights into a vehicle for state regulation of
speech, how would I go about it?
At first sight it should not be possible. Article 10
guarantees everyone
If the computer is not accountable, who is?
“A computer can never be held accountableTherefore a computer must never make a management decision”
So went a
famous internal IBM training manual in 1979.
As a piece
of management advice, it is impeccable. It would be foolish indeed
Contempt of court and platform liability
A few months
ago I wrote about the ambitiously extraterritorial reach of the Law Commission’s
proposed reform of the England and Wales law on strict liability contempt (or contempt
by publication, as it would be re-named).
I threatened
to write
Back to the borderless future
An internet jurisdiction retrospective The problem
Since the dawn of the internet we have wrestled with the
question of how best to reconcile national laws with the inherently
cross-border medium of the internet. We are still at it, with resolution
Britannia rule the internet
Coined
in 1740, ‘Britannia! rule the waves’ was a dawn-of-Empire exhortation to assert
British naval power worldwide. Today, the Law Commission exhorts
Britannia (or England and Wales, to be exact) to rule the internet worldwide:
“In our view, contempt
Safety by design or systems for content moderation?
The Online Safety Act Network (OSAN) recently published a
10-point plan to amend the Online Safety Act. The plan includes:
“Insert a definition of safety by
design into the Act to make clear to Ofcom and services what Parliament
intended”.
Extraterritoriality and the transatlantic free speech wars
The transatlantic
free speech wars continue to rage. The US House Judiciary Committee was in action again last week, taking aim at the European Commission (who rejected its latest interim
report as ‘pure nonsense’) and provoking EU
Repeal, reform, rewrite?
A Parliamentary petition calling for repeal of the Online
Safety Act has reached over 550,000 signatures and is due to be debated on 15
December.
The demand for abolition is eye-catching, but inevitably lacks
nuance. In any case it is
Data protection and the Online Safety Act revisited
The
Information Commissioner’s Office has recently published its submission to
Ofcom’s consultation on additional safety measures under the Online Safety Act.
The
consultation is the second instalment of Ofcom’s iterative approach to writing Codes
of Practice for user-to-user and search