The UK’s new online safety bill is a few weeks away from being revealed and the ambitious plan to police the internet could turn out to be disastrous, according to experts.
Harmful content would be kept off the internet with the introduction of the bill, with punishments including fines and jail time for social media executives.
One expert told Business Insider that the UK is “going down the wrong path more dramatically than almost anybody.”
The bill would essentially give politicians the power to cordon off the darker parts of the internet which are deemed to be harmful.
While companies including Meta, Google and TikTok are not specifically named in the bill, it is thought that the new regulations would target these brands.
If the bill is passed then it would mark the most audacious effort by any Western nation to police social media.
But experts are concerned it may end in disaster.
The UK’s digital minister Chris Philp told lawmakers that the aim of the bill is to help make the UK “the safest place to be online anywhere in the world.”
Under the new regulations, companies such as Google and Meta would need to go one step further than to just moderate outright illegal content posted on their platforms, including child-abuse.
In the instance of a company not doing enough to prevent the posting of illegal content, the UK’s broadcast regulator Ofcom would have the power to fine a company up to 10% of its annual turnover.
If a company was found to breach the new law, executives at the tech firm in question could face jail time under a provision coined the Nick Clegg law, after the former deputy prime minister joined Meta as its vice president of global affairs and communications.
READ MORE: Social media users now equivalent to 58% of the world’s population
While this sounds like a positive move, experts believe that the prospect of being personally liable is a scarier prospect for newer, smaller tech firms and than for huge brands like Google or Meta.
“If you have these liability provisions, at a certain point somebody’s going to need to be arrested, and it’s not going to be a Mark Zuckerberg or a Nick Clegg, it’s going to be a middle manager at a small British startup,” Maidsafe head of policy and governance Heather Burns told Business Insider.
A number of Conservative lawmakers reportedly want parts of the new bill to be rewritten as there are growing doubts over its effectiveness.
One of the main fears is that it would effectively give control of the internet to politicians.
“We have some concerns about whether [the government’s] department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) are so wedded to the draft bill that it’s a bit of a sunk cost fallacy and they’re reluctant to significantly rewrite it,” National Society for the prevention of cruelty of children policy expert Andy Burrows told Business Insider.
But critics don’t know how closely the government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport is listening.
There are also concerns about the new bill hurting unidentified targets, with policy officer at the Open Rights Group saying: “You’re designing regulation on the assumption that the whole internet functions the same way that Facebook functions,” delli Santi said, “but this is not true.”
2 Comments. Leave new
Wouldn’t this sort of bill essentially turn our Internet into something that belongs in China, where its monitored, tracked, and censored heavily, where the government get to dictate what content you view and what they deem as safe. On the plus side I suppose VPN companies will make a huge profit, time to buy shares in them.
You know there’s a provision in the Online Safety Bill that seeks to outlaw VPNs outright in the same way Belarus does?