Britain should scrap its Online Safety Bill
source link: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/05/26/britain-should-scrap-its-online-safety-bill
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Britain should scrap its Online Safety Bill
It is both illiberal and impractical
Boris johnson’s government is up to its neck in short-term crises. Amid a great deal of sound and fury, Britain’s prime minister is trying to survive the fallout from a string of illegal parties in Downing Street and is pondering how to ease a nasty cost-of-living crunch. In the long run, though, it is usually the day-to-day business of government, passing laws, that matters more. One law in particular—the Online Safety Bill, a bumper piece of legislation that aims to fix almost everything that is wrong with the internet—could reshape life dramatically.
Its aim is to make Britain “the safest place in the world” to use the internet. So says the government, and it is not just talk. Fed up with what it sees as the failure of big internet platforms to self-regulate, it has decided to lay down the law. The bill will require tens of thousands of internet firms, from foreign giants like Facebook and Google to niche web forums, to do more to protect their users, on pain of fines of 10% of their worldwide revenue, or even being blocked entirely.
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