The recent spate of digital regulation initiatives in Europe have one thing in common: they introduce new procedures that create friction in the system, such as consent forms, ex ante impact and risk assessment, reporting, rights of appeal. Built-in hurdles like these can be found in a lot of existing European Union legislation, such as …
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Context is King: How Correct Data Can Lead to False Conclusions
On 12 October 2021, in a now infamous Joe Rogan Podcast anti-vaxxer Alex Berenson said that “the vast majority of people in Britain who died in September were fully vaccinated,” offering this dubious fact to support his view that COVID-19 vaccines were as dangerous as the virus itself. The statement, while formally correct and based …
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Fighting Counterfeits or Counterfeiting Policy? A European Dilemma
The regulation on a single market for digital services also known as the digital services act proposed by the European Commission contains very little that is terribly new. To the surprise of many, the long-in-the-making policy update keeps many of the pillars that made the 2000 directive on e-commerce such a success. It keeps the …
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Donald Trump, Sedition and Social Media: Will the Ban Stop the Rot?
The debate on Donald Trump’s belated suspension from social media platforms – he has long been in violation of “community standards” that ban the spread of illegal content and would have gotten ousted much sooner had he been an ordinary user – has ranged far from the real issues at stake here. For starters, the …
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Country of Origin: New Rules, New Requirements
The European Commission has sent a strong signal: like the electronic commerce directive (2000) before it, the new digital services act will “preserve” the “country of origin principle” – a core tool in the European Union’s legislative chest. That principle holds that if a product or service is legal and licensed in one European Union …
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Disinformation and COVID-19: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Few issues have brought the challenge of Internet regulation to the fore more than the recent COVID-19 crisis. The global pandemic and ensuing lockdown offered a near-perfect petri dish for testing the commitment of platforms to the spread of correct, accurate health information under the most trying, jarring circumstances – and for making sure that …
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Illegal Content: Safe Harbours, Safe Families
The rules on illegal content are clear: if it’s illegal in the real world then it’s illegal online. Platforms and regulators have seldom sparred over this; the community guidelines enforced by most platforms are straight-forward. Content suspected of being illegal can be flagged for inspection – or blocked at upload – and should be removed …
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Regulation and Consumer Behaviour: Lessons from HADOPI
The tough French enforcement rules on copyright infringement, dubbed the HADOPI laws, named for the High Authority for the Dissemination of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet agency set up to enforce them, can be considered the posterchildren of the so-called “graduated response” policy, an effort to fight illegal file sharing with …
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