Graham Smith's blog on law, IT, the internet and online media
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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 the right of freedom of expression. Granted, Article 10 is not an absolute right: a state can legitimately interfere with someone’s Article 10 right if it first…
“A computer can never be held accountable Therefore 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 to entrust a highly consequential decision entirely to a computer. And yes, in management terms a computer cannot be held accountable. It can’t be hauled up before a…
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 about the platform liability aspects of the proposals at some future date. Here it is. It’s complicated. In summary, the most significant proposed change…
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 seemingly as far away as ever. The periodic eruptions of controversy when some nation state decides to assert its local laws in a way that others view…
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 laws should apply to all material that is accessible in England and Wales. ” ( Part 1 Report on Liability for Contempt of Court , November 2025…
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”. From a technical drafting perspective clarification might be welcome. The Act says that it “seeks to secure that regulated services are safe by design”. That…
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 civil society groups in the process. The US administration, for its part, fired off its most recent salvo shortly before Christmas last year, when US Secretary of…
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 tolerably clear that the petition is aimed not at the entire Act, but at its core: the set of regulatory safety duties imposed on platforms and search engines. Even…
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 service providers. The first round culminated in Codes of Practice that came into force in March 2025 (illegal…
At the end of May Ofcom circulated a set of FAQs to the attendees of a three day Online Safety Act Explained event that it ran in February 2025. The FAQs address a series of questions for which time did not permit of an answer at the event. Sadly (since these points are of interest to a wider public) Ofcom has not published them on its website. Perhaps it may yet do so, but in the meantime here is…
