The UK Online Safety Bill unfortunately seems to making progress through parliament towards making the Internet a much less safe place for individuals. The bill is a confusing piece of legislation that will undermine freedom of expression and information, and privacy. It also simply won't work. It attempts to regulate how tech platforms deal with user content and communications.
It's aims are fine, but the implementation of the protections being suggested are impossibly naïve and have been proposed by people with no real understanding of how the internet works.
The main aims of the bills are:
-Duty to address illegal content
-Duty to address content harmful to children
-Duty to address content harmful to adults
Of course no-one will argues that these aren't worthwhile aims.
The problem is in the implementation.
-It's impossible for large platforms to "take down and restrict access to content that is entirely legal, but considered ‘harmful’", Who decides this? if it's legal than it's protected speech.
- It weakens encryption and anonymity online
The UK government want to be able to collect and analyse end-to-end user communications. This will be done by making strong encryption (which is impossible or effectively impossible due to the difficulty of decryption) illegal, or by making platforms provide back door decryption keys.
Apart from the terrible privacy and safety implication of this for journalists, human rights workers, and the general public. This will force many (all the ones doing encryption correctly) out of providing services in the UK.
This encryption issue has been ongoing forever, since the first encryption algorithms were created and kept secret by government agencies. To the onerous legal restrictions on the first publicly used encryption techniques. This was all eventually side-lined by clever people creating and releasing new encryption techniques out with the control of the government. Hence showing that these legal restrictions can always be circumvented rendering them mostly useless.
I wrote about the original encryption 'wars' in my book Ahoy-Hoy. It seems history is repeating itself....and the results will likely be the same.
More info:
techcrunch
article19