political issue especially in Europe, where mass youth unemployment and a rapidly ageing workforce means IT skills are in short supply, especially in Parliaments. Google- or Uber-spon-sored promises of untold riches from autonomous vehicles fall on politicians’ deaf ears: robots do not vote. This is a red flag to those advising governments as well as those legislating. 2

If platform regulation signals a desire to slow down the pace of innovation by government, what rational answer can be sold to government? The first essential is to prevent platforms becoming liable as publishers, by whatever legitimate means necessary. That may mean fines for failure to take down fake content or revenge porn. It may mean a user ombudsman as suggested in new proposed English legislation. Recruiting more internal content checkers at Facebook and Google to remove content may be overdue. Global platforms need to conform to European rules on hate speech (for instance Nazi content), a legal battle lost by Yahoo! in the French Tribunal de Grand Instance 17 years ago.b

 

Co-Regulation as a Hybrid Solution What more can be done? Europe sets the global standards for regulation of content, notably in data protection and hate speech. The decisive power relationship in European law has swung to Germany and France. Regulation will increase, and Anglo-American companies increasingly recognize that and are embracing a French term: co-regulation. What that means is diluting government control of the Internet by ensuring a compromise based on industry self-regulation, but with oversight by users and by government regulators. 3 Examples include global Top Level domain name oversight. Governments have sponsored industry standards not only in Europe but globally via hosting and supporting the World Wide Web Consortium with industry.

Co-regulation is the compromise
computer scientists must live with.
Totalitarian regimes want to use the
b Confirmed in Yahoo! Inc. v. La Ligue Contre Le
Racisme et L’antisemitisme. L’Union Des Etudi-
ants Juifs De France, 433 F.3d 1199 (9th Cir.
2006); http://bit.ly/2f8Oi59
threat of terrorism and cyber-crime
to replace self-regulation with direct
and often draconian control. Co-reg-
ulation is the best alternative.
Areas for cooperation between law
and computer science can flourish in
co-regulatory institutions, because
the best of them engineer a delibera-
tive evidence-driven expert-friendly
process. 5 It can curb the worst excess-
es of both corporate and government
control.

If lawyers and computer scientists cooperate to make these social regulation processes work, it is the best chance to prevent a much worse system of direct government control emerging.

 

References

1. Brown, I. and Marsden, C. Regulating Code: Good Governance and Better Regulation in the Information Age. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2013.

2. Guadamuz A. and Marsden, C. Blockchains not Bitcoin: Distributed Ledger Technology. Computers and Law 2, 2016; http://www.scl.org/site.aspx?i=ed46568

3. Marsden, C. Internet Co-regulation: European Law, Regulatory Governance and Legitimacy in Cyberspace. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U. K., 2011.

4. Marsden, C. Technology and the law. International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication & Society Wiley-Blackwell, 2015; DOI: 10.1002/9781118767771. wbiedcs138

5. Marsden, C. et al. Deliverable 4.3: Final Report on Regulation, Governance, and Standard, 2015. European Internet Science Consortium; http://www. internet-science.eu/groups/governance-regulation-and-standards

6. Pollett, T.V., Roberts, S., and Dunbar, R.I.M. Use of social network sites and instant messaging does not lead to increased offline social network size, or to emotionally closer relationships with offline network members Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking 14 (2011), 253–258.

 

Chris Marsden ( [e-mail]) is Professor of Law at the University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K.

The argument in this column is further explored in the final chapters of author’s recent book Network Neutrality: From Policy to Law to Regulation. Manchester University Press, 2017.

Copyright held by author.

Co-regulation is
the compromise
computer scientists
must live with.

Calendar
of Events
January

January 7–10

GROUP ‘18:

2018 ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork, Sanibel Island, FL, Sponsored: ACM/SIG, Contact: Michael Prilla, Email: prilla.michael @ googlemail.com

January 8–13

POPL ‘18: The 45th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Los Angeles, CA, Sponsored: ACM/SIG, Contact: Ranjit Jhala, Email: [e-mail]

January 22–25

ASPDAC ‘18: 23rd Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference Jeju, Republic of Korea, Contact: Youngsoo Shin, Email: [e-mail]

February

February 21–24

SIGCSE ‘18: The 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education, Baltimore, MD, Sponsored: ACM/SIG, Contact: Tiffany Barnes, Email: tiffany.barnes @ gmail.com

February 24–28

CGO ‘18: 16th Annual IEEE/ ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization. Vösendorf/Vienna, Austria, Contact: Jens Knoop, Email: knoop @ complang.tuwien.ac.at

February 24–28

PPoPP ‘18: 23nd ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, Vienna, Austria, Co-Sponsored: ACM/SIG, Contact: Andreas Krall, Email: andi @ complang.tuwien.ac.at