The Briefing, written by Professor Julian Petley, concludes that the online world, although a peerless information and communication resource, is also, rightly, the object of considerable concern. It is dominated by a handful of over-mighty companies which have shown themselves to be entirely unwilling to engage in effective self-regulation which would help to rid the internet of its most obnoxious and harmful contents. The presence of such contents, however, should not be used as a reason to impose a regulatory structure which is ill-thought out, gives the government of the day an unacceptable degree of power over the online world, is hugely bureaucratic and threatens to make the burgeoning UK tech industry a global outlier.

We recommend the following action points:

• Abolish the “legal but harmful” category. If material is genuinely harmful – in terms which need to be very precisely defined in the Bill – it should be made illegal by primary (and not secondary) legislation.
  Insist that what is legal offline is also legal online.
• Remove the press exemption. All newspaper content should be treated in exactly the same way as other online content.
• Considerably reduce the powers that the Bill grants the Secretary of State.
• Ensure that nothing is included in the Bill which threatens online encryption or other aspects of users’ information privacy.
• Ensure that any form of online regulation proposed is compatible with regulation in the US and EU.