Part 1: 1990s’ History of Internet Law

The Internet was developed in the 1960s at a group of research institutes in the United States and the United Kingdom.Footnote ¹³ The Internet is a network of approximately 50,000 autonomous systems, which are interconnected by the Internet Protocol. The Internet became an information network of critical mass in the 1990s with the rise of Bulletin Board Services (BBS),Footnote ¹⁴ still more so with the growth of commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) in the late 1980s, and eventually a mass market artefact with the development of the World Wide Web (‘WWW’) and release of commercial web browsers in 1993–1994. The Internet developed as a self-regulated academic network,Footnote ¹⁵ and its emergence as a commercial platform that would rapidly permeate through society was largely unpredicted.Footnote ¹⁶ Kahin and Nesson explained that the development of the Internet was bottom up and self-regulatory, and explored the emerging tensions as other nation-states began to assert a regulatory role.Footnote ¹⁷

Internet growth, together with its increasing commercial exploitation, was accompanied by an explosive growth in United States’ scholarship. In 1993, Reidenberg explained that information had become an international commodity, ill served by existing legal frameworks poorly adapted due to their focus on the tangible aspects of information-intensive products and insufficient attention to the intangible aspects of information content.Footnote ¹⁸ Reidenberg extended the argument that technology can create an environment in the absence of legal rules in his ground-breaking conception of lex informatica. In the absence of ex ante sovereign power and legal rules, technology can symbiotically create de facto commercial regulation in much the same way as the mediaeval lex mercatoria.Footnote ¹⁹ He extensively spelled out the use of technology as a parallel form of regulation.

Building on Reidenberg’s insights, Johnson and Post made the classic argument for the Internet as a borderless self-regulatory medium that should be permitted to develop with less of the state-imposed restrictions that impeded the growth and development of earlier media.Footnote ²⁰ The growth of the application of law to its emergence was also unpredictable, although Johnson and Post argued for an ‘exceptionalism’ to permit this globalized unregulated medium to grow unfettered by state censorship, which they saw as both normatively and substantively unjustified. They drew on United States’ constitutional law and history in the argument. They suggest a structured, principled, and internationally acceptable manner for national legislators to respond to the Internet. Lessig, while rejecting excessive state intervention, warned that self-regulation could lead to an Internet controlled by corporate interests.Footnote ²¹ Lessig argued that state forbearance was rapidly resulting in private regulation by new monopolies, to supplement the existing regulation by technical protocols.

Although cyber-exceptionalism became the dominant viewpoint among scholars, it was not without its opponents. Goldsmith made a legal positivist stand against the Post-Johnson Internet exceptionalism, seeing as both normatively and substantively flawed any ‘claim that cyberspace is so different from other communication media that it will, or should, resist all governmental regulation’.Footnote ²² He asserted that it can be regulated, including via conflict of laws rules, although this is not a normative position on whether law should utilize its tools to regulate the Internet. In an early trans-Atlanticist article arguing against Internet exceptionalism and reactive national Internet regulation, Mayer-Schönberger and Foster argued that the global information infrastructure limits both absolutists and regulators.Footnote ²³ The emerging internationalization of the Internet would lead to both jurisdictional conflicts as well as a clash of rights principles, as foreseen by Mayer-Schönberger and Foster. Samuelson argued persuasively that legislators must ensure that the impending rule making for the Internet is proportional in both economic and human rights terms to the needs and demands of users, as well as coordinated internationally.Footnote ²⁴ Samuelson accepted the rise of the state, the need for sovereign intervention, and the efficiency self-regulation had provided, in arguing for principles for legislating on the Internet.

There have been extensive discussions as to the provenance of a field termed ‘Internet’ or ‘cyber’ law since the mid-1990s. As the law was colonizing the metaphorical “cyberspace” – communications between computer users over the Internet – most of the most authoritative and pioneering legal scholarship with regard to the new medium dates to the 1990s. Several offline subjects have themselves incorporated large literatures from their digital form, including intellectual property, non-networked computer law, telecommunications, privacy, cybercrime, and media content regulation. As the Internet was ‘born global’ but first became widely deployed in the United States, much of the literature has a bias in that direction.

Many argue that the effects of digital information retrieval on the law applies across all areas with some relevance, especially for intellectual property, and that Internet law should be considered part of the law of contracts, competition, the Constitution, and so on, with narrow exceptions for such issues as legal informatics, and telecommunications law, which are being transformed by technology, and therefore cannot remain distinctFootnote ²⁵. Easterbrook famously argued along these lines that there is no field of ‘Internet law’, any more than there is the ‘law of the horse’.Footnote ²⁶ Lessig responded that the transformative effects of the Internet on law, in areas including free expression, privacy, and intellectual property, are such that it offers lawyers a radically new route to thinking about private regulation and globalization, the limits of state action, as well as a powerful metaphor for explaining these wider changes to law students.Footnote ²⁷ Sommer dismissed Lessig’s claims regarding the exceptionalism of cyberlaw, arguing that ‘a lust to define the law of the future’ is dangerous, and can create bad taxonomy and bad legal analysis.Footnote ²⁸

Academics have constantly argued that the lack of general academic expertise and the emergence of the field mean that Internet law is a necessary short-term distinct study area, which may eventually be reintegrated into its constituent parts, as an inevitable eventual assimilation. Kerr explained two divergent views of Internet law. The first is an internalized expert view of the law, the second a technophobic view. Kerr concluded that two perspectives will converge and evolve, as more people understand the underlying technologies involved, and the useful middle ground.Footnote ²⁹ In a survey essay into the origins of the Internet law debate, Guadamuz argued that several new fields are emerging from the study of computers and law, including legal informatics, artificial intelligence (AI) and law, and that Internet law can provide new insights into established fields that provide contemporary context for the theoretical study of several subjects, and the profession’s development as a whole.Footnote ³⁰ Guadamuz argued that the ‘Attack of the Killer Acronym’ was preventing accessibility to Internet law for the wider legal profession, clients (and faculty).

Larouche later argued that the object of information law has mutated, scope for public intervention has been rolled back, implementation of any form of public intervention has been made more difficult, and that information law has seen its main topics expropriated by more traditional topics. The law syllabus is being digitized, literally (e-books, e-syllabi, e-libraries). He predicted the end of Internet law as a subject and the abstraction of information law to move away from a specific technology (except telecoms, media law). As a result, he argued that a ‘future information law’ will be radically amended.Footnote ³¹ Goldman argued for an Internet law that can be taught using new pedagogical elements employed on a survey-type course, and argued against Easterbrook that the volume of Internet-specific legislation and case law means that common law cannot provide a sufficient grounding for students to understand the transformations wrought by Internet law.Footnote ³²

Specialization happened to some extent, with e-commerce part of standard contract law, platform dominance in competition law, digital copyright (and patent) law, cybercrime in criminal law, and so on, as Murray described.Footnote ³³ Some of the more interesting specialist Internet law academic literature from the 1990s (and early 2000s) has also stood the test of time,Footnote ³⁴ for instance, on network effects,Footnote ³⁵ cyberlaw, and control by code or lex informatica,Footnote ³⁶ free and open source software and control of the online environment,Footnote ³⁷ network neutrality and the regulation of intermediaries by their networked environment,Footnote ³⁸ and the creation of monopoly gatekeepers resisting yet also predicting the dominance of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft (GAFAM).Footnote ³⁹ Internet law has been approached as a private and public law, with policy perspectives from law and economics as well as sociolegal studies. The overviews that best introduce the topic to general readers contain contributions that provide both a commercial and a public law perspective. Some important contributions have focused on US law and policy,Footnote ⁴⁰ and relatively few works provide a trans-Atlantic context.Footnote ⁴¹

The world has changed less than we think it has in the last generation, and the battle between tyranny and freedom is eternal and geographical.Footnote ⁴² Both the twenty-first-century Internet and the nineteenth-century telegraph are controlled by the Five Eyes (the Anglo-American powers and their former colonies in Singapore and Oceania). While the reach of international human rights law was severely limited in the nineteenth century, largely a matter of humanitarian aspects of the law of war and the extraterritorial application of domestic anti-slavery laws by the hyper-power Great Britain, we now live in what are claimed to be more enlightened times. The cabling of the planet for the Internet uses much the same undersea telegraph lanes and developments from those technologies. The first Internet link outside North America was to Norway (as part of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance) in 1973. We have wired Africa and have an interplanetary Internet. Geography matters, and so does territorial sovereignty. Information flows through those cables, and whoever controls the cables controls the information. The tapping of telegraph lines and blocking of encrypted messages was de rigueur in the Victorian era but this policy has been challenged under international human rights law in the twenty-first century.

The likelihood that multistakeholder civil society is able to exercise useful scrutiny and control over hyper-power politicians and their obedient corporate clients or partners may appear remote, and the call for international norms for human rights law quixotic. It could mark what some might call a tectonic shift in governance of communications. Cables may girdle the Earth in only 66.8 light milliseconds, but we continue to observe covert Internet surveillance in the shadowy half-light of governance of the corporations and surveillance agencies that have for so long controlled our information.Footnote ⁴³

Part 2: A Very Short Internet Liability Legislative History

These foundational rules for the adaptation of liability online focused on absolving faultless (and low fault, the line is shifting) intermediaries of liability for end user-posted content. More than two decades after ACLU v. Reno and the ‘Information Superhighway’ metaphor of Al Gore and Bill Clinton’s first term is as useful a time as any to look back to the future. Settled policies were arrived at as a result of expert testimony and exhaustive hearings, on liability, privacy, trust, encryption, open Internet policies against filtering. Changing those policies now may result in potentially catastrophic untying of the Gordian knots of intermediary safe harbour, privacy, copyright enforcement, and open Internet European regulations.

The legislation that underpins intermediary liability was introduced in an extraordinary ‘dot-com’ boom in the period 1996–1999, frequently dated to start on 12 April 1996, when Yahoo! underwent an initial public offering, shares making 270 per cent profit for investors on a single day. The growth of Yahoo! reflects the heady valuations of Internet stocks in the period with its peak at $118.75 a share on 3 January 2000 crashing to $8.11 on 26 September 2001 – lower than the price of its IPO.Footnote ⁴⁴ The rise and fall of broader telecoms stocks (the Internet’s infrastructure plumbing) of about forty-two months was documented by Malik as amounting to an excessive valuation of about $750 billion.Footnote ⁴⁵ A regulatory outcome of the large-scale fraud, accounting irregularity, and generalized lack of regulation in that period is the lack of proper investigation to learn the lessons of that boom and bust beyond the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002.Footnote ⁴⁶ This may have contributed in small part to the failure of regulation, and far greater losses, of the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008–2009 and the ‘Age of Austerity’ that followed.Footnote ⁴⁷

Two myths need rebutting to understand the ‘self-regulatory settlement’ of Internet law. The first is that the United States settled on self-regulation and a hands-off approach. While this was the spirit of the Digital Tornado paper, it was very much unreflective of the 104th Congress that voted through the Communications Decency Act as part of the Telecommunications Act 1996.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the US, liability regimes have differed according to speech-based and copyright-based liabilities. Communications Decency Act 1996 s.230 provides that ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.’Footnote ⁴⁹ This language might shield ISPs from liability for subscriber copyright infringement as well. However, Section 230(e)(2) specifically states: ‘Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or expand any law pertaining to intellectual property.’ Section 230 established the concept of limited liability.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 s.512 laid out detailed rules for copyright infringement and the action required of intermediaries when notice of infringement, as paid out in DMCA, was sent. The introduction on 30 June 1995 of the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act to amend the omnibus Telecommunications Act of 1934, was designed in part to mandate filters against adult pornography in all United States’ households, and the eventual law as amended was voted through 420–4 on 4 August 1995,Footnote ⁵¹ remaining the federal law until part struck down in the famous ACLU v. Reno Supreme Court case on 26 June 1997.Footnote ⁵²

This non-filtered Internet regime, which arrived by accident as a result of constitutional convention, has been developed over time, and maintains a significant degree of difference from the gradually less permissive intermediary regime now permitted in the European Union.Footnote ⁵³ Note that the 105th and 106th Congress were largely obsessed with attempting to impeach President Clinton for perjury, related to a sexual misconduct that was first publicized via that unrestricted Internet that Congress had attempted to control in 1995–7.Footnote ⁵⁴ Attempts to reform the law in the period 2000 onwards were partially successful in restricting government-funded Internet services in for instance libraries, e.g. Children’s Internet Protection Act 2001,Footnote ⁵⁵ although statutes such as Child Online Protection Act 1998 were struck down by the Supreme Court.Footnote ⁵⁶

There is thus a patchy history of US federal legislators attempting to restrict Internet harms and place restrictions on Internet access, struck down by the Supreme Court defending individual liberty against censorship.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the absence of an active Supreme Court, Europe’s lawmakers have faced fewer restrictions on controlling the Internet, although the liability regime is only modestly different. As Holznagel indicates, US courts have applied ‘safe harbour’ provisions to widely protect Internet service providers (ISPs), even where [a] it was aware of unlawful hosted content; [b] if it had been notified of this by a third party; [c] if it had paid for the data.Footnote ⁵⁸ According to Yen: ‘[T]he general philosophy motivating these decisions – namely, that the liability against ISPs for subscriber libel would result in undesirable censorship on the Internet – remains vitally important in assessing the desirability of ISP liability.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Despite multiple recent proposals to amend the limited liability safe harbour of s.230 Communications Decency Act to counter ‘revenge porn’, disinformation and terrorist content, the broad exemption from liability for ISPs has continued into 2020.Footnote ⁶⁰ Frydman and Rorive see courts as ‘in line with the legislative intent … applied the immunity provision in an extensive manner’.Footnote ⁶¹

The second myth that needs exposing is that Europe was entirely reactive to the US Internet liability regime. While it is true that European telecoms were only formally liberalized in 1998, moves to regulate liability for online services predate the public Internet. European consumer Internet use roughly dates to 1998, with the opening of the Telecoms Single Market, and broadband to 2000, with the Local Loop Unbundling Regulation. However, a high-level group of experts led by Professor Luc Soete was set up in May 1995 to advise the European Commission on ‘social and societal changes associated with the Information Society’, which set out over one hundred initial policy suggestions in January 1996, including the infamous ‘bit tax’ to prevent e-commerce eroding the local tax base.Footnote ⁶² Among these suggestions was a recommendation to investigate further ‘appropriate ways in which the benefits of the Information Society can be more equally distributed between those who benefit and those who lose’. Given the upheavals of the ‘zero hours’ precariat economy of the 2010s, and the scandals of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook and other multinationals’ failure to pay tax on in-country activities, the bit tax may be returning in 2020.Footnote ⁶³

In the German Teleservices Act of 1997Footnote ⁶⁴ and Bavaria v. Felix Somm (Compuserve) case,Footnote ⁶⁵ Germany showed that it wished to see a similar limited liability regime to that in the US. This led with British support to adoption of the Electronic Commerce Directive of 2000, creating the Digital Single Market in e-commerce. 1999 seems very late in the dot-com boom – but the legislative history of the ECD is directly traceable to 16 April 1997, months before the Teleservices Act was finally ratified. The coordination of US and European lawmaking came in the International Ministerial Conference ‘Global Information Networks: Realizing the Potential’ in Bonn (then the German capital city) on 6–8 July 1997, which addressed ‘international policy-making amongst others for electronic commerce with a view to adopting a Ministerial Declaration’.Footnote ⁶⁶ As with the US Telecommunications Act 1996, it was an eighteenth-month legislative process.

‘Safe harbour’ protection of ISPs from liability was only implemented on 17 January 2002, when the ECD came into force. Article 12 protects the ISP where it provides ‘mere conduit’ with no knowledge of, or editorial control over, content or receiver (‘does not initiate [or] select the receiver’). Benoit and Frydman establish that it was based on the 1997 German Teleservices Act, albeit with ‘slightly more burden on the ISPs in comparison with the former German statute’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Where ISPs provide hosting services, under Article 14, they are protected from liability, in two ways:

1. 1. the provider does not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or information and, as regards claims for damages, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which the illegal activity is apparent; or

2. 2. the provider, upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove or to disrupt access of the information.

Like the proverbial three blind monkeys, ISPs and web hosting services should ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’.Footnote ⁶⁸ As mere ciphers for content, they are protected; should they engage in any filtering of content, they become liable. Thus masterly inactivity except when prompted by law enforcement is the economically most advantageous policy open to them. Frydman and Rorive state ‘undoubtedly the Directive seeks to stimulate coregulation’. It does this by formally permitting national courts to override the safe harbour in the case of actual or suspected breach, of national law, including copyright law.

Whereas in the US, the absolute speech protection of the First Amendment and procedural concerns mean that Notice and Take Down is counter-balanced by ‘put back’ procedures, in Europe, where no such protection of free speech exists, speech freedom is qualified by state rights. In both jurisdictions, Notice and Take Down regimes cause Frydman and Rorive to state that: ‘[T]his may lead to politically correct or even economically correct unofficial standards that may constitute an informal but quite efficient mechanism for content-based private censorship.’Footnote ⁶⁹ It is clear that the economic incentive for ISPs is simply to remove any content notified, otherwise do nothing to monitor content, and let end users, the police and courts, and ultimately the ethics of the content providers decide what is stored and sent over their access networks. Frydman and Rorive state that: ‘Business operators should never be entrusted with … guidelines defining the limits of the right to free speech and offering procedural guarantees against censorship … which belong to the very core of the human rights of a democratic people.’Footnote ⁷⁰ That is nevertheless the situation that ISP Codes of Conduct seek to self-regulate.

Could a stronger case be made to make ISPs responsible for a class of their content, where it serves their commercial benefit? This is an idea that was suggested in the 1990s, before the CDA and ECD supplanted the idea. It has returned in the US with Balkin and Zittrain’s concept of information fiduciaries,Footnote ⁷¹ adapted to Europe in Perrin and Woods’ recent work on duty of care.Footnote ⁷²

Vicarious liability tests the ability to benefit and control [i] the right and ability to supervise and [ii] a financial direct interest. This tends to make ISPs choose not to monitor even for law enforcement. The financial direct benefit is interesting in view of the ‘killer application’ for broadband deployment in the 2000s: Did this include peer-to-peer if the access charges received by the ISP is based on traffic i.e. adverts on portal or bandwidth usage? ISPs arguably benefitted from the existence of copyright infringement on the Internet. Thousands of users desired Internet service precisely because it offers free access to copyrighted materials. As Yen argued, an ISP (like the Polygram trade show operatorFootnote ⁷³) could make copyright compliance part of its system rules and then monitor for violations.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Viacom v. YouTube case in 2010 failed to fully establish the burden in such cases.Footnote ⁷⁵

Similar controversies have arisen beyond content and intellectual property. The landmark 2000 French criminal case of Yahoo v. LICRA, confirmed that US multinationals must conform to national criminal law on hate speech.Footnote ⁷⁶ With regard to privacy, in 2000, the Europeans and US published the ‘safe harbour’ agreement. Negotiated from 1998, it was always legal nonsense if sound policy, and was struck down by the European Court of Justice in Schrems in 2015.Footnote ⁷⁷ Its replacement, the ‘privacy shield’, is equally a sticking plaster over trans-Atlantic differences, and may also be struck down. While this chapter will not describe any of the data protection law developments over the last 25 years, it is noteworthy that the Data Protection DirectiveFootnote ⁷⁸ was continually attacked as unsuitable for the Internet that it was not expressly designed to regulate,Footnote ⁷⁹ so the new General Data Protection Regulation is already subject to much attack for its failure to regulate artificial intelligence and robotics, yet again technologies for which it was not expressly designed … but may be adapted.Footnote ⁸⁰

Part 3: The Development of Co-Regulation

The early period of frenetic legislative activity in 1997–2001 matched the growth of the Internet sector in Europe, which was very small and not officially measured until 1998, when it grew from 9 per cent to over 42 per cent in 2002 in the United Kingdom, for example.Footnote ⁸¹ This unprecedented growth of a single electronic medium was driven by broadband, mobile and Wifi-enabled Internet access as well as the growth of social media: seven in ten Europeans were using the Internet by 2010.Footnote ⁸² By the end of 2017, 86 per cent of European Union citizens used the Internet, with 433 million users, and 252 million users of Facebook within that number and approximately 400 million Google users.Footnote ⁸³

The European Commission has conducted continuous monitoring of Internet self-regulation throughout the twenty-first century. A 2004 report for the European Commission concluded:

The development of Internet regulation has been scrutinized in real time as it developed. Self-regulation continues, and even in the absence of any new laws we would expect the development of the Internet not to be static.Footnote ⁸⁵ Legislative impact assessments of Internet law that ask, ‘What happens if we do nothing?’, do not involve stasis. The zero option is that the Internet continues to develop.Footnote ⁸⁶ Self-regulation is viewed as making standards and practices across industry that the European Commission, or a Member State, views agnostically in legislative terms (or pre-legislative, given the focus on areas that are emerging and which are not yet regulated), but which intends to monitor to analyse the extent to which the self-regulation approaches the standards of ‘representativeness’ that co-regulation is meant to demonstrate as a best practice. The Commission’s insistence that this is not an inevitable journey is backed by its actions in such areas as technical standard setting.

The largest European Internet companies are United States based. Half of the world’s ten largest public companies by capitalization are computer technology, Internet-based advertising, media and e-commerce conglomerates: Google (trading as Alphabet Inc.), Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM). Apple is in the global top twenty corporations by revenues, with two Internet access providers in the top thirty (AT&T and Verizon). Large Internet companies have very high profit margins driven in part by their avoidance of high sales taxes, corporate taxes and transfer pricing, as well as merger activity. The European Commission explained that: ‘Google’s search engine has held very high market shares in all EEA countries, exceeding 90% in most. It has done so consistently since at least 2008.’Footnote ⁸⁷ Regulation by states of the failings of those private actors is in general much slower, with the Google competition breach investigated from November 2010 until a record fine was finally issued in June 2017. The actors that enforce regulation on the Internet are thus young but globally successful multinationals, an unprecedented group of private actors regulating speech and commerce on a communications medium. In 2017, the European Commission found all these companies guilty of anticompetitive conduct:

• Apple in Ireland, and Amazon in Luxembourg, had received illegal state aid of respectively €13 billion and €1.5 billion.

• Google abused its dominance through its search business, EC imposing a €2.4 billion fine.

• Facebook had flagrantly breached the terms of its merger with WhatsApp in 2014, with an EC fine of €110 million imposed in May 2017.

• Previously dominant software and Internet company Microsoft had been found guilty of abusing its dominance three times since 2007; fined a total of €2.2 billion.

This total of fines is a record for any sector, as are the individual instances of fines. To give a sense of the scale of mergers by the companies in that period, they made 436 acquisitions worth a total $131 billion in the decade to June 2017.Footnote ⁸⁸ These private actors operate with enormous scale and scope, yet they are legally regulated exactly as small commercial websites. The size and scale of their operations make their regulation more difficult than the equivalents in other industries – for instance, the infamous ‘Seven Sisters’ energy companies whose regulation inspired both energy and, to some extent, environmental law.Footnote ⁸⁹ Such regulation between states and firms has been termed ‘para-diplomacy’,Footnote ⁹⁰ and it is constantly engaged in by the GAFAM group.

Major platforms (now including Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Microsoft) and access providers formed a self-regulatory group, the Global Network Initiative (GNI), in 2008 to respond to government demands for better enforcement. GNI members publish transparency reports which can be audited by the board of GNI, an example of self-regulation by a group.Footnote ⁹¹ Google first published a report in 2010, and reported in 2018 almost 4 billion annual copyright removal requests as compared to 495,000 annual “right to be forgotten” delisting requests and only 16,000 annual government content requests (affecting 221,000 websites), demonstrating that its most substantial enforcement actions are carried out on behalf of copyright owners.Footnote ⁹² Facebook, Twitter (since 2012), Amazon (since 2015) and others also produce annual transparency reports.Footnote ⁹³

Co-regulation was noted by United States Congress in 2002 to describe certain aspects of European regulation: ‘government enforcement of private regulations’.Footnote ⁹⁴ It actually came from Australia.Footnote ⁹⁵ The European adventure in co-regulation in wider consumer protection legislation, as well as standards setting, was made detailed in 2002,Footnote ⁹⁶ and became official policy in December 2003, with the Inter-Institutional Agreement on Better Law-Making (IIA), which defines co-regulation.Footnote ⁹⁷ Although a non-legislative act, the IIA is virtually a constitutional document in European law, and its importance cannot be over-estimated, as it agrees the rules of engagement of the European Parliament, Council of Ministers and Commission.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Commission confirms that forms of regulation short of state regulation ‘will not be applicable where fundamental rights or important political options are at stake or in situations where the rules must be applied in a uniform fashion in all Member States’.

De jure co-regulation involves legislation that tells the industry ‘regulate or else’. The UK Digital Economy Act 2010 included two specific elements of co-regulation, for the domain name authority (Nominet) and audiovisual media services online (the Authority for Television on Demand). De facto co-regulation exists where the regulators have used their powers of extreme persuasion. It is an area in which the industry players are very aware that the regulator has power. There can be de facto co-regulation taking place alongside de jure co-regulation.

The Commission in 2005 analysed co-regulation in terms of ‘better regulation’.Footnote ⁹⁹ This was immediately made part of internal EC practice in the Impact Assessment Guidelines,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ which the Commission must follow before bringing forward a new legislative or policy proposal.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Price and Verhulst (2005) contained significant focus on AOL and internal self-organization.Footnote ¹⁰² They identified even then increasing realism in recognizing competition problems, emerging monopolies, and dominance. Verhulst and Latzer provided excellent analysis of the types of co-regulation beginning to develop and their institutional path dependency.Footnote ¹⁰³ They identify five types of regulation, short of statutory agency-led regulation:

• Co-regulation,

• State-supported self-regulation,

• Collective industry self-regulation,

• Single company self-organization,

• Self-help/restriction by users including rankings to impose restrictions on access to content.

Note the direction of travel: both bottom-up transformations from self- into co-regulatory bodies, and top-down delegation from regulation into co- but not self-regulation. Also note examples of ‘zombie’ self-regulation – where no one will declare the patient dead or switch off the life support machine. I described these as ‘Potemkin’ self-regulators, where there was a website and the appearance of a regulator but few resources, no physical address containing offices and little or no apparent adjudication and enforcement.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ We should note the gains and losses in the lifecycle of regulation – will self-regulation ossify if it stays true to its principles of self-regulation? If ossification were to result, would it matter other than to self-regulatory purists if a mature self-regulator were then to be made into a co-regulator? UK converged communications regulator Ofcom’s own managerial and regulatory analysis of co- and self-regulation arrives at similar conclusions.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The EC has made it pragmatic to fund standards and ex ante support self-regulation in cases where the US would simply ex post regulate via competition law. This leads to substantial US–European differences of approach, which may create ‘transatlantic competition of standardization philosophies … [in] consumer protection systems’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Examples of co-regulation have become frequent in this field in the 2000s, notably in data privacy, domain name governance, content filtering, Internet security, and network neutrality, as well as standard setting and social network privacy regulation.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Both soft law and soft enforcement play a vital regulatory role which legal positivists would be in danger of overlooking by a failure to consider the law in its co-regulatory context.

A Beaufort scale of co-regulation was developed for the European Commission based on the Beaufort scale of wind speed (from calm to hurricane).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The wind in this case is the degree to which the government was breathing on the forms of self-regulation that were taking place. Zero was a state of calm, which would be an entirely technical standards body whose standards were formed totally within the technical community, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force, up to a state of storm, which could be the forms of co-regulation that were formalized in the Digital Economy Act. Between zero and eleven, there is a lot of room for us to see different elements of influence that have been exerted. That wind is blowing a lot more strongly from European governments and from parliaments towards trying to achieve something much closer to co-regulation than to self-regulation. There are three alternatives:

1. 1. not to regulate, but the world develops without regulation

2. 2. to regulate all the platforms that legislators are concerned about

3. 3. to regulate only the dominant platforms.

It is this regulatory dilemma that I consider in the final part of the chapter.

Part 4: Back to The Future of Cyberlaw in the Ubiquitous Networked Computing Era

Internet lawyers are widening their horizons and returning to the broader notion of being information lawyers whose interests extend beyond a public IP network. The end of the special place for Internet law, and its absorption into media law, has been prematurely announced. It is not only the European institutions that are becoming excited about more Internet regulation, driven in part by self-preservation and the rise of disinformation (‘fake news’ – sic). Reed and others question how we regulate AIFootnote ¹⁰⁹ and dominance of the ‘surveillance-industrial’ state in these post-Snowden/Schrems/GDPR times, pushing digital law into even constitutional studies.Footnote ¹¹⁰ These are exciting times to be an information lawyer.

To put a damp squib on too much recurrent techno-optimism or cynicism, I argue that most arguments for regulating the Internet and cyber-technologies today remain old wine in new bottles.Footnote ¹¹¹ The United Kingdom regulator Ofcom has called for more regulation, and potentially a new regulator, of the Internet.Footnote ¹¹² Most developed legal systems have lots of legal regulators of information, even if none of those is entirely shiny, new, and ‘cyber’. There is the UK Information Commissioner, Electoral Commission, Ofcom itself, the Advertising Standards Authority, and others. There are technical support institutions such as National Cyber Security Centre,Footnote ¹¹³ and a variety of non-governmental organizations such as the Nuffield Foundation-supported Ada Lovelace Foundation, the Turing Institute, and venerable Foundation for Information Policy Research.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In constructing what I call ‘OffData’, a regulator of electronic communications and content,Footnote ¹¹⁵ we need to learn the lessons of previous regulatory mergers both inside (OfCom) and outside (OfGem) communications. We need to recall what is known about sectoral regulation. UK Ofcom was set up almost twenty years ago as a result of technological convergence between broadcasting and telephony,Footnote ¹¹⁶ but deliberately constructed not to regulate Internet content. It is now required to so do. This is not a moment for unique solution peddling or an ahistorical view of the need to extend competences beyond a privacy, a security, a sectoral competition, and a communications regulator.

While information law is maturing, and the old Internet law/cyberlaw nomenclature may be fading, what we do as lawyers dealing with computers and their impact on society is growing more important. Some of the new ideas about regulating the Internet and artificial intelligence (AI) betray a naive faith in technology companies’ intentions towards law enforcement. It is now the job of grizzled, veteran information lawyers to help policy makers understand how to make better laws for cyberspace.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Hildebrandt explains the scale and scope that can create disinformation problems in social media platforms:

Some of the claims that AI can ‘solve’ the problem of disinformation (‘fake news’) do just that. Limiting the automated execution of decisions (e.g. account suspension) on AI-discovered problems is essential in ensuring human agency and natural justice: the right to appeal. That does not prevent Internet platform operators’ suspension of ‘bot’ accounts at scale, but ensures the correct auditing of the system processes deployed.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Technological solutions to detect and remove illegal/undesirable content have become more effective, but they also raise questions about who is ‘judge’ in determining what is legal/illegal, desirable/undesirable in society. Underlying AI use is a difficult choice between different elements of law and technology, public and private solutions, with trade-offs between judicial decision making, scalability, and impact on users’ freedom of expression. Public and private actors have suggested that AI could play a larger role in future identification of problematic content – but these systems have their own prejudices and biases. It is worth restating that neither law nor technology is neutral: they both embody the values and priorities of those who have designed them (‘garbage in, garbage out’).

Does the use of AI that employs algorithmic processes to identify ‘undesirable’ content and nudge it out of consumers’ view, provide a means for effective self-regulation by platforms? The UK Parliament Artificial Intelligence Committee reported on some of these issues in 2017.Footnote ¹²⁰ There are an enormous number of false positives in taking material down. It is very difficult for AI to tell the difference between a picture of fried chicken and a Labradoodle, simply because of the nature of the attempts by algorithms to match these things.Footnote ¹²¹ It will need human intervention to analyse these false positives. AI can be deployed, but Google and Facebook are employing 50,000 more people because they recognize that there will have to be a mixture in order to achieve any kind of aim.Footnote ¹²² Artificial intelligence and algorithms cannot be the only way to regulate content in future.Footnote ¹²³

‘Mechanical Turks’ are people employed – subcontracted, typically – to carry out these activities,Footnote ¹²⁴ in parts of the world where their own cultural understanding of the content they are dealing with may not be ideal.Footnote ¹²⁵ One of the problems is that they are responding to a perceived need to remove more content, rather than addressing fair process and due process. Subcontracting to people on very low wages in locations other than Europe is a great deal cheaper than employing a lawyer to work out whether there should be an appeal to put content back online. The incentive structure will be for platforms to demonstrate how much content they have removed.

Transparency and explanation are necessary, but remain a small first step towards greater co-regulation.Footnote ¹²⁶ Veale et al. have explained how to move beyond transparency and explicability to replicability: to be able to run the result and produce the answer that matches the answer they have.Footnote ¹²⁷ The greater the transparency, the greater the amount of information you give to those users who do not read the terms of service online: the degree to which that helps is limited. Prosumers are told: ‘If you do not agree to the effectively unilateral terms of service you may no longer use Facebook.’ A better approach would be the ability to replicate the result achieved by the company producing the algorithm. Algorithms change all the time, and the algorithm for Google search, for instance, is changed constantly. There are good reasons to keep that as a trade secret. Replicability would be the ability to look at the algorithm in use at the time and, as an audit function, run it back through the data to produce the same result. It is used in medical trials as a basic principle of scientific inquiry. It would help to have more faith in what is otherwise a black box that prosumers and regulators have to trust. The European Commission has used the overarching phrase ‘a fair deal for consumers’.Footnote ¹²⁸

Platform regulation is a new version of an existing regulated problem, with potentially dramatic negative effects on democracy and media pluralism.Footnote ¹²⁹ In tackling disinformation (and other undesirable uses of online communication, as the history of electoral and defamation reform shows), not only the effectiveness of the technological measures needs to be considered, but also raising awareness of the individual and social responsibility for the provision and appreciation of verifiable truthful content, by independent platforms rather than a single central authority. Media pluralism and literacy go hand in hand with any technological intervention.

I predict that 2020 will see the implementation of hard law requiring ‘notice and action’ within one hour of complaints about illegal content online.Footnote ¹³⁰ The vigorous action on social network regulation has not happened, in spite of urging from national and European politicians in view of terrorist content, sexual abuse, fake news, and the other vile elements of human society manifested on the Internet. European regulators continue to rely more on corporate social (ir)responsibility than hard law. The European Commission record fine for Google is being appealed, but it will have to accept some kind of co-regulation of its vertically integrated advertising in time.

I explained in the Introduction to this chapter that Werbach’s Digital Tornado, along with Reidenberg’s conception of lex informatica, heralded a model of limited state but very substantial responsible collective self-regulation. Hard law, in the shape of the proposed European Digital Services Act to be introduced in 2020, will continue in the 2020s to be accompanied by Codes of Conduct and other self- or co-regulatory measures. At the time of writing, the world was plunging into a deep economic and social depression due to the pandemic, with broadband connectivity and Internet platforms ever more vital. Even as legislatures introduce hard law to combat their particular favourite online harm, continued emphasis will focus on giant platforms’ self-regulatory practices. Cyberlaw has become mainstream in the most dramatic manner imaginable.