The UK’s ambitious and controversial proposed internet regulation started with scribblings on the back of a packet for a brie and cranberry sandwich from Pret a Manger. Those notes, from discussions between academics Lorna Woods and William Perrin about how to make tech companies responsible for online harms, became an influential white paper in 2019. That in turn became the foundation of a draft law called the Online Safety Bill, an ambitious attempt to turn the UK into the “safest place in the world to be online,” by regulating how platforms should handle harmful content, including child sexual abuse imagery, cyberbullying, and misinformation.
Since then, Britain has endured three <a
→ Continue reading at WIRED
