LONDON – The “Internet Safety Strategy green paper” published this week by the U.K. government is unsurprisingly sprawling and ambitious. By their nature, green papers essentially are an invitation to consult, a statement of intent calling upon a wide variety of stakeholders to contribute ideas and suggestions.
Even by the standards of green papers, however, this evolving internet safety strategy is highly ambitious –- a fact openly recognized and called out by its authors.
“This Government aims to establish Britain as the world’s most dynamic digital economy,” the green paper states. “We want to make Britain the best place in the world to setup [sic] and run a digital business, while simultaneously ensuring that Britain is the safest place in the world to be online.”
Three sentences, three superlatives. That’s a pace the paper maintains for 62 pages, repeatedly calling upon a wide variety of agencies, departments, business entities and private citizens to work hand in hand to make the internet a better, safer place while maintaining its open and free nature.
If there’s one thing you can’t accuse the green paper’s authors of being, however, it’s unaware of the enormity of their stated task.
“Through this green paper we will set out a high level of ambition on how we must all play our role in tackling issues of online harms,” the paper continues. “While the primary aim of this Strategy is to build safer online environments and reduce the harm experienced online, we cannot expect that things will not sometimes still go wrong for some internet users.”
Throughout the green paper, the government’s intent is enunciated clearly. What’s profoundly less clear is how the government will accomplish its lofty goals.
To be fair, papers like this are designed largely to solicit ideas that can then be used to flesh out a final plan. But given the scope and complexity of the task at hand here, one can’t help wondering how the government can distill a practicable strategy from what is sure to be a flood of feedback from groups and entities with diverse interests that often are in conflict with each other.
The green paper also poses intents and desires that may sound straightforward in the abstract but doubtlessly will prove extremely difficult in practice.
“One of the most common concerns about the Internet is that different rules apply there,” the paper states. “Acts that would be unthinkable in the physical world have become commonplace online. We reject this. The government and police will protect citizens online in the same way that we do offline. Those who commit crimes online should understand that the law applies online, just as it does offline. And together we should establish that we expect standards of behavior online to match those offline –- it is no more acceptable to bully, insult and threaten on the Internet than it is in the street or the classroom.”
The above sounds great, in theory. In practice, however, sitting down a schoolyard bully for a chat with the school principal or suspending that same bully from school is a very different proposition than dealing with a cyber-bully cloaked in multiple layers of VPN-enhanced anonymity.
Adding to the difficulty of the U.K.’s desire to tame the wild, wild web is the inconvenient fact the internet is a global phenomenon, and much of the content, behavior and harm the government wants to rein in originates well beyond the precious stone set in the silver sea.
Here too, the government recognizes its limitations, but seems to envision a seamless process in which foreign entities private and public will embrace the U.K.’s goals and ambitions for internet safety without explaining why and how they’ll do so.
“This Strategy focuses on online safety in Britain, but recognizes that solutions and changes to behavioral norms are also needed at a global level,” the paper states. “We will be talking about the challenges of online safety with leading tech companies and like-minded democracies as we develop our thinking on the Digital Charter. We will campaign to build a more robust international response to online safety and continue to focus on raising awareness with international bodies and our partners.”
Again, this sounds great. But where’s the stick, should the “like-minded democracies” fail to see improving the online safety of Brits as a sufficient carrot? Is the U.K. prepared to wall off its market-garden to tech companies that fail to abide by whatever rules and standards eventually flow from the coming period of consultation?
The U.K. government is not wrong about the need for (or desirability of) an all-on-deck approach to internet safety, but as ever, the devil will be in the details.
Until and unless those details can be more clearly elucidated, the U.K.’s goal of enhancing online safety while simultaneously making itself a haven of tech business development will remain little more than a 62-page collection of bumper sticker slogans pasted together in manifesto form.
Image © Dmccale.
