Report from the The Guardian
In Brief – Justice Jeremy Johnson of the High Court in London has rejected the Wikimedia Foundation’s effort to have the court rule that Wikipedia should not be categorized as a Category 1 platform under the UK Online Safety Act (OSA), calling the request “premature”. However, he noted that the site “provides significant value for freedom of speech and expression” and added that his ruling did not give Ofcom “a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia’s operations”. The non-profit says that it will face huge challenges to comply with regulatory requirements designed to protect online users from objectionable content on social media platforms, and that it would need to restrict UK user access by three-quarters to fall below the Category 1 user threshold. Johnson noted that Ofcom has not formally determined that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service, nor determined the specific responsibilities of the platform, and that if Ofcom made determinations that meant Wikipedia was unable to operate as at present, then the government should consider amending the regulations or exempting categories of service from the act, and if not, Wikipedia could bring a further challenge to the court.
Context – The OSA empowered Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, to “make online services safer” by making sure that “companies have effective systems in place to protect users” from illegal and harmful content including child sexual exploitation and abuse, hate, harassment, and encouraging self-harm. The first big platform changes have been online age verification by adult sites and large social media platforms. Ofcom has described the law as a “regulatory cousin” rather than identical twin of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Protecting people from so-called misinformation and hate is predictably becoming an ideological point of left-right disagreement. Wikipedia is a Very Large Online Platform under the DSA, facing the most stringent obligations, resulting in a compliance process that the foundation calls a “major challenge”. Finally, consider the regulatory creep of online age checks, with Australia soon requiring technical age verification for large search engines.