September 2019 WILMap Updates

The Karnataka High Court has issued notice in a petition seeking that video streaming platforms Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hotstar, YouTube and AltBalaji, be brought under the Cinematograph Act and

The Information Technology Act, 2000 (" IT Act ") defines an "intermediary" to be a person1 who receives, stores, transmits or provides any service with respect to an electronic record2

Along with the announcement of the dates for Lok Sabha Elections for 2019 , the Election Commission (EC) has also announced basic guidelines for the use of social media by

Against the backdrop of concocted news and political propaganda proliferating through digital media, fake news has become a ubiquitous and very real menace. From Entrepreneur India .

Social media platforms continue to struggle with the unenviable balancing act that pits free expression against content moderation. The European Union may soon make this endeavor all the more fraught

Responding to calls from politicians for founder of the far-right English Defense League Tommy Robinson’s videos to be removed from YouTube, Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index on Censorship said: “Tommy

Dear Secretary of State, We write to you as civil society organisations who work to promote human rights, both offline and online. As such, we are taking a keen interest

Apologies if I’m not being appropriately empathetic, but I think lawsuits alleging that Internet giants are biased against conservatives are stupid and counterproductive. They are premised on factually unsupportable assertions

All the signs are that the government will shortly propose a duty of care on social media platforms aimed at reducing the risk of harm to users. DCMS Secretary of

The government will next week confirm the launch date for a UK-wide age block on online pornography as privacy campaigners continue to raise concerns about how websites and age verification

In March 2018, a District Court in West Bengal convicted an engineering student for sharing intimate videos of his ex-girlfriend on a porn website. [1] The court convicted the accused

When that little white box on Facebook asks you, "What's on your mind?", could Facebook be responsible for what you have to say? A group representing French Muslims is suing

It is perhaps understandable that European lawmakers have large Internet companies in their sights. The Cambridge Analytica scandal and subsequent data breaches at Facebook led to admonishments and fines .

It’s disingenuous when the Indian government says that they want traceability but “not at the cost of encryption or privacy.” Traceability is bound to be at the cost of privacy,

Since the tragic attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand earlier this month, Australian leaders have raised concerns that social media platforms have become facilitators, if not full-on enablers,

Internet companies were once the darlings of Capitol Hill, celebrated by lawmakers as examples of American innovation. It’s safe to say the honeymoon is over. From the Los Angeles Times

Technology is a major part of our lives, and companies such as Facebook have immense responsibilities. Every day, we make decisions about what speech is harmful, what constitutes political advertising,

It’s been about a year since Singapore’s Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods held its open hearings. Although no Bills have yet been tabled, Singapore is expecting legislation to deal

EU Commissioner Gunther Oettinger -- well known for being a bit of a bigoted Luddite -- basically crafted the plan that became the EU Copyright Directive when he was the

In September 2018, under French and German influence, the European Commission put forward a proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on preventing the dissemination

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has proposed an independent watchdog that will write a "code of practice" for tech companies. Senior managers could be held liable

Australia has adopted a law that would penalize platforms and their executives for a failure to control what it calls “abhorrent violent material.” The law is deeply problematic, as was

U.S. lawmakers and privacy advocates have spent the last year hammering Facebook Inc. to change its behavior, prompting billionaire Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to reveal his vision for government

With the rise of the Digital Age, the European Union was more than ripe for an overhaul on its Copyright Directive of 2001. Last week, the European Parliament voted in

Mark Zuckerberg has a vision that he’d like Congress to share. Lawmakers seem to agree that there are too few tech companies with too much power, and that Big Tech

On March 28, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) accused Facebook of violating the Fair Housing Act by encouraging discrimination based on race, religion, sex, familial status,

Facebook recently said in a statement that the company had spent more than 18 months assessing “risk” across its platforms to help ensure that the Lok Sabha election was free

On Monday, the U.K. Government published proposals for "tough new measures to ensure the U.K. is the safest place in the world to be online," claiming these to be the

In April 2018, House Republicans held a hearing on the “ Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms ” that focused on misguided claims that Internet platforms like Google, Twitter, and

The UK government has just outlined its plans for sweeping new laws aimed at tackling illegal and harmful content and activity online, described by the government as ‘the toughest internet

Nearly a decade after pro-democracy protests first roiled Tahrir square, political activists in Egypt face a severe new threat to their freedom of speech: a new law governing the use

Though acts of terrorism take place in the real world, they attain a kind of online afterlife. Materials like those from the recent Christchurch shooting proliferate as supporters upload them

Now that the EU's awful Copyright Directive has been passed , it would be easy to give up, and assume that nothing more can be done. That's far from the

In the immediate aftermath of the horrific attacks at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, internet companies faced intense scrutiny over their efforts to

On 1 April, the government of Singapore introduced the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill . Often referred to as the Singaporean anti-fake news law, it is expected to

Last Monday, having spent the best part of a day reading the UK government's Online Harms White Paper , I concluded that if the road to hell was paved with

On Monday, the European Union’s member states approved a package of controversial reforms to the bloc’s copyright laws, known as the Copyright Directive, that the European Parliament passed last month.

I’m pleased to announce my essay, The Complicated Story of FOSTA and Section 230 . This essay tries to simplify a very complicated set of topics and summarize it in

Cecilia Kang recently had a good article in the NY Times about Mark Zuckerberg's bizarre call for governments to take over content moderation on internet platforms. Lots of people pointed

The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications’ recent guidance on its approach to intermediary liability under Canada’s anti-spam legislation is overreaching and onerous, according to lawyers working in the field. From Law

In a span of less than two weeks, the Madras High Court has imposed and lifted a ban on the TikTok mobile application, an increasingly popular video and social platform.

A bill before the Texas Senate seeks to prevent social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter from censoring users based on their viewpoints. Supporters say it would protect the free

The Asia Internet Coalition has accused the Nepali draft IT Bill of vague phrasing in its restrictions , empowering authorities indiscriminately, and of failing to understand the services it seeks

Facebook booted a hodgepodge of extremist figures recently, inflaming a faction on the right that is challenging the prevailing legal consensus on what is and isn’t protected speech on digital

Singapore has passed a controversial anti-fake news law that gives authorities sweeping powers to police online platforms and even private chat groups. The government can now order platforms to remove

Yesterday, there was a big process, called the Christchurch Call , in which a bunch of governments and big social media companies basically agreed to take a more proactive role

In what’s being criticised as a controversial and ambiguous law, Singapore’s Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation (Pofma) Law criminalising fake news and allowing the authorities to remove objectionable online

This morning, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes made a landmark call to break up Facebook in The New York Times . Hughes — who left the company in 2007 — argues

Facebook’s announcement in late April that it had set aside $3 billion to $5 billion to settle claims that it mishandled users’ personal data suggested a strong consensus by federal

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is one of the co-authors of a law often credited with creating the internet as we know it — and he’s got a few things he’d

ex-trafficking victims in California are suing Salesforce , claiming the company helped the now-defunct website Backpage, a classified ads website, in enabling prostitution. Whatever your view on the harm to

The rush to bring law and order to online spaces is well and truly on. Two important documents on the topic of online speech regulation have come out of Paris

Tighter regulation of social media and other online services in now under discussion in several European countries, as well as in the UK where the government has released a white

UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has published a new joint report and stat-fest on Internet attitudes and usage with the national data protection watchdog, the ICO — a quantitative study to

Freedom of expression is a fundamental right “enshrined”, at the international level, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (art 19) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

Current policy discourse in the European Union is steadily shifting from intermediary liability to intermediary responsibility. The long-established principle prohibiting general monitoring obligations is currently being challenged by two initiatives

As you may recall, Facebook embraced SESTA/FOSTA during the legislative proceedings. First, following advice from its political advisor Definers, Facebook decided SESTA was less important than the myriad of other

Following more than two years of negotiations, the revised EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive was adopted in November 2018, aiming to better reflect the digital age and create a more