The Online Safety Act 2023 aims to tackle illegal content, but what are the duties on service providers?
Writing in this week’s NLJ, Claire Cross, partner, and Eve Campbell, associate, Corker Binning, investigate what the Act means in practice for service providers.
Cross and Campbell look at the new risk assessment duty, due to take effect once Ofcom has finalised its guidance. They highlight some of the grey areas in terms of whether online content is illegal or harmful.
The authors write: ‘UK criminal offences are complex, nuanced and not always fully defined in legislation—for example, those that involve multifaceted allegations including matters related to fraud, sexual offences and evasion of duty prosecutions. This is partly why Ofcom’s draft guidance on how to identify illegal content runs to 390 pages.’
Pictured: Tim Berners-Lee, who said: 'Some things are of course just illegal—child pornography, fraud, telling someone how to rob a bank. That’s illegal before the web and it’s illegal after the web.’
