The High Court within the U.K. today dismissed Wikipedia’s challenge to the country’s far-reaching online safety laws, rejecting its claim that the foundations were flawed.
The Online Safety Bill, or OSA, which the federal government has vowed will tame the “Wild West” of the web, has been controversial because it was first proposed. It’s viewed by its critics as ushering in a brand new type of authoritarian surveillance. The British government claims its goal is to make the country “the safest place on this planet to be online.”
One among those early critics was the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that helps run Wikipedia. As a nonprofit whose sole purpose is education, the platform has argued it doesn’t belong within the “category one” bracket of online entities with other large entities similar to social media platforms, where, like them, it would face the strictest scrutiny. Nonetheless, the law states that any online service with greater than 7 million users routinely becomes category one.
The inspiration argued that the law is just too broad, stating that whether it is indeed categorized as high-risk, enforcement will mean its contributors can have to confirm their identity, which is able to undermine their privacy and safety. There are around 230,000 volunteer editors for Wikipedia, in addition to 3,500 administrators. The English version alone incorporates greater than 7 million articles and receives, on average, 597 latest articles a day.
The principles for category one entities also mean strict protections for users and constant reporting to British regulators on possible harmful content. The web site argued that if required to stick to those rules, it could lose about three-quarters of its U.K. audience.
The court rejected Wikimedia’s arguments, but added that this doesn’t give the British government and its regulator Ofcom “a green light to implement a regime that will significantly impede Wikipedia’s operations.” The judge argued that if Wikipedia does change into classified as category one and finds itself unable to operate, the country’s technology secretary, Peter Kyle, should “consider whether to amend the regulations or to exempt categories of service from the act.”
“While the choice doesn’t provide the immediate legal protections for Wikipedia that we hoped for, the court’s ruling emphasized the responsibility of Ofcom and the UK government to make sure Wikipedia is protected because the OSA is implemented,” said Phil Bradley-Schmieg, lead counsel on the Wikimedia Foundation. “The judge recognized the ‘significant value’ of Wikipedia, its safety for users, in addition to the damages that wrongly assigned OSA categorizations and duties could have on the human rights of Wikipedia’s volunteer contributors.”
Photo: Unsplash
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