Draft Online Safety Bill Briefing

Special Briefing: The Draft Online Safety Bill

The Draft Online Safety Bill (OSB) has the potential to introduce an effective regime for managing online harms. It proposes a form of systems-based regulation, focussed on frameworks, business models, structures, and design.

The draft Bill provides the overall framework for a raft of measures to be set out in secondary legislation, and codes which will be introduced by Ofcom, the new online safety regulator. The Bill sets out how the Secretary of State and Ofcom will need to act in order to administer these framework duties.

The services considered in scope for this regulation are those that have a significant number of users in the UK, if the UK is a target market, or if the service can be used in the UK by individuals and there are reasonable grounds to believe that there is a material risk of significant harm to individuals in the UK.

This will of course have implications for Ofcom’s technical capabilities and capacity and there will likely be some shortfall requiring expert third sector bodies to monitor the UK’s digital sphere. The proposed law treats user-to-user services (like Facebook) and Search engines (like Google) differently, applying stronger duties to some user-to-user services (placed into what is called a Category 1 group), such as addressing legal but harmful content.