Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollhus, who with me to discuss the government's ongoing attempts to protect people on the internet with the online safety bill are the Conservative former Culture Secretary, Baroness Nikki Morgan, along with Labour's Lord Wilf Stevenson, Shadow Spokesperson for Culture, Media and Sport, as well as Dr Michael Veal,

Associate Professor of Digital Rights and Regulation at University College London.

So I'll start with you, Michael. Obviously, this idea of an online safety bill has been

knocking around for quite a while. Now, the first white paper was in, back in 2019, was still a way off from it being on the

statute book.

What essentially was the idea behind it?

What was it meant to cover that wasn't being covered by existing legislation and who is

going to be affected by it?

You can go back much further than that, actually, internet safety. Green paper, a lot of the

uncommenced provisions of the Digital Economy Act. This is an area that many countries are grappling

with because I think for a whole variety of reasons, regulation about content and platforms online

had not been developing at the same time as a lot of the business models and practices

have been developing online. And so there's a bit of catch-up. It's exactly the same with things like data

protection legislation. There's a lot of baggage, a lot of accumulated, even illegality at times,

that I think there's a lot of sweeping up happening in legislatures around the world. So the online

safety bill is a form of platform regulation, and it is a development.

We've had laws around regulating platforms since the late 90s in many jurisdictions around where they're liable and where they're not.

This is a step onwards for that that places effectively responsibilities of different kinds on online services.

Some might think of it, and it's been portrayed quite a lot in the media as a

big tech bill, but actually on the government's own impact assessment, about 25,000 companies in the

UK are in scope of this bill, but it places differing responsibilities to different levels.

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