Brass Horn Communications – written evidence (IRN0044)

Submission in Response to The Internet: to regulate or not to regulate? inquiry

This submission is written on behalf of Brass Horn Communications, a small non-profit Internet Service Provider based in the United Kingdom.

Background:

Brass Horn Communications specialises in providing censorship and surveillance resistant Internet services to the global community.

We are greatly concerned that the language of “regulating the Internet” in an effort to tackle ‘fake news’ and abusive messaging belies the dangers of damaging the infrastructure that empowers the global free exchange of ideas.

We must be very careful not to conflate the Internet (the infrastructure) with the online platforms/“Internet Giants”/Social Media companies that operate on top of it.

The UK Government should not attempt to interfere with the technical operation of the Internet infrastructure and instead leave the regulation of the Internet infrastructure to the global multi-stakeholder community.

1. Is there a need to introduce specific regulation for the internet? Is it desirable or possible?

The Internet is by definition an inter-connected set of independent networks, any legislation or regulation passed would only apply to the UK. For the Internet to remain global the UK networks would be required to stay connected to networks in other parts of the world and these networks would not necessarily follow UK law rendering the regulations ineffective.

Applying regulation to Internet infrastructure at national boundaries has been widely decried as Internet Balkanisation (including by the UK Government[1]) and would detrimentally impact UK Internet businesses whilst at the same time be unlikely to achieve the stated aims.

The Internet is a special medium, many see it as a form of media consumption, but unlike TV or Radio it is by design a two-way system. When you tune into BBC1 on your TV it is picking out a small slice of the received TV signal being broadcast, the Internet however requires your computer to send information to BBC.com and then BBC.com sends information back.

If information can be sent from an individual computer to the Internet then that computer can be a publisher as easily as it is a consumer. This is the power of the Internet. Any computer can be a online platform, even a mobile phone can be the server for a small blog – this makes regulation of publishing content difficult as any device capable of being a receiver is at the same time a broadcaster.

Unlike roads or radio frequencies the global community decided that the Internet was a medium that everyone could use without a license or permission and it is this permissive environment that has made it such a success. Attempting to constrain the Internet (the infrastructure itself) would damage digital innovation in the UK but ultimately be ineffective at preventing people misusing it.

We would encourage the committee to experiment with asking if it is possible to regulate the road or pavements to prevent the spread of hate speech or fake news. One could pass laws that say people cannot use a road or pavement to transport flyers or newspapers that contain fake news or hate speech but how would the Police enforce this without a draconian approach such as blanket stop and search?

Would searching every vehicle on the road or every pedestrian be proportionate? Would it be effective? Would people change their message or start to use code? Would they transport blank paper from point A to point B and then print their fake news / hate material at the end of their journey?

Many advocates of Internet regulation point to BT CleanFeed and the IWF as models of regulating the Internet, we would put forward that CleanFeed has become a tool of censorship and is possibly no longer effective for its original purpose (e.g. it cannot stop access to illegal material published on private channels or within messaging apps).

In 2004 Bill Thompson, a BBC commentator on Digital Issues, warned[2] that CleanFeed could be used for other forms of censorship. It only took a few years till we saw the Honourable Justice Arnold order websites that weren’t technically illegal be blocked using the CleanFeed system, his stated reason for ordering the blocks can be summed up as the system for blocking websites existed.

The IWF has a noble goal but as with any approach that utilises censorship it has made mistakes. This has caused the temporary loss of Wikipedia and other notable websites – the IWF lists are secret (for obvious reasons) but this is problematic from a transparency viewpoint.

The evolution of CleanFeed is the so-called ISP “Family Filters” – these filters have been found to erroneously block ChildLine, the NSPCC, the Samaritans and many more websites.[3] Websites that adults and children alike may have needed in times of crisis only to find that they have been blocked “for their safety”, this is unacceptable.

The opportunity for misuse of any regulation that aims to constrain the Internet is too dangerous to be allowed and would possibly violate EU law[4]

The Windrush issues, the Undercover Policing Inquiry and the Snowden revelations show that Governments cannot always be trusted with certain powers. The Internet is the greatest innovation for collaboration, empowerment and communication humankind has ever seen – we cannot allow the Government of a supposedly free and open society the power to strangle the underlying infrastructure.

To answer whether regulation is possible the short answer is; not effectively.

Brass Horn Communications specialises in defeating Internet censorship both here in the UK and abroad. We build new technology and help empower existing technology to ensure that the Internet continues to work as originally envisaged, that is to say; a packet of data can travel from point A to point B and back again reliably and securely.

We would encourage the committee to read the “Declaration of the Independence of CyberSpace”[5] as this may help to understand why some of us in the Internet community resist the idea of Government regulation of the infrastructure. Once a Government starts to exercise regulation in the form of censorship (fake news, hate speech, etc) then it is difficult to stop the state adding new categories to the list. Russia, China, Iran and other countries seek to “regulate” the Internet through censorship – the UK should not be part of this group.

Sending abusive messages has been illegal since 1988, glorifying terrorist/extremist content is illegal, hate speech is illegal – to return to the pavement analogy; just because people are using the Internet instead of soapbox in the street doesn’t change that their behaviour is illegal – pursue the criminals, don’t criminalise the company that laid the paving slabs.

Internet intermediaries should not be regulated in a drive to control content – we need to ensure that a packet of data sent from a users computer gets to its destination and the reply from the destination gets back to the users computer. Without this guarantee the Internet will be fundamentally broken.

2. What should the legal liability of online platforms be for the content that they host?

In Internet technology communities it is usually understood what we mean when we discuss volume of content to be on a “human scale” or on a “Facebook scale”.

Newspapers, Television and other mediums operate at human scale, there are a few content creators who report to a sub-editor and those sub-editors report to an editor or program director etc.

The companies in question have a political leaning, a stated editorial goal and everyone works towards that goal.

A few hundred people might report into a handful of people who in turn report to a yet smaller group of people.

Teachers marking homework is human scale.

MPs holding surgeries with constituents is human scale.

Online platforms harness the creative output of the global population – the variety and scale of this output is difficult to measure and borderline impossible to pro-actively police.

Are we asking if the owners of Wembley stadium should be liable for what one, two or even one hundred people in a crowd of tens of thousands chant or a placard they hold up? Even if we did, the scale of Wembley stadium is still nothing compared to the number of messages, hours of video and gigabytes of images uploaded to the large platforms every second of every day.

By making online platforms liable for content they will respond by censoring on the side of caution, this will affect marginalised communities and legitimate political speech. This is dangerous for a free and open society as people will be silenced, they might even get isolated from friends and family if their account is erroneously banned[6] by a mistaken categorisation. An excellent example of this is the US FOSTA/SESTA legislation which has resulted in mass deletion of entire online communities.

Many advocates of holding platforms liable will point to the IWF takedown statistics or Microsoft’s PhotoDNA product as exemplars of how “it can be done if the Internet giants want to” but again we’ve seen issues with false positives.

A notable recent incident is one where Facebook deleted the iconic photo of Kim Phúc in 2016[7] due to systems put in place at the request of Governments, this was widely acknowledged as unacceptable and a mistake – but only because it was a newspaper with a global audience that was impacted. What impact or recourse would an individual have had?

Advocates of such technology are happy for false positives to occur.

In support of this claim we make reference to the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety – written evidence (IRN0008), in which they applaud CleanFeed and PhotoDNA without the need for an independent audit but claim that without an auditor they could not be confident that the moderation policies of online platforms were fair and effective.

These methods are used by more restrictive Governments to control freedom of speech in their countries; in Vietnam there are concerns that Facebook is silencing political activists using similar systems[8] of censorship.

Returning to question 1, if a person knew that anything they wrote on a UK affiliated online platform could result in censorship they might opt to use a different platform. The regulation would be nullified and the content would remain published. The only entities losing out are the UK businesses that people wouldn’t trust.

It is bad enough that UK infrastructure cannot be trusted to be free of “backdoors” due to the Investigatory Powers Act but adding onerous censorship as well would be even worse.

Because of increased censorship (and surveillance capitalism) we are already seeing a move to decentralised technologies such as Mastodon[9] and MaidSafe[10] – with these technologies the user is the online platform. There is no one company that can be held liable for the content, the only person who can remove the content is the user who published it – by forcing regulation upon certain companies the Government may inadvertently make the situation less controllable.

Online platforms should not be held liable for their users content for several reasons;

•         Those that err on the side of caution will inevitably censor marginalised communities

•         It will adversely affect smaller platforms that can’t develop or buy the technology / resources required to monitor content

•         Active monitoring of content will result in a chilling effect on users

•         We will possibly see a withdrawal from the UK of certain providers (which will still be accessible to UK citizens due to the global nature of the Internet)

11 May 2018