Regulation is good. Harm is bad, right?

The venue: European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights Plenary session.

The speaker: Julia Reda, Pirate Party MEP.

Reda, not the most forthright of supporters of intellectual property rights <cough>, espousing the view that you can't regulate the Internet; this would be too difficult and also too questionable. I felt the need to respond, commenting that regulation can be a very good thing; it meant that the building we were in wasn't going to fall down, plugging my laptop in was safe and the food we had just consumed at lunchtime wasn't going to poison us.

It's also a strange world when I am having to explain to people who are at the same time critical of enforcement of IP rights and supporting a 'free and open' Internet. It's not clear why the Internet should be the only unregulated space where hate, harm and abuse are not only tolerated by libertarians but also championed by some as a way of saying, "well, you have to put up with the really bad to allow the good to happen".

The UK Government last week published its Online Harms White Paper, which seeks to protect young people from the worst excesses of what social media throws at them. This is a potentially groundbreaking moment for society and citizens as it sets out a clear proposal for dealing with some endemic problems that have caused both physical and mental harm. It's clear that lawmakers have had enough of the abuse they face, including death and rape threats, to see that something has to be done.

Establishing a duty of care for online platforms is being proposed and it's important to acknowledge the vital work done by Professor Lorna Woods and Will Perrin for the Carnegie Trust that created a proof of concept for this.

Of course, economic harms are, significantly, missing from the White Paper and there are many, like me, who feel that those need to be included to better protect citizens and society from a range of scams, frauds and other crimes that are being used by organised crime networks to prey on the vulnerable and generate significant profits. IP crime itself has always been attractive to criminals because, in the large, it has been seen as low risk and high profit. I remember the Met Police explaining to me years ago, at the height of the pirate DVD 'boom', that a package of 'burned' discs was worth more than an equivalent package of cocaine. We know that counterfeit goods and pirated content advertised and traded via social media and online marketplaces is equally attractive, helping make profits and launder money for transnational organised crime gangs.

So what are we waiting for? We need to get Government to act now. Protect our children and young people, yes, but also use this opportunity to show that the UK really will lead the way in a new Internet that offers opportunity and hope for all in society and that protects citizens, creators and businesses. If that means regulation in some form (a duty of care would establish an independent regulator) then we should embrace it.and not allow control of our data, our lives and our childrens' futures to be controlled by a small number of huge global tech companies.