The Online Harms White Paper: whatever happened to online-offline equivalence?

From internet time immemorial the UK government has adhered to the principle of online-offline equivalence. No Ministerial speech or government paper has been complete without reaffirming that what is illegal offline should be illegal online, or perhaps invoking its kissing cousin: that laws should be technology neutral.

However the Online Harms White Paper marks a significant departure from online-offline equivalence. The new nostrum is that the internet is different, so requires a new and different legal regime.

In the Internet Safety Strategy Green Paper, published in October 2017, equivalence of illegality had already started to mutate: “What is unacceptable offline should be unacceptable online.” In February 2019 Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright produced his own version: “A world in which harms offline are controlled but the same harms online aren’t is not sustainable now…” Then in March 2019 the House of Lords Communications Committee report Regulating in a digital world proposed a “parity principle”: “The same level of protection must be provided online as offline”. These reformulations tend to emphasise equivalence of outcome rather than applicability of the same laws.

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