As government looks to regulate Facebook and Instagram, it starts a fight that could decide how we live

Politicians and technology companies finally agree that something must be done – now we might see what that looks like

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There has, for years, been one thing that just about all of the tech industry agrees on: regulation is coming. Recently, they have even realised that it’s necessary. But if there is one thing that has split tech behemoths, politicians and the public apart more than perhaps any other issue, it’s what that regulation should look like.

Now the UK government thinks it has alighted on an answer, offering perhaps the first comprehensive attempt to limit the harm that technology companies are doing to the people – in particular the children – who use them.

For the most part, the solution they have chosen focuses on shifting the responsibility for content that appears on the site onto the people who run them. It heralds the introduction of a statutory duty of care, requiring that technology companies delete harmful content, for instance, and can be punished if they don’t.

It follows a series of tragic cases in which technology appeared to be implicated, and which turned even more attention to the lack of progress on regulating the technology that runs the world around us. Chief among those awful stories was the suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who had been found to have been looking at content about depression and self-harm – relatively readily available on the platform – before she died.

The most eye-catching of the proposals, and the one that strays away from expectations, was the suggestion from the government that it will pursue ways of holding individual members of senior management to account when the companies they run make mistakes. Technology firms have often been opaque in their responses to such criticism, and shifting responsibility to individuals could stop them from deflecting towards the immense scale of the products, their organisations and the technologies that underpin them.

But this approach has proven difficult before. When the DCMS’s committee on fake news attempted to question Mark Zuckerberg, he repeatedly turned them down – even after various other countries banded together with UK politicians, and amid speculation about imprisonment in Big Ben’s tower for refusing to comply with the select committee’s request.

It neatly illustrated how difficult it can be for a technology company to be regulated by any one government. Facebook has a bigger population than almost any country on Earth a corporate flexibility that allows it to move to just about any country too, allowing it to slip away from politicians in the countries where it doesn’t reside, and threaten those in places it does with the possibility it might leave.

It has traditionally been said that the most obvious place to regulate technology companies is in the US, and it is possible that is the only way for such regulation to have any meaningful effect. Even that has changed recently, however, with Donald Trump focusing on Google and presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren offering a variety of policies – including suggestions the big tech companies should be broken up. Facebook knows that regulation is coming, and in recent months has moved towards recognising that it needs to do what it can to influence what that regulation might look like rather than trying to stop it from happening at all..

And European regulation has been effective before. Only last year, the European Union introduced GDPR – sweeping data protection regulation that applied to any company who stores the data of European users, with the punishment of vast fines for anyone who refuses to abide by it. Whether it was a success is still an open question, but there can be no doubt about its effectiveness, with just about every organisation in the world making major changes to how they deal with data.

Plenty of questions remain about the government’s new proposals, and exactly how they will work. Though the white paper marks the end of a considerable amount of work by the Home Office and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, it is really only the opening salvo of a fight that is going to rage for years, in unknown ways.

Some of the questions still to be answered are practical, such as whether the government should establish a new regulator or use an existing one such as Ofcom. Some are more political or philosophical, like whether such restrictions are going to lead to a crackdown on free speech and what they say about the responsibility that users must surely take for the posts they make and the websites they use.

But probably the most pressing ones are somewhere between the two. What does it mean for a government to regulate websites with far more users than it has citizens, and is it really possible for legislation in one country to restrain companies that connect the entire world?

Whatever the answers to those questions are, they must be asked and we are going to have to do our best to answer them. Governments are under increasing pressure to regulate tech firms and those few tech firms are taking up a more and more outsized role in our lives; this kind of regulation is about nothing less important than the very core of how we live our lives.

For years, it has been agreed that something must be done about the tech firms, but not what that is. Now the government has made an argument for what should be done – but we still don’t know what it actually will be.