Rising above liability: the Digital Services Act as a blueprint for the second generation of global internet rules

Husovec, Martin ORCID: 0000-0003-1437-0347 (2024) Rising above liability: the Digital Services Act as a blueprint for the second generation of global internet rules. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 38 (3). 883 - 920. ISSN 1086-3818

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Abstract

Twenty-five years ago, in 1998, the United States Congress developed a blueprint for the global regulation of the internet. Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) recognized that user-generated content will be crucial to most digital services and offered up-front assurances from liability to some providers subject to conditions. What started as a sectorial conditional immunity system in copyright law was immediately scaled up into an all-encompassing horizontal rulebook in the European Union through the ECommerce Directive (ECD) in 2000—recently updated into the Digital Services Act (DSA). The last two decades have largely validated the DMCA’s conditional immunity as a feasible baseline approach to the regulation of internet communications that power global exchanges of ideas, goods, and services. However, the conditional immunity model has its limits. It was not designed to offer a complex solution for new challenges. The DSA is the first comprehensive attempt to create a second generation of rules for digital services that rely on user-generated content. Unlike previous sectorial initiatives, its approach is sweepingly horizontal. The DSA requires some level participation from both state and non-state institutions for its system of checks and balances to work, and some of its solutions can be “too European.” However, the principles behind the DSA could be useful in other jurisdictions—perhaps even in the United States. The United Kingdom, which is currently developing its own set of post-Brexit rules, continues to build on some of the same principles as the DSA.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://btlj.org/
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Author
Divisions:	Law
Subjects:	K Law
Date Deposited:	21 Feb 2024 10:00
Last Modified:	17 Sep 2024 11:18
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/122080

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