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Abstract:
In February 2024, following Germany’s “Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz”, the European Union’s Digital Services Act, and the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, Canada exploited its “second mover” regulatory status by introducing its long-awaited Bill C-63. Through its Online Harms Act and related amendments, it proposed an innovative “systems-based risk assessment” model for regulating harmful online content. In this article, the authors argue that any truly “systems-based” approach will benefit from regulatory insights and prescriptions informed by the following two interdisciplinary sources. First, both constitutional and media law scholars endorse stepping outside conventional regulatory models by employing more “context-based” or holistic approaches—a regulatory turn seemingly consistent with Canada’s pivot towards an innovative “systems-based” model. Second, exploring further the synergies between law and medicine introduced in our previous Digital Iatrogenesis eucrim article, any enhanced framework aimed at “cracking the code” of digital media regulation will benefit from profound insights native to social medicine and diagnostic theory. Besides providing a convincing case for expanding aetiological (and regulatory) inquiry to include social and environmental factors, established principles of medical diagnosis provide a valuable decision-making protocol for present-day regulators. Taken together, leading regulatory and medico-diagnostic scholarship suggests that prevailing “systems-based” models—as epitomised by Canada’s proposed Online Harms Act—would appear to function as a “blueprint” for privatised government censorship, providing regulators with the legislative mandate, informational transparency, and compliance authority necessary for regulatory capture. As one of the Internet’s “Big Picture” dilemmas, these censorship concerns may yet require reassessment of Europe’s current regulatory framework.
