An international group of digital rights organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in the US, has launched the “Manila Principles on Internet Liability,” what it calls “a roadmap for the global community to protect online freedom of expression and innovation around the world.”
The principles concern Internet intermediaries—telecom companies, ISPs, search engines, social networks, etc.—that run key parts of the online world’s infrastructure. As EFF’s Senior Global Policy Analyst Jeremy Malcolm, one of the people behind the Manila Principles, explains: “These services are all routinely asked to take down content, and their policies for responding are often muddled, heavy-handed, or inconsistent. That results in censorship and the limiting of people’s rights.” The Principles are designed to provide a framework of safeguards and best practice when responding to such requests to remove content.
In an e-mail, Malcolm told Ars about the Principles’ background and motivation. The original partners were the EFF, the Centre for Internet and Society in India, and free speech organization Article 19. Other groups were added to give a more global balance. Malcolm says: “The motivation for this work was that intermediaries have been drifting back into the view of regulators and private interests who want to restrict content online. Whereas a decade ago the idea of immunizing intermediaries from liability was well accepted, it is now being questioned again.”
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