Britain has proposed a landmark online safety law to punish
abuses such as child pornography, racism and violence against women, but a
joint committee of lawmakers drawn from both houses of parliament said on
Tuesday it should go a step further to cover paid-for adverts.
"Excluding paid-for advertising will leave service
providers with little incentive to remove harmful adverts, and risks
encouraging further proliferation of such content," the joint committee
report said.
The Financial Conduct Authority also wants adverts on social
media and search engines, currently excluded from the draft law, to be included
after 754 million pounds ($999.65 million) was stolen nL8N2QU29V from consumers
in the first six months of this year.
The report also backed a Law Commission recommendation to
make cyberflashing, or the unsolicited sending of obscene images or video
recordings, which are often a feature of sexual harassment, illegal.
The draft law is due to be approved in 2022 and government
has two months to say if it will back the recommendation, along with several
others which lawmakers say are needed to "call time on the Wild West
online".
"The era of self-regulation for big tech has come to an
end. The companies are clearly responsible for services they have designed and
profit from, and need to be held to account for the decisions they make,"
said Damian Collins, who chairs the joint committee.
Britain's communications regulator Ofcom should draw up
mandatory codes of practice for the internet service providers, the report
said. There must, however, be "robust protections" for freedom of
expression, including an automatic exemption for recognised news publishers, it
added.
Britain's financial services minister John Glen said last
month he was "very sympathetic" to introducing online adverts into
the bill or similar action.
The FCA spent 600,000 pounds on Google to warn about scam
adverts, though the online giant has since said it will only take adverts from
firms regulated by the FCA, and offered a $3 million credit to the regulator.
"Without a decisive response from the government and
the tech giants, many more individuals will sadly fall victim to these
scammers," said Mel Stride, chair of parliament's treasury committee,
which backs the recommendation to help remove fraudulent online adverts. -Reuters