EU eyes deal to tame internet ‘Wild West’

The European Union yesterday homed in on new regulation to require Big Tech to remove harmful online content, the bloc’s latest move to rein in the world’s online giants. The Digital Services Act (DSA) — the second part of a massive project to regulate tech companies — aims to ensure tougher consequences for platforms and websites that violate a long list of banned content ranging from hate speech to disinformation and paedophilia images. EU officials and parliament members started talks in Brussels to hammer out the deal, hoping to reach an agreement later in the day on legislation in the works since 2020. The text is the companion to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which targeted anti-competitive practices among tech behemoths like Google and Facebook. The legislation has faced lobbying from the tech companies and intense debate over the extent of freedom of speech. “What’s forbidden offline must be forbidden online,” tweeted EU internal markets commissioner Thierry Breton, who has previously described the internet as the “Wild West”.