Global Online Safety Regulators Network publishes second position statement

IRIS 2024-6:1/2

Eric Munch

European Audiovisual Observatory

In November 2022, the Global Online Safety Regulators Network (the Network) was launched, as the first dedicated forum for independent online safety regulators around the world. It aims to provide regulators with a network to share experience, expertise and evidence, to enable coherent international approaches to online safety regulation. Its members include ARCOM (France), Coimisiún na Meán (Ireland), the Council for Media Services (Slovakia) and Ofcom (United Kingdom, current chair) for Europe, as well as eSafety (Australia), OSC (Fiji), KCSC (Republic of Korea) and FPB (South Africa). It also has 10 observers, which are organisations with expertise and interest in online safety regulation.

On 24 May 2024, the Network published its second position statement on how regulators will work together to address the global nature of online safety regulation. Conscious of the differences between the regulatory regimes of its members, the Network has mapped similarities in its members’ regulatory remits and identified opportunities in multiple areas.

One such area is the development of common metrics for risk assessment methodologies and evaluation approaches, to minimise unwarranted divergences. The sharing of experience and evidence between members with regard to collecting user complaints will also be valuable and may lead the Network to consider working more closely on investigations and enforcement action, if instances of systemic non-compliance across jurisdictions are discovered. The Network will participate in coordinating the types of questions its members ask of the industry as part of their regulatory activities, in order to produce comparable global data and improve trend analysis. Finally, the Network will aim to identify a common set of reasonable steps services can take to address specific harms and risk factors, based on the Network’s experiences of good practice.

The Network had previously produced a position statement on human rights and online safety regulation.