Paved With Good Intentions: How the EU Legislative Process has Placed Internet Voluntary Counter Extremism Near the Edge of the Legal Wilderness

Victoria McCloud's paper on EU law and internet regulation of extremist material online ("Paved With Good Intentions: How the EU Legislative Process has Placed Internet Voluntary Counter Extremism Near the Edge of the Legal Wilderness")  has been published by the Global Network on Extremism and Technology at King's University Department of War Studies.

The modest progress towards the modernisation and replacement of the current EU ePrivacy Directive has led to an uncomfortable legislative position which has brought with it headlines such as the New York Times’ “E.U. Privacy Rule Would Rein In the Hunt for Online Child Sexual Abuse” as recently as 4 December. In this paper I consider how this state of affairs has arisen, what it may say about EU ‘rule and enforce’ style regulation, and why it matters, both for global counterextremism/counterterrorism and for the debate around where we place the fulcrum in the balance between the privacy of end users’ communications on the one hand and the ability of non-State service providers to detect, store and report suspected extremist or terrorism-related material on the other.