Tech companies face £18m in fines for failing to deal with illegal content
The UK has imposed a new set of regulations on tech companies by offering fines should they fail to delete potentially harmful or illegal content from their platforms in a timely manner.
This comes as a part of an EU-wide initiative to curb the power of Silicon Valley Big Tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon over fears they will monopolise the market and abuse their positions to gain an unfair advantage over smaller competitors.
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Auditors have been investigating such companies for months so the EU and UK can impose sufficient regulations on them with Britain imposing a new set of long-awaited digital management rules.
The UK government published its new bill on Tuesday morning, setting out new "duty of care" requirements for platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp. These new laws require these companies to "remove and limit the spread of illegal content."
The new legislation has been 18 months in the making and comes a little more than a month after the EU hit Amazon with antitrust charges over fears it was abusing its dominant market position to stifle competition.
In October it was also revealed that Amazon was avoiding paying the UK's digital services tax by charging third-parties that use its platform extra to cover the costs.
The new rule gives Ofcom the authority to impose fines of up to £18 million or as much as 10% of their annual global turnover.
Ofcom can also block services who continually break the rules and impose criminal charges on executives who repeatedly offend.
The government have stipulated this will include any platform that hosts user-generated content, including online marketplaces and video games. News websites which contain content will be exempt from these new rules, it admitted.
The EU is set to unveil its new digital services laws later today.
This will include two new bills, the Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts and are being spearheaded by Margrethe Vestager and Thierry Breton, who have been part of audits and investigations against Big Tech companies in recent months.
In a joint opinion piece to the Irish Times on Sunday, the pair said: "The business and political interests of a handful of companies should not dictate our future.
"Our rules on digital services in Europe - the most coveted single market in the world - date back to 2000. Most online platforms hardly existed back then," they wrote.
"We need to update our toolbox and make sure that our rules and principles are respected everywhere. Online as well as offline."
Read more: The EU has been too slow in tackling Big Tech, external auditor says
The European Commission considered companies like Amazon and Google to be "digital gatekeepers," adding they "set the rules of the game for their users and their competitors."
The EC hopes this will encourage more EU-based startups to be able to break into the tech market and provide EU-based competition for the predominantly US-centric tech bubble.
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