Callum Voge. Used with permission. Global Voices interviewed Callum Voge, Director of Governmental Affairs and Advocacy at Internet Society, to discuss the challenges of legislating technology. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Global Voices (GV): What are the hallmarks of good legislation when it comes to the internet? Callum Voge (CV): Good legislation with the internet happens when both policymakers and the public are informed. That's at the most simple. It's really important that digital policy is developed in consultation with experts. Policymakers should be asking certain questions. First, is the proposal actually technologically feasible? Then second, are there any consequences of this legislation that might not be obvious — unexpected negative consequences? And if those do exist, how can they be rectified? How can they be addressed? At the Internet Society, we developed something called the Internet Impact Assessment Toolkit to help with this process, by identifying what the internet needs to exist and what it needs to thrive. Just as it is standard in many countries to do an environmental impact assessment when a big project is launched, this should be done for internet or digital policies too. We're very happy that it has been used, for example, by the EU recently. There are four main principles that we, with our community, identified as key for the internet: it must be open, global, secure, and trustworthy. Some other features that describe what the internet needs to thrive and reach its potential are: accessible, unrestricted, collaborative, decentralized, common, technology-neutral, confidential. These are key principles. We are glad to see governments, activists and civil society using this toolkit. And then, through the policymaking process, we hope for positive change. The goal, of course, is to move the internet closer to a resource for everyone that benefits everyone. GV: Making legislation on the internet is complicated by balancing very important but different — almost contradictory — things, like allowing free expression but limiting disinformation and hate speech. What are your thoughts on walking this tightrope? CV: It's a really tricky thing, right? Because the issues that we're seeing as you mentioned, disinformation or harmful content online horrible things like child sexual abuse, they're there and they need to be addressed in some way. And of course, we're supportive of governments trying to find ways to make the internet safer. But, at the same time, some of the approaches are, from our view, not proportional and not effective. Two that we've been doing a lot of work on are the UK Online Safety Bill and the EU proposal to counter child sexual abuse online. Both of these have very positive goals and are at different places in the legislative process. The UK Online Safety Bill was passed in September and has gone for royal assent to become law. The EU process is at an earlier stage; the council and the parliament and the commission will negotiate and try to find a common ground. But, with both of these proposals, we see new obligations for platforms in the form of detection orders. This means that platforms would be pressured to either weaken encryption or to create encryption backdoors or something called client-side scanning to gain access to private messages. Their view is that private messages need to be monitored, and they need to moderate this kind of content. That is a very scary ask and one that is not restricted to countries with nondemocratic governments. The idea with “encryption backdoors” is that a key is created for the government so that they can decrypt messages and data, like a TSA lock that can be opened by the TSA but remains locked otherwise — as if the government has never been known to poke its nose into people's business. Even if you really trust your government would not abuse those powers, there are other issues, too, because what we always try to hammer home is that when you create an encryption backdoor, that's a systemic weakness in the encryption. So it means that not only the government but also criminals can exploit this weakness. And the government should also worry about so-called hostile state actors — other governments also exploiting those weaknesses. What we always try to emphasize is that there's no such thing as a backdoor that only works for the good guys and not the bad guys. A backdoor is a backdoor. The UK government claims that there's a way to do this safely without violating end-to-end encryption. The technologists disagree. There's no known technology to do that. If you break encryption, you break it. It's as simple as that.