Dr Martin Husovec

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

Digital services, such as social media, online marketplaces, app stores, and search engines, were left largely unregulated for twenty years. The first generation of content regulation focused on enabling companies to operate services that process user-generated content through a set of liability exemptions (US Communication Decency Act, EU E-Commerce Directive, etc.). The global norm was reliance on self-regulation of the technology industry when it comes to content issues. Following a number of controversies, in the early 2020s, legislatures around the world started introducing new comprehensive content-related regulations to address various problems, ranging from hate speech and terrorist content to child sexual abuse material and copyright infringements. The basic regulatory models that emerged from the legislative activity are those offered by the United Kingdom (Online Safety Act 2024), the European Union (Digital Services Act 2022), the United States (various proposals) and Australia (Online Safety Act 2021).

These laws regulate predominantly how services make decisions about user-generated content to address concerns about the fairness of the process and underlying content rules. The laws also increasingly regulate the design of these services, such as their recommender systems, and advertising. The UK and EU approaches furthermore impose general risk management obligations on some of the providers of digital services. The legislative goal is to increase trust, safety, and predictability of the online environment for individuals and businesses.

The course offers a unique exploration of different global regulatory models of digital services and puts their basic mechanisms into the broad context of industry practices and social science research. The goal is to explore the design of these regulatory models, including how they are shaped by different constitutional rules and analyse them for their pros and cons.

In their summative assessments, the students will be asked to use this knowledge to analyse gaps in the newly adopted legislation, compare existing models, and contrast them with those applied by other countries.

20 hours of seminars in the WT. 2 hours of seminars in the ST.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the WT.

• Martin Husovec, Principles of the Digital Services Act (Oxford University Press, 2024, forthcoming)
• Martin Husovec, Rising Above Liability: The Digital Services Act as a Blueprint for the Second Generation of Global Internet Rules (2023) Berkeley Technology Law Journal Vol. 38, No. 3 (2024), available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4598426
• Daphne Keller, Amplification and Its Discontents, available at https://knightcolumbia.org/content/amplification-and-its-discontents
• Eric Goldman, The United States’ Approach to 'Platform' Regulation (2023) Santa Clara Univ. Legal Studies Research Paper No. 4404374, available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4404374
• Douek, Evelyn, Content Moderation as Systems Thinking (2022) 136 Harvard Law Review, available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4005326
• Kate Klonick, The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech (2018) 131 Harv. L. Rev. available at https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-131/the-new-governors-the-peoplerules-and-processes-governing-online-speech/

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours and 30 minutes) in the spring exam period.