News arrives from Canberra: Australia has doubled the penalty for social media breaches, a move that echoes the steady creep of legislative control over the digital sphere. Meanwhile, the UK’s Online Safety Bill is paraded as the global model. Let us pause, step back, and consider what this means for the liberal order we pretend to cherish.
First, Australia’s decision. Double the fine. Why? Because the platforms continue to host what the state deems harmful. But here is the unspoken truth: this is not about safety. It is about power. The state, having ceded ground to private companies for two decades, now seeks to reclaim sovereignty through punitive measures. It is a classic cycle; think of the late Roman Empire’s desperate edicts against corruption, or the Victorian era’s push for moral regulation through the Obscene Publications Act. The pattern repeats: a perceived crisis, a demand for action, and a centralising of authority.
Second, the Online Safety Bill. The British government, ever the imperial bureaucrat, has drafted a law that imposes a duty of care on platforms. Ofcom, the regulator, will have sweeping powers. The model is being exported as a solution to the world’s digital ills. But let us ask: what is the cost? Free expression, already battered by cancel culture and the mob, will find itself shackled by legal apparatus. The Founding Fathers of the internet, from Tim Berners-Lee to the early pioneers of Usenet, would recoil. They envisioned a open space, not a supervised playground.
This is intellectual decadence. We have forgotten that the answer to bad speech is more speech, not censorship. We have replaced the marketplace of ideas with a regulatory committee. We have allowed our fear of the mob to justify a soft authoritarianism. The Romans had their panem et circenses; we have our algorithms and safety bills.
National identity is also at stake. Australia and the UK, once champions of the common law tradition and individual liberty, now rush to emulate the Chinese model of internet governance. Not quite the same, of course, but the trajectory is unmistakable: a state that controls the contours of permissible debate. It is a betrayal of the Anglo-Saxon heritage that gave us habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights.
I am not advocating chaos. Harmful content does exist. But the remedy is not a sprawling bureaucracy. It is a return to localism, to community standards, to the ancient concept of the proximate person who knows the speaker and the context. The state is a blunt instrument. It cannot nuance. It will inevitably sweep up the eccentric, the satirist, the dissenter.
Consider this: the Victorian era’s moral crusades led to the prosecution of George Bedborough for selling a copy of Havelock Ellis’s “Sexual Inversion,” a serious work of sexology. The regulators thought they were protecting the public. They were wrong. Today’s regulators think they are protecting children from online harm. They may be wrong, too, and the cost is our freedom.
So, Australia doubles down. Britain holds up its bill as a beacon. The rest of the world watches. And I, Arthur Penhaligon, sigh. We are reliving history’s mistakes, wrapped in the language of safety and progress. The Fall of Rome was not a single event; it was a thousand small surrenders. This is one of them.
