On Monday last week, the government published its long-awaited white paper on online harms. It was launched at the British Library by the two cabinet ministers responsible for it – Jeremy Wright of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the home secretary, Sajid Javid. Wright was calm, modest and workmanlike in his introduction. Javid was, well, more macho. The social media companies had had their chances to put their houses in order. “They failed,” he declared. “I won’t let them fail again.” One couldn’t help feeling that he had one eye on the forthcoming hustings for the Tory leadership.

Nevertheless, this white paper is a significant document. It marks the first time that the government of a major country has decided to regulate the companies that now dominate the online world. Other countries (Singapore, Australia and Germany to name just three) have already had a go, but their efforts have been partial, reactive and sometimes half-arsed. The UK white paper tries to address the problem at a broader level.

It has triggered a wave of alarm from privacy, anti-censorship and free-speech activists. “The era of internet freedom is over,” wailed one critic, for example. Could it be, another wondered, that the flurry of apocalyptic angst reflected the extent to which the Californian Ideology (which held that cyberspace was beyond the reach of the state) had seeped into the souls of even well-intentioned critics? They simply cannot believe that anyone would have the temerity to try to regulate the virtual world.

Some of the worries seemed rooted in the classic error of confusing the internet with a few giant companies that have come to dominate that world. In reality, the problem we have is not the internet so much as those corporations that ride on it and allow some unacceptable activities to flourish on their platforms, activities that are damaging to users and, in some cases, to democracy, but from which the companies profit enormously. Sooner or later, democracies will have to bring these outfits under control and the only question is how best to do it. The white paper suggests one possible way forward.

It does so by going to the heart of the problem – corporate responsibility. Since the mid-1990s, internet companies have been absolved from liability – by Section 230 of the 1996 US Telecommunications Act and to some extent by the EU’s e-commerce directive – for the damage that their platforms do.

There were good reasons for that exemption at the beginning (two years before Google was founded and eight years before Facebook started) but the rationale no longer applies in an age when they have become so powerful and pervasive.

Until now, the founders of the companies have protested that they did not set out to undermine democracy, disseminate hate speech, misinformation and conspiracy theories or live-stream terrorist atrocities and so bear no direct responsibility for what people do on their platforms. This is true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough, for there is another kind of responsibility they conveniently ignore. This is what ethicists call “obligation responsibility” and in this country we call a duty of care. It’s essentially a responsibility for unintended consequences of the way you have set up and run your business.

The white paper says that the government will establish a new statutory duty of care on relevant companies “to take reasonable steps to keep their users safe and tackle illegal and harmful activity on their services”. Fulfilment of this duty will be overseen and enforced by an independent regulator with formidable powers and sanctions at its disposal. Companies will have to fulfil their new legal duties or face the consequences and “will still need to be compliant with the overarching duty of care even where a specific code does not exist, for example assessing and responding to the risk associated with emerging harms or technology”.

Stirring stuff, eh? It has certainly taken much of the tech industry aback, especially those for whom the idea of government regulation has always been anathema and who regard this fancy new “duty of care’ as a legal fantasy dreamed up in an undergraduate seminar. But in fact, as internet law professor Lorna Woods pointed out a year ago, it’s a tried-and-tested model embedded in such mundane statutes as the Occupiers’ Liability Act 1957, the Health and Safety Act 1974 and the Environmental Protection Act 1990.

So it’s not exactly rocket science, legally speaking. And because it isn’t focused on specific harms but on the systems that companies have to put in place to be compliant, it enables regulation to be more flexible and, at least to some extent, future-proof.

Such flexibility will, of course, drive lawyers (who hate ambiguity) crazy, a sentiment memorably expressed by one distinguished legal eagle, Graham Smith, last week. “If the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” he tweeted, “then this is a motorway!” To which the best riposte is perhaps the old Chinese proverb that the longest journey begins with a single step. This white paper is it.

What I’m reading

AI woe…
How will AI change your life? Recode.com has a transcript (and podcast) of a terrific conversation between Kara Swisher, Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker on what AI is doing to us and what’s problematic about that.

Stupid bots: a blessing
“Bots are terrible at recognising black faces. Let’s keep it that way.” So runs the headline on Zoé Samudzi’s thoughtful Daily Beast article about the fact that facial-recognition software is bad at recognising black faces – and why that might be a good thing in the long run.

If I had a hammer...
The tyranny of convenience: read Maureen O’Connor’s sobering New York magazine essay on the consequences of outsourcing adulthood to concierge services.