The web has a terrorism problem. The digital era has upended the landscape of information distribution, removing the elite gatekeepers carefully filtering what the masses were allowed to see and turning the informational world into an anarchic free-for-all in which anyone anywhere can publish anything. Terroristic content has flourished in this filtering void, leading an increasing number of governments to contemplate draconian new internet laws designed to force the removal of terrorist content. Yet, the EU offered a powerful reminder earlier this week of the dangers of such legislation when it issued 550 false terrorism takedown requests to the Internet Archive, including demanding the removal of the main index pages of the entire digitized output of the Smithsonian Libraries and US libraries including the Library of Congress hosted by the Internet Archive, for publishing “terrorist propaganda.” What does this tell us about our digital future?
Earlier this week the Internet Archive announced that it had received a series of legal demands from the French Internet Referral Unit (IRU) sent via Europol’s EU IRU to remove a list of URLs containing “terrorist propaganda.” While such requests might ordinarily involve unremarkable obscure URLs of user-submitted content, in this case, the demands involved more than 550 requests deemed "false" by the Archive, including demands to remove the master index pages of the entire digitized output of major US Government and university institutions.
Among the formal takedown requests submitted by the French IRU were the master collection page of more than 9,600 digitized items from the holdings of the Smithsonian Libraries, the master collection page of more than 1 million science and mathematics papers archived from arXiv, the master collection page of more than 1.8 million television news shows, including CSPAN’s US Government archives, the master collection page of more than 209,000 papers mirrored from the US NIH/NLM’s PubMed, the master collection page of almost 3 million books digitized from American libraries, including the Library of Congress and countless more.
Why would the EU’s Europol issue a request on behalf of an EU member state demanding that the Internet Archive remove its master collection index pages of hundreds of years of science, mathematics, medicine, history and scholarship?
Neither Europol nor the French Government responded to requests for comment, but the most likely culprit is a combination of automated filtering and overtaxed government bureaucracy that faces no penalties for making false takedown requests.
While it might seem relatively obvious that demanding that the Internet Archive remove its master index page of the Smithsonian Libraries and its master index pages of its arXiv and PubMed archives, as well as its master television and digitized book indexes would constitute overly broad requests, the simple fact is that the EU faces no consequences for doing so.
There are no financial or legal penalties that EU institutions will face in this case for the false submissions and no incentives for EU governments to do a better job of making sure they make only legitimate takedown requests. The French government will not be facing a massive fine for these false requests and no government officials will be going to jail for failing to ensure the accuracy of their takedown requests.
Making matters worse, proposed EU legislation would require recipients of such takedown requests to remove all URLs within one hour or face substantial financial penalties. As the Internet Archive notes, such legislation, if enacted, would require it to remove its master index pages of its core science, mathematics, medicine, history and scholarship collections without question and only retroactively fight with the EU to narrow its request to legitimate content.
In fact, even in the current case, the French OCLCTIC threatened to immediately institute blocking procedures against the Internet Archive if it did not comply with its false requests.
Moreover, it appears the most recent batch of false requests have been merely par for the course by the EU. According to Europol, more than a third of its takedown requests to the Internet Archive over the past four and a half years were ultimately determined by the Archive to be incorrect and were not instituted.
Putting this all together, the EU’s latest actions on behalf of one of its member states remind us of why Internet legislation without the necessary checks and balances is so corrosive and dangerous.
In a perfect world, governments would leverage such laws to remove only individual specific pieces of content that have been rigorously reviewed, including by outside experts and determined to clearly pass the threshold of terroristic content.
In reality, governments have no incentives to actually review their takedown requests for accuracy and thus can freely issue orders to remove the Internet Archive’s main index pages of hundreds of years of science, mathematics, medicine, history and scholarship by the world’s most prestigious institutions without worrying about the consequences of their false requests.
When more than a third of such takedown requests to the Archive over the past half-decade have ultimately been determined to be incorrect, it raises questions of why the EU does not take such a grave process more seriously and actually review the requests it issues.
Moreover, the lack of external oversight over such requests means autocratic governments face no penalties for classifying any criticism of their administrations as “terrorism” and demanding its removal under such laws.
As governments around the world move towards increasing legislation of the Internet, the lack of penalties for false requests and political incentives for quick action will mean governments will likely move more and more to automated systems that issue blanket takedown requests over vast swaths of the internet, fracturing the global internet and forcing a sea change in how organizations handle such requests.
On the other hand, if governments faced penalties of tens of millions of dollars per request that was ultimately determined to be incorrect and criminal charges, including jail time, for the individuals submitting such requests, much as governments have proposed for social media companies, there would finally be incentives for governments to actually emphasize accuracy in their takedown requests.
In the end, without incentives forcing accurate takedown notices, the very concept of a global internet is likely to fracture under the weight of ill-conceived regulations colliding with the reality of government bureaucracy.
The era of the web as we know it as a global beacon of freedom of expression is quickly coming to a close.
