In 2023, more than 18,000 Free Speech Union supporters told the Government they didn’t want a single regulator for online content. The Minister dropped the plan in 2024, saying “harm” was subjective and open to interpretation. Two years on, it’s back.
Labour is promising a “digital duty of care” enforced by a new online regulator. National’s under-16 social media restrictions would hand new powers to Internal Affairs.
Both are being sold as child safety, and both would reach every adult who goes online. Free Speech Union Executive Director Jillaine Heather is joined by retired District Court Judge David Harvey and political commentator Ani O’Brien to work out what changed. Harvey traces the idea from the Law Commission and the Harmful Digital Communications Act to Internal Affairs’ Safer Online Services proposal. He explains why a “digital duty of care” borrows the language of negligence law but has nothing to do with it, and why the real question is power.
O’Brien shows how the public service keeps reshaping the same plan until the packaging sells, and why child safety polls so well with swing voters in an election year. They also ask whether any of it would work for kids. Age verification can’t check only the under-16s, so it means checking everyone. Harvey makes the case for law that steps in after harm is done, and against a regime of prior restraint. O’Brien makes the case for parents setting the rules at home, and Heather points to the laws against grooming and sextortion already on the books. Whoever forms the next government, this fight isn’t going away.
There’s little chance that Russia will agree to military-strategic compromises as part of a US-brokered grand deal with E-NATO, despite the promising economic opportunities that this could unlock, unless E-NATO reciprocates.
The Telegraph published a piece in late October citing unnamed diplomatic sources to report that “Russia hopes to weaken Nato with Ukraine peace talks”. They expect that “Putin will probably demand that Nato’s footprint in Europe be reduced to its 1997 level, before former Eastern bloc countries began joining the alliance”, per his security guarantee requests from late 2021. This prediction is premised on his top aide Yury Ushakov announcing that Russia now wants Europe to participate in the peace process.
According to The Telegraph, “That would mean a potential withdrawal of Nato troops from Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Finland, which joined the alliance in 2023.” That’s not exactly true, technically speaking, since Russia called for a return to the continental military-strategic status quo from the date when the NATO-Russian Founding Act was signed in 1997. What that would mean in practice is the withdrawal of pre-1997 NATO members’ troops from new members’ territories.
As was assessed here, it could even lay the basis for their joint military patronage over the Eastern Baltic as the core of NATO 3.0, which refers to the Europeans leading NATO’s containment of Russia while the US “Pivots (back) to (East) Asia” for more robustly containing China. The Intermarium, which refers to the states between Germany and Russia, is expected to play the most prominent role therein. Poland and Sweden are its heavyweights, so it naturally follows that they’d jointly lead its containment of Russia.
Britain, France, and Germany, the first two of which are nuclear powers while the last is the EU’s de facto leader, have since deployed various forces to post-1997 members’ territories. As part of a US-brokered grand deal between E-NATO and Russia over the post-war European security architecture, however, they could potentially withdraw their forces to facilitate compromises by Russia without endangering their allies. These regional allies, led by Poland and Sweden, are now strong enough to hold their own.
In exchange for complying with the spirit of Russia’s request for pre-1997 NATO members to withdraw their troops from post-1997 members’ territories, those new members and Russia could reach a US-brokered de-escalation agreement to pull their troops back from the border. Symmetrical moves by Poland and the Baltic States on one side, and Russia and Belarus on the other, could form the basis of the post-war European security architecture and lead to new arms control talks if there’s the will.
There’s little chance that Russia will agree to military-strategic compromises as part of a US-brokered grand deal with E-NATO, despite the promising economic opportunities that this could unlock, unless E-NATO reciprocates. The most realistic way in which this could happen is through the withdrawal of its pre-1997 members’ forces from their post-1997 members’ territories. France should also rescind its offer to extend its nuclear umbrella over them. Lasting post-war stability would then be a viable prospect.
The Kāpiti Coast District Council has voted to restore protections to a Māori burial ground after more than fifty years of challenges by iwi.
Local iwi Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai welcomed the decision which adds Kārewarewa urupā in the Waikanae Beach area to the District Plan as a site of significance to Māori.
Kārewarewa urupā is associated with the 1839 Battle of Kūititanga, many of those who died in the battle were buried at the urupā, and the site has been used as an urupā since the mid-19th century.
See earlier posts about this area. It’s good news, not just for the fact that burial grounds or cemeteries should not be built on, but preserves it as a patch of open ground free of ‘cheap and affordable’ houses. —Eds
Power and fuel prices are going sky high and their coming winter will be very cold. At the same time their goverment pays tens of thousands of illegal migrants to lounge around in 4-Star hotels while they engage in predatory behaviour towards indigenous British women, and many other crimes. And it continues to shower the gangsters of Ukraine with ‘mahney’ and gives them cruise missiles.
Maybe the UK Labour government want to get rid of the 55-65 age group by sending them to NATO’s meat grinder so they won’t have to pay their pensions?
Its bulletin last night began with a complaint about it by Qiulae Wong, who is not mentioned in it but for whatever peculiar reason seems to be TV1 News’ go-to hero at present. (They got a comment from Hippy Chippy next.)
