Bill Designed to Protect Youth Online May Give Ottawa More Censorship Control, Internet Expert Says

A woman uses a smartphone in front of a laptop on April 3, 2019, in Abidjan. (Issouf Sanogo/AFP via Getty Images)

A government bill to restrict underage access to pornography may hinder the privacy of Canadians and give Ottawa stronger online censorship control, according to an internet expert.

Law professor and Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce Law Michael Geist recently raised concerns about the enforcement measures tucked into Bill S-210.

“Bill S-210 goes well beyond personal choices to limit underage access to sexually explicit material on Canadian sites. Instead, it envisions government-enforced global website liability for failure to block underage access, backed by website blocking and mandated age verification systems that are likely to include face recognition technologies,” Mr. Geist wrote on his blog.

Bill S-210 was designed to protect children from accessing online pornography. It has already passed through the Senate and was given a second reading in the House of Commons on Dec. 13. The bill is now under review by the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security.

According to Mr. Geist, enforcement of the bill is left to a regulatory agency (likely the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, or CRTC) that could issue violation notices that list the steps an organization must take to comply with the law.

“This literally means the government via its regulatory agency will dictate to sites how they must interact with users to ensure no underage access,” he wrote. “If the site fails to act as instructed within 20 days, the regulator can apply for a court order mandating that Canadian ISPs block the site from their subscribers.”

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Moreover, he argues, blocking the sites may prove a form of censorship because other material—even content that is not sexually explicit—would be blocked.

“This raises the prospect of full censorship of lawful content under court order based on notices from a government agency,” he wrote.

Mr. Geist noted that the bill is not limited to pornography sites, but any online service or site that makes “sexually-explicit materials available.”

“This would presumably include search engines, social media sites such as Twitter, or chat forums such as Reddit, where access to explicit material is not hard to find,” he wrote.

He also raised concerns over the age verification system that the bill endorses.

“This effectively means that sites will require their users to register with commercial age verification systems in order to run a search or access some tweets. And the age verification systems raise real privacy concerns, including mandated face recognition as part of the verification process.”

During the debate in the Senate, the bill was changed in response to some of these concerns.

“The individual and societal consequences of children viewing sexually explicit content, particularly violent material, are becoming more and more apparent as studies continue to surface. We also know that children are accessing more of this content at younger ages—as young as six years old. The overall number of children who regularly view online pornography is on the rise,” Conservative Senator Yonah Martin said during the Senate debate in April.

Ms. Martin acknowledged concerns about the bill but noted that an amendment proposed could reduce the worry.

“The amendment specifies that the Governor-in-Council must consider, before prescribing an age-verification method, whether the method is reliable; maintains user privacy and protects user personal information; collects and uses personal information solely for age-verification purposes, except to the extent required by law; destroys any personal information collected for age-verification purposes once the verification is completed; and generally complies with best practices in the fields of age verification and privacy protection,” she said.

“While this amendment may not satisfy everyone who remains concerned about the constitutionality of this proposal, it is relevant that our esteemed colleagues on the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee vetted both versions of this legislation.”

Mr. Geist’s blog notes that trying to protect children from inappropriate content is “a laudable goal,” but should not permit government censorship.

“Creating safeguards for underage access to inappropriate content is a laudable goal, but not at the cost of government-backed censorship, mandated face recognition, and age-approval requirements to use some of the most popular sites and services in the world,” he concluded.

Bill C-11

It’s not the first time that the professor has raised the alarm over Ottawa’s online regulations. In October, he said that Bill C-11 was the beginning of an Internet regulatory framework being introduced by the federal government, some of which could hinder freedom of speech.

Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, was passed in April. Since then, the CRTC has held a number of discussions to develop rules associated with the law.

In September, it was announced that any streaming service with earnings over $10 million is required to register with the CRTC.

“We are developing a modern broadcasting framework that can adapt to changing circumstances,” CEO of the CRTC Vicky Eatrides said in a news release on Sept. 29.

Mr. Geist said the move runs counter to freedom of expression.

“The regulator is effectively saying that a podcaster or news outlet that generates a certain threshold of revenue must register with the government, a position that runs counter to freedom of expression rights without government interference,” Mr. Geist wrote in an Oct. 2 social media post.