UK libel law: The Alisher Usmanov Affair
Tim Ireland is a blogger (you knew that probably). He doesn’t generally hold back with his blog postings, but he’s been muzzled by his web provider, Fasthosts, in a quite concerning way.
For a while now, my own little website mediauk.com, and this one, have been hosted in the UK. Mainly, this is for quality of service reasons; but also because I want to ensure that I’m only operating under one legal jurisdiction, mainly centred around privacy, data protection, and the free email lists I run.
Hosting this website in the UK is more expensive than hosting it in the US; but it now seems it’s also more risky.
The libel laws are such that if you say things others might complain about, your webhost might pull the plug. And, as Tim’s temporary blog shows, Fasthosts did just that: removing his website, and that of many others as a consequence, with seemingly no investigation into the facts. UK libel laws might be seen as holding web hosts responsible for comments made by their customers (or their customers’ web users), and Fasthosts clearly didn’t care about arguing the toss: keen instead to remove content as soon as they can, regardless of the truth or otherwise of any claims. This has an obviously chilling effect. You should read that site - and this one - for more details.
In my role for Media UK, I’ve had my fair share of threatening legal letters. Sometimes I’ve agreed and edited posts. Mostly, I’ve argued the toss - keen not to set a precedent that I’d remove any old post from anyone who didn’t like what was being said.
One of the first threatening letters I had was in 2000, when a major commercial radio group threatened to set their lawyers on me. Users on Media UK were claiming that this radio group was deliberately deceiving their audience (sound familiar?) by producing this quiz to sound as if it was one radio station’s game, while it was actually running across over twenty stations. Not only did you have a twentieth of the chance of winning that you thought you had, the radio stations were deliberately editing out winners’ locations in their resulting phone calls, furthering the deception. It was, looking back, horribly shady practice.
The group emailed me, requesting I remove all material related to this competition from my site, and making very clear legal threats if I did not. I quickly looked at the evidence, removed some slightly over-emotive language, swallowed hard, and informed the group that the rapidly-growing discussion would stay on the website. Because it was true, and I stood by my users.
Two things happened: firstly, the radio group didn’t take it further. Secondly, all new network-wide competitions have, since then, clearly stated that you’re playing against other listeners across their network.
Had Fasthosts been hosting my website, I don’t believe that Media UK would have had a chance to play a small part in changing that group’s decision and ending this deception. And that would be a very scary thing indeed.
You might wonder why I’m not naming the radio group above. Seven years is a long time in radio; the stations no longer exist in that form, and commercial radio is now rather less afraid of networking programmes and competitions. Audience deception was not, then, the hot potato it is now; and mentioning the radio group involved would serve no useful purpose. While comments are open as normal on this blog, I’ll not be drawn on the group’s identity, and will remove any guesses.
A note from 2024: all my websites are now nominally hosted in the Republic of Ireland.