The original note, as written at the time
Imagine a time when online systems will dominate such that we shall even need a wing of the law and order regulation arm called the web police. Its purpose: to protect all citizens from attack by the internet.
Ongoing development
A time will come when online systems dominate to the point that law and order needs a wing of its own: a web police, whose purpose is to protect citizens from attack by the internet.
The framing that matters is protect citizens from attack, not police the internet. Those are different institutions and we currently have neither.
What we have is a patchwork: platform moderation, which answers to shareholders; criminal law, which arrives years late and cannot reach across borders; and a set of regulators who can fine a company but cannot reach the person who is ruining somebody’s life from another country.
A web police force would have to be defined by the harms rather than the medium. Fraud, extortion, harassment, the distribution of images, the compromise of an account used to reach a family. All of those are already crimes. The problem is that they are committed in a jurisdiction nobody polices and reported through a form that goes nowhere.
The risk is obvious and it is the reason this is hard: an internet police force is a surveillance agency with a friendly name, and the temptation to use it for political purposes is not hypothetical in any country. So the design has to be constrained from the outset — a narrow list of harms, a warrant requirement, published statistics, and a right for the accused to see the evidence.
The alternative is what we have now, which is a private police force owned by the platforms, accountable to nobody, and answerable only in the sense that it can suspend an account.
If the state will not protect people online, the platforms will, and they will do it in the way that suits them.