The Global Online Safety Regulators Network brings together 18 regulators and observers from five continents. The Network has today published its second position statement on how regulators will work together to address the global nature of online safety regulation.

Earlier this month, Ofcom published it’s draft guidance on protecting children online in the UK. However, the regulatory body recognises that neither the risks children face online nor the online services they use are confined to national or continental borders.

For those reasons, Ofcom – and its international partners – are working on developing its regulatory capability and approaches, to achieve the outcomes set out in the organisations’ respective online safety rules and make a safer life online for children everywhere.

Although regulatory regimes differ in some ways, the frameworks are similar in several key respects.

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By mapping the similarities in our regulatory remits, the Network has identified opportunities in multiple areas to pursue coherence between our respective regimes. These include:

• Regulatory tools: Ofcom will aim to develop common metrics for our risk assessment methodologies and evaluation approaches, to minimise unwarranted divergences between them.
• User complaints: Regulatory bodies that collect user complaints will share experience and evidence. Where there are instances of systemic non-compliance across jurisdictions, the Network might consider working more closely on investigations and enforcement action.
• Information requests: Ofcom will aim to produce more comparable global data that better informs its trend analysis, by coordinating in relation to the types of questions we ask of industry as part of our regulatory activities.
• Safety measures: Ofcom will aim to identify a common set of reasonable steps services can take to address specific harms and risk factors by drawing on our experiences of good practice.

The Network is also continuing to grow, having recently welcomed the Council for Media Services, Slovakia’s media regulator, as a new member and the Family Online Safety Institute as a new Observer.