(Cancelled) The Death of the Online “Intermediary” in Europe

Please note that this talk has been cancelled.

Date: December 12, 2018 (Wednesday)
Time: 1pm – 2pm
Venue: Room 723, 7/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, the University of Hong Kong

Speaker: Professor Uta Kohl (Professor of Commercial Law, Southampton Law School, University of Southampton)

Abstract: Legal immunities were granted to “intermediaries” in Europe and the US at the time when the internet as a social medium was in its infancy and were based on ideas of intermediaries as a fairly small and homogenous group of online actors and, by definition, as not having agency. This talk challenges both assumptions in the light of the socio-economic development of the internet and its network controllers and argues that recent legal developments in Europe also suggest a move away from the concept of “the intermediary” to a gradual recognition of a multifaceted complex environment run by network “controllers”.

About the speaker: Professor Kohl joined Southampton Law School in 2018 after having worked at the Department of Law and Criminology of Aberystwyth University for quite a few years. She has written extensively on internet governance issues as well as on corporate governance. Her research interests lie in two broad areas: internet governance and corporate governance, with particular focus on their international dimensions. She has written on online jurisdiction in public and private international law, intermediary liability, the regulation of online speech as well as corporate human rights abuses and on jurisdiction in the context of multinational corporations. She is also interested in the interactions of statehood or territoriality and transnational corporations or globalization, both in the offline and online context, and the interdisciplinary conversations around those topics.

All are welcome! Please register here: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=61186