The wiretapping bill is again at the centre of the Italian Internet debate since some members of the Parliamentary majority have expressed their intention to submit it to a vote of confidence in Parliament as soon as possible .
The text of the disputed bill contains the law defined by the press as the “Blog killer” (art. 1, paragraph 29) which, we should remind ourselves, obliges “information sites, including electronic versions of daily newspapers and magazines” to report and rectify any information claimed to be false, within forty-eight hours of the request.
This law has already been analyzed on these pages by Professor Giusella Finocchiaro, who has stressed several negative issues:
“In addition to heavy fines (from € 7,746 to € 12,911) and to the stringent terms imposed for rectification (only forty-eight hours after the request), which are anything but easy to enforce, the danger is that, if approved, in the long run this rule will equate sites (and blogs) to newspapers, creating the basis for the application of strict rules which have originally been intended for media companies, (administratively demanding, and accompanied by penalties), for ”information websites” and maybe every electronic communication (and why not, also social networks and Twitter).
Many network commentators have again started to protest against what they consider a serious limitation of freedom of expression on the web. The National Press Council held a protest demonstration in Rome on September 29.
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