At one point in András Koltay's New Media and Freedom of Expression, the author quotes the US Supreme Court in their critical 1969 decision in Red Lion Broadcasting v FCC, where they defended the FCC's regulations, remembering the ‘First Amendment goal of producing an informed public capable of conducting its own affairs’. This mattered a great deal in 1969 in the context of the regulation of radio—but it can be argued to matter far more now, in the context of the ‘new’ media and the age of ‘fake news’ and other kinds of misinformation. It points at perhaps the biggest question of this age: do we have a public capable of conducting its own affairs at all, or have we reached the stage where the power and practice of the new media has made this almost impossible? In the light of the Cambridge Analytica affair and the proliferation of targeted, manipulative misinformation, where hate speech and abuse can be found almost everywhere, it is a question with no clear answer—and with no clear route to resolution. Further, if the answer is in the negative—that we don't have a public capable of conducting its own affairs—what can or should be done about this? Koltay's book does not quite have the scope or the ambition to really answer these questions—but it does make a valuable contribution to those who are seeking to find the answers. Its detailed description of the issues, scholarship, laws and key cases in what is a complex, nuanced and multifaceted area is useful for anyone working in this field.

The idea that the internet, by virtue of its decentralised structure, borderless nature and seemingly boundless scale should be a perfect medium for freedom of expression has been held strongly from its very early days. Koltay, having provided a fine and appropriately detailed retelling of the background of freedom of expression in relation to the ‘old’ media—in both US First Amendment and European Convention terms—gives an equally appropriate description of those early days and the tension between those who thought the internet should not (and indeed could not) be regulated and those who thought it could, should and must be taken in hand by lawmakers. The optimism and idealism of those early years has given way to a realism and indeed cynicism about the net and its various roles as information resource, communications medium and social space—Koltay does well to chart these changes and how they have happened, drawing on scholarship from both the US and Europe—the work of the likes of Von Hoboken, Murray and Laidlaw sit alongside Sunstein, Volokh and Pasquale.

If at times the book seems a little descriptive, this is to an extent a result of the amount of ground it has to cover. The topics covered range from the big areas in new media—there are extensive chapters on search engines and social media platforms respectively—to the more edgy subjects such as the dark net and deep fakes. The regulatory challenges take centre stage, including the respective roles of governments and the internet giants, of laws and ‘community standards’. Who takes responsibility for what? Who has what powers? Subjects that have been covered at length elsewhere, from net neutrality to issues of jurisdiction and enforceability are given detailed attention, through the case law at all levels to the newer models of regulation being currently considered throughout the world.

The game has moved on even since the book was published in 2019—from the German NetzDG law to the current UK ‘Online Harms White Paper’, which at the time of writing was undergoing parliamentary scrutiny—but the issues remain, and are given appropriate attention by Koltay. The thorny issues of censorship at all the different levels—from ISPs, search engines and social media platforms onwards—and the complexity of the roles of search engines and social media are given close attention. Big questions such as whether internet intermediaries/platforms/gatekeepers be thought of as publishers or ‘mere conduits’, and how as a consequence of that should they be regulated—are dealt with well and with some originality. For search engines, for example, Koltay looks at defamation, autocomplete, the right to be forgotten and more, concluding with an interesting suggestion about treating the role of search engines as ‘editors’. Some areas could do with more attention—for example the role of algorithmic curation of speech, including biases and manipulation—but to be fair to the author the significance of this is becoming more obvious with the passing of time, and a book published even as recently as 2019 can be overtaken a bit by events.

Moreover, this is a legal text rather than a sociological, political or philosophical one—and it resists being drawn into those deeper but far harder to pin-down areas. This should not be seen as a weakness but as a part of what was intended: the detailed accounts of law and cases, as well as of the scholarship is impressive throughout, and forms a comprehensive work of reference as well as everything else. What was also intended is indicated by the book's subtitle: Rethinking the Constitutional Foundations of the Public Sphere. The nature and format of the public sphere has changed in so many ways that it is hard for law, government and indeed scholarship to keep up, as reading through Koltay's book makes very clear. That means we need to rethink things—and rather than telling us how things need to change, Koltay shows us why. As he concludes:

This seems inescapable, and Koltay's book admirably lays out all the reasons why it is true. What is also inescapable, however, is the feeling that neither public nor private actors seem capable of grasping this nettle at this point, particularly after the events of the last few years. Rather the opposite: the corporations and governments seem determined to fight for their own corners and fail to take any kind of serious account of the public's real interests. This leaves the public squeezed between powerful but unhelpful giants, and that goal of ‘an informed public capable of conducting its own affairs’ seems a very long way from being achieved.