Summarised by Centrist
Former District Court Judge David Harvey traces New Zealand’s decade-long pursuit of what Harvey calls “the Holy Grail of the digital age”, complete state control over online content.
From the 2013 Law Commission report News Media Meets New Media to the Broadcasting Standards Authority’s 2025 claim of jurisdiction over internet radio, the essay argues that each reform has carried the same impulse: to domesticate the internet under the language of safety and harm.
Harvey writes that the timeline begins with the Harmful Digital Communications Act in 2015, framed as an anti-bullying measure but marking the first incursion into digital content. The Christchurch attacks in 2019 reignited the drive, with Jacinda Ardern’s Christchurch Call reframing censorship as moral duty. The Department of Internal Affairs soon gained powers to issue takedown notices and expand its secret web-filter system, while the Broadcasting Standards Authority started asserting control over online media.
The Safer Online Services project of 2019–24 proposed a super-regulator for all media, including websites and podcasts. It collapsed under backlash from the Free Speech Union and Voices for Freedom, but resurfaced in 2025 through the government’s Media Reform Consultation. Buried in that document was a plan to expand the BSA’s mandate to “all professional media,” shifting it from complaints resolution to “system-level outcomes.”
Harvey notes that the BSA’s sudden move to regulate internet broadcasting coincides too neatly with those proposals to be a coincidence. Each step, the Christchurch Call, DIA takedown powers, the filtering system, and now the BSA’s claim, forms a continuous pattern of centralising control under the rhetoric of safety.
In a follow-up essay, Age Restrictions, Social Media and Coincidence, Harvey links Catherine Wedd’s Social Media Age-Restricted Users Bill to the same regulatory lineage. The Bill, requiring platforms to block under-16s from joining, relies on circular definitions and wide ministerial powers. The
Free Speech Union warns it could lead to intrusive age verification and “censorship through compliance.”
The Halfling concludes that what once looked like moral protection now resembles bureaucratic ambition, another step toward “the Holy Grail,” where safety becomes the pretext for control.
