Many law enforcement agencies around the world have adopted risk assessment methodologies to analyse organised crime. These assessments, which are intended to provide law enforcement management with rigourous analysis to enable rational and objective decision-making processes, are an integral part of intelligenceled policing. Despite the prevalence of these assessments, as the assessments and their methodologies are often tightly restricted within the law enforcement community, it is often unclear how law enforcement defines, analyses and makes decisions about organised crime. While the use of risk assessment methodology in policing to analyse organised crime is generally under-evaluated, critics point to serious methodological weaknesses. Another less-explored aspect in the scholarly literature is how law enforcement conceptualises and measures the impact of "harm" from organised crime and uses this analysis to inform priority-setting processes. This article explores how law enforcement assesses organised crime-related harm by examining five policing methods-one each from Australia and the Netherlands and three from the United Kingdom. The article finds that the methods have significant shortcomings: the main concepts are generally ill-defined and the operationalisation of these concepts is problematic. More importantly, the problems evident in the harm methods raise several critical questions, specifically whether measuring organised crime-related harms is empirically feasible and, if so, can be undertaken in a manner that meaningfully informs law enforcement's decision-making and limits undue political interference.

The riot by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, generated a public debate about the role of platforms in policing users involved in violent hate speech. PayPal’s efforts on this issue, in removing services from some designated hate groups while continuing to serve others, highlights the challenges payment platforms face when they act, whether formally or informally, as regulators. This article examines PayPal’s policies and enforcement efforts, both proactive and reactive, in removing its services from hate groups in the United States. It pays particular attention to the surveillance and screening practices that PayPal employs to proactively detect users who violate its policies. The article argues that public calls for PayPal to identify and remove its services from hate groups raise critical questions about ceding broad regulatory authority to platforms and reveal the serious challenges of relying upon commercial enterprises to address complex social problems.

Having set the backdrop to the private agreements, this chapter discusses how the non-binding agreements emerged from distinct historical and political circumstances. It provides a brief historical overview that traces the growing influence of multinational rights holders on the U.S. government’s intellectual property policymaking processes from the late 1970s to 2012. The chapter then examines in detail four U.S. intellectual property bills, including the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, which proposed to reshape fundamentally the online regulation of intellectual property rights infringement. In doing so, the chapter documents a significant shift in enforcement strategy from a focus on removing problematic content (e.g., advertisements for counterfeit goods) to disabling entire websites for allegedly trafficking in counterfeit goods. The chapter argues that Internet firms have become global regulators (known as macro-intermediaries) attractive to governments and corporations for policing a wide range of social problems, including counterfeit goods. The chapter concludes that government officials from the U.S., U.K., and European Commission played a central role in pressuring Internet firms to adopt the non-binding agreements. These agreements serve strategic state interests as well as the financial interests of rights holders.

On January 18, 2012, millions of people participated in the now-infamous “Internet blackout” to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the rights it would have given intellectual property holders to shape how people use the Internet. SOPA’s withdrawal was heralded as a victory for an open Internet. However, as Natasha Tusikov documents in Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet, rather than accept defeat, a small group of corporations, tacitly backed by the U.S. and other governments, have implemented much of SOPA via a series of secret, handshake agreements among powerful corporations, including Google, PayPal, and Microsoft. This book is the first to explore these agreements. Drawing on extensive interviews with corporate and government officials, Tusikov details the emergence of a new realm of global governance, in which large Internet firms act as global regulators for powerful intellectual property owners like Nike, and raises questions about the threat these new global regimes pose to democratic accountability itself. The book argues that these global regulators are significantly altering the ways in which governments and corporations regulate content and information on the Internet.

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