Last checked at 
(Adds Lloyds bank, lawyer reaction)
By Huw Jones
LONDON, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Google, Facebook and other online
services should be held legally accountable for advertisements
on their platforms in order to prevent fraudsters scamming
millions of consumers, a cross-party group of British lawmakers
has said.
Britain has proposed a landmark online safety law to punish
abuses such as child pornography, racism and violence against
women, but a joint committee of lawmakers drawn from both houses
of parliament said on Tuesday it should go a step further to
cover paid-for adverts.
"Excluding paid-for advertising will leave service providers
with little incentive to remove harmful adverts, and risks
encouraging further proliferation of such content," the joint
committee report said.
The Financial Conduct Authority also wants adverts on social
media and search engines, currently excluded from the draft law,
to be included after 754 million pounds ($999.65 million) was
stolen nL8N2QU29V from consumers in the first six months of this
year.
The report also backed a Law Commission recommendation to
make cyberflashing, or the unsolicited sending of obscene images
or video recordings, which are often a feature of sexual
harassment, illegal.
The draft law is due to be approved in 2022 and government
has two months to say if it will back the recommendation, along
with several others which lawmakers say are needed to "call time
on the Wild West online".
"The era of self-regulation for big tech has come to an end.
The companies are clearly responsible for services they have
designed and profit from, and need to be held to account for the
decisions they make," said Damian Collins, who chairs the joint
committee.
Britain's communications regulator Ofcom should have powers
to police mandatory codes of practice for the internet service
providers and punish breaches, the report said. There must,
however, be "robust protections" for freedom of expression,
including an automatic exemption for recognised news publishers,
it added.
Britain's financial services minister John Glen said last
month he was "very sympathetic" to introducing online adverts
into the bill or similar action.
Vim Maru, group director of retail banking at Lloyds
said fraud is now Britain's most common crime and
supported including paid-for online adverts in the bill.
"The proposed legislation is a golden opportunity to take on
the fraudsters together," Maru said.
The FCA spent 600,000 pounds on Google to warn about scam
adverts, though the online giant has since said it will only
take adverts from firms regulated by the FCA, and offered a $3
million credit to the regulator.
"Without a decisive response from the government and the
tech giants, many more individuals will sadly fall victim to
these scammers," said Mel Stride, chair of parliament's treasury
committee, which backs the recommendation to help remove
fraudulent online adverts.
Geraint Lloyd-Taylor, a partner at the Lewis Silkin law
firm, said the draft law leaves many unanswered questions and
clearly poses a threat to democratic freedoms by introducing a
new form of censorship without clear boundaries and safeguards.
($1 = 0.7543 pounds)
(Reporting by Huw Jones;
Editing by Bernadette Baum and Louise Heavens)
