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This week, on Monday 8th of October, a 19-year old teenager named Matthew Woods was sentenced to 12 weeks imprisonment after he had made innapropriate and explicit comments about a missing 5-year old, April Jones, and a missing 3-year-old, Madeleine Mccann. The particular law he was tried under was section 127 of the Communications Act, 2003, which makes it effecively a criminal offence to troll. Azar Ahmed, was tried under the same law and sentenced to 240 hours of community service for his comments on Facebook that "all soliders should die and go to hell", following the deaths of six British soliders. Daniel Thomas, a Welsh premier league footballer narrowly avoided being prosecuted under the same law for homophobic comments made over Twitter. Since these prosecutions, new guidelines are being developed and public debate is being sought over this particular law. However, in this country, the law still stands. A resident of my country who is not simply taken to a civil court over the offensive material. They can and have been criminally prosecuted, which will show up on any Criminal Records Beaureau check (a large variety of jobs in my country require you be clean as a whistle these days, and a CRB check can stain your character for years afterwards), and can result in the livelihood of the prosecuted individual coming to a screeching, crashing halt (in the company I work for, they take a very dim view of any form of prosecution taken against a person who has criminally offended). Given the consequence of being criminally prosecuted, does section 127 overstep the bounds, or not do enough? The wording of the law can have a very broad interpretation, depending on the prejudices of the judge overseeing the case (sexism, anyone?). The gathered evidence from sites like Fat, Ugly or Slutty would be more than enough (especially for repeat offenders) to keep the Crown Prosecution Service busy for years, but the "public electronic communications network" of Xbox Live already has policies which govern and restrict the kind of things that can be written and said, and repeat offenders (in the worse case) can get their expensive toy locked off Xbox Live forever. But is self-regulation enough? If it is, why does Fat, Ugly or Slutty get regular doses of fresh material? How should the law support the tuning-down of offensive comments on the vast conglomeration of "public electronic communications network"s today?