Online Safety Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, the internet is in so many ways a wonderful new continent, discovered only in my adult lifetime. But like older territories it has not been the unadulterated bastion of freedom and equality that its pilgrim and founding mothers and fathers would have dreamt of. While it has created enormous opportunities for expression, interconnection and learning, it has also allowed the monetising of hate and abuses of power up to and including serious criminal offences to the detriment of children and other vulnerable people.

To a large extent, big tech corporations with monopolistic power have become the new imperium, colonising this new continent without the desire, expertise, independence or accountability to properly regulate of police it. Further, as the technology has moved at a breath-taking pace, national Parliaments and Governments have lagged behind in even fulfilling their basic duties to resource the enforcement of existing criminal law online or, indeed, to ensure sufficient tax raising from the new emperors who can employ former senior politicians for their lobbying, influence national elections via their products and seek to further their hegemony even beyond our shrinking, burning planet.

Alongside corporate and governmental neglect, there have been abuses of people’s rights and freedoms by state and non-state entities around the world. It is very possible to be too permissive in allowing private abuse and simultaneously too interventionist so as to abuse political power. Noble Lords would be wise to hold on to that duality as they undertake the most anxious line-by-line scrutiny of this Bill. With that in mind, given the length, novelty and complexity of this draft legislation, I regret the short time allocated today. The sheer number of speakers should have justified two days of Second Reading, if only to prevent de facto Second Reading speeches in Committee.

Legislation is required and the perfect should not be the enemy of a first attempt at the possible. However, given the fast developing and global landscape, further legislation will no doubt follow. Ultimately, I believe that His Majesty’s Government should seek to pioneer a global internet and AI treaty in due course—or at least, a Labour Government should. For one thing, the black boxes of advanced algorithms must be made transparent and subject to legal control so as not to entrench inequality, discrimination and hate.

That may sound ambitious, but it will take that kind of ambition—the kind of ambition that we saw in the post-war era to establish some notion of an international rule of law and fundamental rights and freedoms in the real world truly to establish a proper rule of law with protected human rights in the virtual one. At the very least, what is already criminal should be policed online. However, we should be wary of outsourcing too much of that policing role to corporations without at least binding them more directly to the free expression and personal privacy protection duties that bind Ofcom, police and prosecutors under the Convention on Human Rights.

Furthermore, we should look again at tightening up over-broad public order offences, such as causing alarm or distress under Section 5 of the Public Order Act, before allowing them to constitute priority illegal content for proactive removal. Conversely, will the Minister confirm that, for example, euphemistic sex for rent adverts targeting poor, vulnerable women, in particular, will be a priority under Section 52 of the Sex Offences Act? As this experiment in national regulation of an international phenomenon develops, the power of the Executive to direct Ofcom sets a dangerous politicising precedent for regimes elsewhere. They should be removed.