25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the others who have thanked the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, for securing this debate and launching it so comprehensively. It seems impossible to believe that it was only in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee presented his bosses at CERN with a paper that foreshadowed the web. He got it back with the comment scrolled on the top: “Vague but exciting”. How exciting it turned out to be.

The world wide web has changed lives, generally for the better. It has fuelled revolutions and shrunk the world. I speak as a trustee of the British Museum. The world wide web has made the contents of that museum available to anyone anywhere. There are 3.5 million objects now online and they are visited all the time. The web site traffic grew last year by 47% to 19.5 million visits. Yesterday, the museum celebrated its 255th birthday with a record number of visits, fuelled by a Google doodle.

However, we need to be discriminating. This is no comment on the Lords of the Blog or the noble Lord, Lord Soley, but there is quite a lot of rubbish on the web. One of my favourite cartoons was in the New Yorker and it showed two dogs looking at each other. One says to the other, “Do you blog?” The other says, “I’ve stopped. I’ve just gone back to incessant stupid barking”. There is some wonderful stuff on the web, but there is also a lot of rubbish and policing is never going to work. The net will always be ahead of those who try to police it. Perhaps that is why even some respectable news organisations seem to apply different standards to what they put online to what they put in print.

Wikipedia of course is a wonderful source, but it is not infallible. The users of the web have to learn to discriminate. They have to apply their own judgment. Nevertheless, it is an amazing force for good. It has changed lives for the better, not just by enabling people to shop the world, but to educate themselves and entertain themselves. As the noble Lord, Lord Chadlington, explained to us, it is also a wonderful way for some people, who may be housebound, to combat the loneliness that affects so many.

I have only one question for the Minister. In the internet age, why on earth are we providing free television licences for people, taxed or not taxed, when perhaps we should be offering them subsidised broadband?