Defamation Bill

Debate between Lord Allan of Hallam and Lord Brougham and Vaux

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Mawhinney]

I am grateful that the noble Lord made this argument because of all the arguments we heard in the committee this was the one we thought probably had the least validity. If you make a statement and it goes round the world, who—I was almost tempted to say a naughty word—cares whether it is made in a pub, in Tesco or anywhere else? Who cares if it is made by a friend to a friend? To use that argument is to somehow say there is a qualitative difference. I will speak later in this debate at greater length but I want my noble friend to think carefully before relying on what is almost a patently non-sustainable argument.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux)]

I want to remind the Committee that the Chamber will be rising in about five minutes and, in the spirit of Christmas, if noble Lords can keep their comments short we will finish after the end of this group.

[Lord Allan of Hallam]

I shall aim to do so. I turn specifically to the amendments. Let me work through those. There is a lot of merit in Amendment 23A, on the electronic platform. I am interested in the Government's response about what they perceive the legal definition of a website to include. It is certainly the case, and the expectation in the technology community, that most content will be accessed within as short a space as two to three years, primarily through untethered mobile devices and applications—specific applications tied to a particular service. The traditional notion of going to a web browser and typing in a web address will not necessarily be the dominant form of accessing information. It is a fact that most information and contact will be delivered in a different and more sophisticated way, and it is important to ask the question now as to whether the definition of website that the Government intend covers this wide range of information services or is intended to cover stuff delivered by the http protocol; the traditional web browser.

In the context of Amendment 25A and the notice to be posted alongside the publication, I have concerns about how realistic that is. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about how straightforward that might be. Given the different formats out there and the wide range and type of contact that may be posted, to be able to guarantee that a notice of complaint is posted alongside the original content may prove to be much more technically complex than has been imagined. I wonder about the value of doing that given how people access content through small-screen devices and the way in which the content scrolls and moves rapidly these days. The idea of a notice next to a piece of content is again looking back to the newspaper model, where you have something much more static and in a much more defined format. I have questions about the workability of the notice in Amendment 25A.

The e-mail contact in Amendment 25B goes back to the website versus platform debate. It may come as a surprise to the Committee but e-mail is a dying communications mechanism. Young people do not use e-mail. E-mail is for work and if you want to communicate with people whom you know and like and with organisations, you use different forms of communication—instant messaging-type applications and a whole range of new communications services. In the context of how website operators might receive complaints, e-mail is probably for a large operator one of the least efficient ways of doing this. It is relatively unstructured and people will send anything to an e-mail address.

A much better approach, if we want to include something in the Bill, is to say that there must be an efficient contact mechanism and then allow the website operators to determine the most efficient contact mechanism for them. In the case of a lot of the large providers, their preference, rather than e-mail, would be for people to use a contact form. A contact form allows you to give guidance to the person. You can have a very simple flow. Somebody types a defamation on a website. The website says, “Hey. If you want to report defamation go here”, and they are given a screen that takes them through all the information that they need to provide in careful detail and then offers them a form that they can send in. The great advantage of that method is that the form then sends the information to the legal team to do an assessment, with all the relevant contact information. A smaller operator may choose to use e-mail because they have nothing else and they do not have the technology, but we should not specify the technology used for contact in the Bill. We should leave that up to the operators.

Those are my comments on this group of amendments. I know that we will come back to the larger issues of principle and the balance of power between the complainant and the website operator in the next group.