25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a director of three companies listed in the register which conduct their business on the internet. The world wide web is a veritable miracle of science and technology, captured brilliantly by the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, in her opening remarks. Information can be uncovered in seconds which once would have taken days; pictures and news can be shared instantly with friends and family; grandparents can Skype their loved ones in Australia; anyone can set up shop, or start a business, for next to nothing; and individuals are free to express their political and other passions, convictions and beliefs, as never before, unmediated. Events can be broadcast that repressive states once covered up with ease. The internet has enabled, empowered and enriched us. But it also brings worries as well as wonders, and neither nationally nor internationally have we developed an appropriate policy or institutional framework to address them.

In the UK, we have a lively start-up sector, yet we have to look abroad for many of our skills. There is a huge shortage of programmers in some web languages, especially those needed for developing mobile applications, and the UK’s educational bodies are not fleet-footed enough to meet that shortfall. We are tolerating behaviour and actions on the internet that would never be allowed in the physical domain. For a while, Facebook, with spurious justification, believed that videos of beheadings should be allowed on its service. If our banks exploited information about our private transactions in the manner of Google, there would be uproar. If the ugly, threatening, sexist abuse that is harboured routinely on Twitter took place in a pub, it would more often be prosecuted. When Lily Allen criticised online copyright theft, her website was the target of a DDoS—a distributed denial of service—attack by online anarchist warriors, no doubt using malware placed on millions of computers known to the ISPs, but not to their innocent owners, all mounted with impunity.

Online fraud takes place on a gigantic and global scale. In the UK, we neither measure its impact on our citizens, nor do we do anything material to counter it. Without threatening in any way the precious, priceless benefits that the world wide web has brought us, the task over the next 25 years is to extend to it civilised standards and the rule of law.