25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Lord Black of Brentwood Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Baroness on her introduction to this historic debate. While the internet impacts on every aspect of life, two areas of society affected most are education and the media.

The changes that have taken place in education have been breathtaking, not least for adults who benefit in terms of lifelong learning. I think, for instance, of the work of the Royal College of Music, on whose council I sit, and I declare an interest accordingly. One of the hallmarks of the RCM’s wonderful teaching is the virtuoso master class. Each year 4,500 people attend them, but by making them available online, a much bigger audience can participate. Consider this: in the past three months alone, more than 60,000 people have watched one of those master classes, more than had attended all master classes in person in the previous decade. The RCM is also pioneering an online resource to teach people the basics of music theory. So far, it has delivered more than 200,000 lessons to more than 50,000 students in 50 countries. That is the great egalitarian, inclusive side of the internet—making things possible for those who, a generation ago, could never have dreamt of achieving something such as that.

The media is another area where change has been dramatic, and I declare my interest as director of the Telegraph Media Group. While some suggest that the internet is destroying the media, the truth is the opposite for innovative and enterprising companies because of the new audiences that the web provides. The Telegraph was the first paper to get a website, back in 1994, but at that time its audience was limited to those who read newspapers in the UK. Twenty-five years on, audiences are global, and when people want authoritative news analysis, it is trusted news brands to which they turn. During the London Olympics, the Telegraph website alone attracted a record 408 million page views— 220 million here in the UK and 190 million abroad.

Local newspapers, too, are seeing strong growth in online audiences. Three regional publishers, including the owners of the Scotsman, the Northern Echo and the Manchester Evening News passed 10 million monthly online readers last year, a massive figure, considering the geographical limits on their print circulation. Of course, newspapers still face huge challenges in this age of the internet: protecting copyright, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley of Knighton, said; monetising digital content; and adapting business models. Gaining a global audience also means attracting global competition. Such a period of transition is proving to be painful for many in publishing but it is change that is absolutely essential for survival. For those who are succeeding, the internet is taking the UK’s iconic newspaper and magazine titles and turning them into global media brands.

I conclude with this point in praise of the web: with so much content from so many publishers, the vast majority of them individuals, being provided in so many jurisdictions, any attempt to censor the web through legal or statutory regulation is ultimately doomed to failure. This point is vital to any debate about press regulation, which is dear to my heart, but which was, ironically, completely ignored during the Leveson inquiry, which was an analogue inquiry for our digital world. What the web, in all its glorious anarchy, has done is to make any form of statutory press control futile in an online age. As someone who believes passionately in freedom of expression, that is one of many good reasons to say, “Happy anniversary”.