Digital Economy Bill

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 13th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I refer to my interests as set out in the register and I would like to make it clear that while the House of Lords Communications Committee on which I serve is in the middle of an inquiry into “Children and the Internet”, I speak not on behalf of that committee but as an individual—albeit one who has spent a great deal of time over the past six years thinking about the relationship between children, young people and digital technologies.

I want to make some general observations about the Bill as a whole and then I will return to the question of children. Like others, I welcome the notion of broadband as a utility, and along with that the establishment of a universal service order providing for the introduction of a minimum speed. However, I am aware of the argument against regulation in all parts of the value chain of the tech industry, with one of the major points being the speed of technological change and the expectations of those using the technology. It races ahead of the pace of legislation. Rather than enshrining the suggested 10 megabits in the universal service order, which will shortly look paltry, perhaps we might look at enshrining the principle of a minimum speed with a mechanism to set it at appropriate levels at appropriate intervals.

The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, set out in great detail some of what I was going to talk about in the world of work, so suffice it to say that I was disappointed not to see much more ambitious intervention as regards skills and training in changing practices at work and measures to tackle the enormous deficit of skills that we anticipate. If we are to get the workforce we need and want for the future, I should mention in particular the need to take a more proactive look at supporting the acquisition by women and girls of digital skills.

I am also disappointed by Part 4, which provides new protection for intellectual copyright, but it seems to be a fairly undisguised battle between Google and major players from other areas of the media industry that make content. What I do not see in this part of the Bill is any attempt to protect user content. It is worth remembering that the vast majority of content on the internet is created by users, most of whom unwittingly transfer their pictures, words, behaviour patterns and intimate thoughts by way of those interminable terms and conditions to companies which sell the information to third parties for advertising. While I acknowledge the need for film studios, recording companies, media conglomerates and the like to be supported in this way, the poor user has not been served. I would have liked the Bill to tackle the question of terms and conditions head on.

The same attitude is evident in Part 5. Personal data are to be collated and shared across public departments. As other speakers have said, there are good reasons for doing so given some of the positive outcomes, but in a world where anything from the result of the American election to the records held by one’s bank or mobile phone company—or indeed the activities of the security services—are all rather insecure, the assurances that such data will be anonymised and individuals protected by the current status quo in the form of the Data Protection Act seem to be fairly absurd. I hope I will be forgiven if I am ignorant, but I could not find in the detail of the Bill a clause dealing with opt-out and how that might work. To allow data collection and sharing by services that one has no choice but to use seems to be setting out on a path that we will need to look at as the Bill goes through its stages in order to get a little more in the way of assurance. Given that we are in the middle of what is an unstoppable trend of outsourcing public services such as prisons, health and social services and even child protection to commercial companies, how does the compulsory sharing of data in the context of public/private partnerships protect the rights of citizens? I feel that we may need to look at this area more carefully.

I turn now to the BBC. I found it wryly amusing that one of the great travesties has been quietly laid out under the title of “Miscellaneous”; it is quite funny. The transfer of policy to the BBC for payment of the over-75s’ free licence is of course an essential piece of housekeeping: he or she who pays must indeed have their hands on the policy. However, as others have said, the BBC is a broadcaster, not a government department. While I am sure that others will join with me, and while I am equally sure that we will be collectively whistling in the wind, we have a new Prime Minister, a new Secretary of State and a new Chancellor. I urge them to distinguish themselves by reversing this unseemly raid on the coffers of the BBC by dropping both the policy and the effective funding cut.

Before I return to the subject of children, I agree with others who have outlined the prominence of the PSBs. The letter of the law is indeed set out in the Communications Act 2003, but it refers to a different technological time. If the commercial companies cannot deliver on the spirit of the law, then those of us in this House should find a way to change the letter of the law.

Part 3 fulfils the Government’s pledge to make commercial pornography sites subject to age verification. The right honourable Matt Hancock said in the other place that the Bill would give children,

“the same sorts of safeguards online as they have offline”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/11/16; col. 1274.]

I welcome this effort at age verification. I dismiss the previous Secretary of State’s assertion that this is in any way an,

“infringement of the civil liberties of individuals”,—[Official Report, Commons, 28/11/16; col. 1301.]

who want to access this same material. However, I feel the Bill is too narrow. I have the dubious privilege in my life as a film-maker of having watched a significant amount of pornography over several decades. I have watched it change over that period. Whatever the pros and cons of watching pornography are as an adult, the one thing I am entirely certain of is that it is a really bad way of learning about sex. That is what is happening.

The accessibility and ubiquity of violent sexual content is transforming young people’s attitudes towards sex. Some of this material is deliberately sought out, but much of it is accidentally thrust upon children, causing distress and confusion—another noble Lord used that word. It is important to remember that young people are not fully formed. They do not know the rights and wrongs and cannot make these fine judgments for themselves. I find it horrifying that a third of 13 to 14 year-olds say that they want to act out the scenes they have viewed. If, like me, noble Lords have seen those scenes they would not wish children at the age of 13 or 14—indeed, possibly at any age—to act them out. There is a statistic from the NSPCC that 53% of boys said that pornography they had seen had depicted a realistic view of sex between two people.

I am going to labour this point. When I was making a film part of which dealt with the relationship between online pornography and teenagers, I came across some emerging trends: increasing and large numbers of young men with erectile dysfunction, desensitised by the constant viewing of extreme pornography; rising numbers of young women presenting at health centres with anal injuries, sustained in sexual relationships with hazy notions of consent and mutuality; and quite ghastly tales of very young children coming across graphic pornography that they could not unsee. Most of all, I was struck by the overwhelming sadness at the number of very young people, boys and girls, who articulated the way that watching pornography was intruding on their ability to form intimate relationships in the real world.

In Committee we will have to look very carefully at what constitutes pornography and exactly how the mechanism of age verification will be applied to preserve the privacy of individuals, because there is not quite enough clarity on either of these things. We will have to do that in the context of realising that a vast amount of porn is user-generated, not from commercial sites. Where does that sit in this picture? We have to recognise that this will not work 100%, but part of what is important about this measure is the adult world suggesting what a social norm might be. For a young child, transgressing and breaking the boundary is an important act in accessing this material. People who say that this is not important because it will not work have the wrong end of the stick.

Others have said but I must say also that, although it obviously will not form part of the Bill, the Government must undertake to take seriously the desire of parents, teachers and young people themselves to have statutory, age-appropriate, well-funded and well-designed SRE in all schools, whatever their status. It must be SRE that takes account of the multitude of good resources that exist for young people online, but which offers a robust and sophisticated alternative to learning about sex from online pornography. Blocking violent sexual content without putting in place positive and uninflected SRE will not serve the nation’s children. It is a developmental imperative to find out about sex; we need to find a safe and secure environment in which to do so.

I return to the Minister’s statement that this is a Bill that will harmonise children’s experiences online and offline. If that was the intention, the Bill as it stands is severely lacking. Children enjoy many more rights. A noble Lord already mentioned the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. There are rights that protect them from commercial exploitation, give them privacy and demand that we take their best interests as paramount. There are rights to the highest goals in education, as well as protection from violence and harm. Those rights and our laws—EU laws and national laws—are consistently thwarted in online and digital settings. We allow profiling and wholesale data gathering. We tolerate hundreds of thousands—possibly millions—of underage children using social media sites that have an age limit of 13 years old. As I mentioned, terms and conditions for almost every online business—educational, business or social—are designed to obscure the commercial relationship that a minor is unlawfully entering into.

We have failed to conduct any meaningful conversation, let alone take action, on false news, transparency of search algorithms, gender disparity in the online experience and, most importantly for the young, the constant alerts, interruptions and encouragement to share personal information that are deliberately designed to keep the user using. The evidence is out there and growing. It is becoming very clear that young people are finding it harder and harder to put down their devices. They are tethered to the flashing of the latest alert. This is not an unintended consequence but a deliberate design feature, mirroring the very same design as casino slot machines, with their random rewards setting off dopamine in the brain. There are measurable outcomes that include anxiety and mental health issues at epidemic proportions.

We have to consider this, because this is an opportunity. For young people, the digital world is the world. Our young people will be the workforce, the parents, the teachers, the leaders and the entrepreneurs in this new world. When we consider anything at this level we have to consider how we want to bring them into this world and how that world is designed to treat them.

The Bill was an opportunity to deliver the commitment that Matt Hancock made: to harmonise the online and offline worlds; to make digital services conform to the standards we uphold offline; and to recognise children’s special status as minors, with some measures to protect their data, to have high privacy settings by default, to put digital literacy at the heart of our school system and to take a broader view of the challenges they face. The digital world offers us an unparalleled opportunity for a new and improved world, but we have more than a duty to protect. We have a duty to design the digital world in a way that benefits and empowers our young people.