25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve (CB)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Lane-Fox for introducing what must be a central topic for all of us. She also asked the right question: what sort of world wide web do we want? There are also the questions of what sort of web we can have and have now.

We are probably living in the twilight of the cyber-romantics who think that zero regulation of everything online is the way we should head. We obviously are not in that situation. The effective and enriching use of the web is life-transforming but depends on the right sort of legislation and regulation in the right places. If we doubt that, we have to think, just for a moment, about all the online shopping that people do and what it has taken for people to have a reasonable degree of confidence about entering that world. Of course, there are other worlds about which they do not have that confidence.

The area of greatest worry to a lot of people is online privacy and surveillance. However, it is odd that they feel it is okay for the Amazons, Googles and others to have their private data but somehow not okay for Governments to have it. That proposition will need to be tested down the route. Commercial power is not negligible.

I should like to ask the Minister some limited questions on privacy. We are, as we know, facing a new data protection regulation, which, if it comes through the process in Brussels, will spread across the entire European Union and ostensibly aims to protect privacy more by raising the standards for consent. Will it do that or will it protect fictions of privacy by allowing fictions of consent to count as legitimating? Do Her Majesty’s Government have a view on that?

I should also like to ask the Minister a question about anonymity. This is a matter of some disagreement. Some people think that online anonymity is highly desirable. They note, of course, that it protects the spamster, the scamster and the cyberbully but feel that that issue should be settled at another level. However, knowing that we are anonymous is, to be sure, liberating but often in dangerous ways. In serious situations, we stand by our words, and free communication depends upon being able to judge what the other party says.

We have heard a good deal in this debate about the merits of transparency. I do not believe that transparency is a sufficient, ethical ideal for online communication. It is a remedy for secrecy but is not sufficient for communication, which is surely what matters, online as much as face to face—being able to judge what others are saying and what they are doing in saying it. Are they, for example, promising something or threatening something? We need to be able to judge not just speech content but speech acts. This can be frustrated in many ways, and I ask the Minister whether he thinks that there are things that we need to do to limit online anonymity in order to protect the future possibilities of online communication.