25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Lane-Fox for this opportunity, and in her honour I prepared for it only at the last minute. I have some interests that are declared in the register, but I also chair EyeHub, which is one of the TSB-funded IoT projects. The internet is very new, and most of us have not been using it for anything like 25 years. We are only just beginning to make a start on the internet of things, to which my noble friend also referred. That will change things, because machines will start reporting what we are doing behind our backs. There are all sorts of implications in that which we have not yet thought about.

In fact, people all over the world are only just beginning to evolve and think about how they will adjust to the implications of the global internet and the consequent cultural clashes that are happening. One of the major ones is how much Governments should be allowed to control their citizens. The whole thing is global, and Governments are losing control because people can work from anywhere. To whom do the taxes belong? We are seeing that debate now.

We will have to rethink entirely how we interface, work with and talk to people. Also, I will just slip in a comment that we still need to meet people face to face. You have to share hospitality with people to know whether you can trust them; you cannot just trust electronic tokens or people whom you have never met, unless they come highly recommended by a friend. That is going to be one of the big issues in the near future.

The other great thing about the internet is that remote communities and communities on the edge of urban conurbations can become global players. You do not have to be situated in the middle of things. However, they need to be able to access the internet properly—and access is a real problem in Britain, despite all the things that the Government are saying. I am afraid that an awful lot of stuff is flying around that is not quite true.

Vast amounts of information are out there, and the problem is that some of it is about you. Much of it is inaccurate and misleading, and it always will be. That is partly because it is easy to fool a machine and partly because it is easy to get things wrong. It is very easy for criminals to fool machines. If I want an alibi, I will lend you my telephone and iPad and get you to establish an alibi for me. We have to be careful about what we think we are actually seeing about people if we are talking about Governments and control.

The point is that it is dangerous to allow the puritans who try to tell us what to do for our own good to have too much control, because life will not be much fun. The other problem is that when they are the Government, they can make you into a non-person, and that may be done on inaccurate information. It has happened to people already, so we have to be very careful about it. I recommend that noble Lords watch a 2008 miniseries called “The Last Enemy”, which can be bought on DVD; it is very interesting.

You cannot regulate or block criminal or unethical practices out of existence—I am afraid that that is true. All we can do is try to arrest the criminals and disincentivise them, and try to disincentivise the big players by modifying their behaviour through cultural pressure. The web may sometimes help with this, but its basic resilient design means that there are always ways to get around the blocks. Like life, the internet will never be completely safe; that would be boring. We love the freedom of being able to hear the cries of the downtrodden, but we are going to have to fight to keep that freedom for ourselves. Our fathers and our grandfathers died for it.