Online Safety Bill [HL]

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Friday 17th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, this Bill has absolutely the right good intentions and I am not opposed to what it tries to do; namely, to protect our young from online inappropriate material and adult content. This also applies to other things which the young can access online. The real problem is whether the mechanism will work. Will trying to do it this way be effective? Because I have been involved in the internet and the IT world for a very long time, I do not think that it will and I will explain why. There are other things we should do. First, I declare an interest: I am the unpaid chair of the Digital Policy Alliance. We have been looking at this for some time and have a discussion group going on it.

I will talk about the practicalities and the real difficulties. The internet is complex and it can be all too easy to circumvent any controls put in if they are in the wrong place. The gambling controls referred to work because they are enforced at the end point—at one of the ends of the internet—and not by the system that routes the communications, which the ISPs are part of. That is where you connect in. An ISP is defined in the Communications Act as amended, which is mentioned in the Bill. The Act states that an internet service provider provides an internet access service that consists,

“entirely or mainly of the provision of access to the internet”.

It allocates an IP address; that is all it does. ISPs do not actually interfere with the transmission of material through it. They are basically just a connection. That is the challenge: everything goes through an ISP, but they do not do anything with it. They are like a telephone directory. You have a thing called a domain name server, which looks up the thing you have typed and routes you off to wherever it is going. That is pretty well it.

ISPs can interfere a little bit. People say that the Internet Watch Foundation and the Digital Economy Act managed to block sites. Yes, but what happens is that the website’s address is put on a blacklist and rerouted elsewhere automatically. It does not interfere with the transmission. Part of the problem with doing this at the ISP level is that it will not help with things such as Netflix and Amazon, where there is some unsuitable content on the website: you will block the whole of Amazon, Netflix or whatever. It cannot block selectively. What it comes down to is that you have to do it where the material is being accessed. The other trouble is that the person who switched on the computer in the morning, which is when the ISP knows who might have switched it on, is not necessarily the person using it later in the day. You also have to find out who is accessing the website. These things can be done.

There is a further problem: the EU is about to interfere with all this. The telecoms single market regulation protects the ISPs from having to do these sorts of things. It says, “You’re just a communications medium”. The EU is about to rewrite, or is in any case looking at, the audiovisual media services directive, which concerns some of these issues. That will be about European-wide stuff. The regulations apply directly to us. We cannot do anything about them. We can tamper with the directive, but maybe we should wait and see what comes out. I am not for waiting for the sake of it, but we have to take it into account.

In the mean time we can do something. This is being discussed in several groups because people want to find a solution to it. It has been noted that it also involves, for instance, tobacco, alcohol and gambling—although they are doing something about that effectively. E-cigarettes are now involved. There are crowdfunding sites where people are trying to invest in things. Education also has requirements of material for certain age groups. Also, one wants to protect children’s groups from overaged people trying to come in and access their little groups. Age verification in general will be of vital interest at any age, but all this requires age verification at the point of supply—where you access the websites—not at the point where you go on to the internet. They are the only ones who know what the requirement is, be it over the ages of 15, 18 or 21, or aged under 30.

One place where this is being discussed, which I am involved in, which is why I declared my interest, is in a neutral forum hosted by the Digital Policy Alliance. There, we have a cross-cutting group from a lot of different industries, because we want to produce something that can be used by everyone. You then put some teeth into how you enforce it. You could put some penalties in there that make people want to comply. The debate on this is being observed by government departments. There are a lot of different attitudes towards it as to what they want. The identity providers have one way of doing things; others have other ways. The important thing is that we should be able to identify any age range. The other thing that has come into this is that some of the foreign businesses are sitting in this because they want to do something about it too. They know that they are going to come under attack, particularly foreign suppliers of “adult content”, as they like to call it. They would like to do something that can be rolled out abroad as well. If that happens, we will suddenly get it globally. To me, that is very interesting.

Separately, the British Standards Institution is starting work on a publicly available specification or PAS, which is like a standard, that might do something about this. It will not specify an exact methodology or technology; this whole thing will be technology neutral. It will then come up with something that can be used when the Government formulate some regulations and laws around this. It can be used to say, “If you don’t comply at least to that standard, you’re in trouble and we’ll enforce some nasty stuff against you”. A prescriptive method, as in this Bill, I am afraid will kill a lot of the positive discussion and positive work being done on this. I would like the Bill to go on the backburner, but it has inspired the most useful conversation and has given it a huge shot in the arm to get discussions going fast.