Online Safety Bill

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, several Peers have mentioned the Digital Economy Act 2017 and the sadness of the constitutional impropriety when the Executive refused to implement the will of Parliament. That really concerned me because, if it had been implemented, so many children would have been protected, for several years by now. We learned some useful things during its passage that could very much be applied in this Bill.

The first was on enforcement. This is always the big problem: how do you make them comply? One of the things that will work is the withdrawal of credit card facilities. If a Government or authority ask credit card companies to withdraw facilities from a company, they will, probably internationally. In fact, this happened not that long ago, a few months ago, to one of the big porn sites. It soon fell into line, so we know it works.

The other thing is that anonymous age verification is possible. At the time I chaired it, the British Standards Institution issued PAS 1296 on how to do it, and several companies implemented it. The website itself does not check; it is done by an external company to make sure that it is right. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, has just explained exactly how it works. It was a very good explanation of the whole thing. About a year ago, they were intending to elevate it to an international standard because other countries wanted to use it. Certain European countries were very keen on it and are already implementing stuff.

The other thing that struck me is this: what is meant by “legal but harmful”? It is an expression that has sort of grown up, and I am not sure whether it means the same thing to everybody. In terms of pornography, which I and a lot of us are worried by, we do not want to be a modern Mary Whitehouse on the one hand, so you do not want to regulate for adults. But the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, who worked on this, explained all the dangers very well, as did several others. It is not just that children get addicted; they also do not learn how to treat each other and get completely the wrong impression of what they should do. In fact, horrifyingly, I heard that throttling, for instance, is on the increase because it has apparently been appearing on porn sites recently. It does not take long to corrupt the next generation, and that is my real concern: we are destroying the future.

To future-proof it, because that is the other worry, I would suggest quite simply that access to any website, regardless of size, that has any pornography must have anonymous age verification. It is very simple. We may not want to prosecute the small ones or those that do not matter, but it allows us to adapt it to whoever is successful tomorrow—because today’s success may disappear tomorrow, and a new website may come up that may not fall within it.

The other thing I want to mention quickly is that anonymity is necessary because it is not illegal, for instance, for any of your Lordships’ House to go and access pornography, but it is severely career limiting if anyone gets to know about it—and that is the trouble. The same thing applies if you are a Muslim leader and wish to buy some alcohol online. That is why we need to have this. It is perfectly possible, it is out there and lots of companies can do it.

Finally, what is misinformation? It is really the opposite opinion of what you yourself think, and I think there are huge dangers in how we define that.