Digital Economy Bill

Debate between John Whittingdale and Claire Perry

3rd reading: House of Commons & Legislative Grand Committee: House of Commons & Programme motion No. 3: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 28th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Whittingdale]

I start by making it clear that I fully support the provisions in the Bill to require age verification to access pornographic sites. As I observed on Second Reading, it is just as well, since my name is on the front of the Bill.

I would like to introduce an element of caution. Unlike a lot of other material online that has been discussed—child pornography, racist material, hate speech, extremist encouragement and copyright breaches—we are talking here about legal content. Like it or not, the sites we are discussing are visited by millions and millions of people every day. They are some of the most popular sites on the entire internet.

As I have said, I support the idea of age verification to ensure that only those who can appropriately view this material do so, although there are concerns. I have yet to see exactly how age verification is going to work. We have seen examples of existing content access control systems through things such as credit cards, or mobile phones that have been verified as belonging to an adult. It is, in my view, asking a lot to ask people who want to access legal content to hand over their credit card numbers to pornographic website operators. The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) was absolutely right to flag up the data protection concerns about that. I hope that Ofcom will look very carefully at how the CAC systems work.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the main ways in which young people are now exposed to pornography is through social media such as Twitter, and I do not really see that the Bill will do anything to stop that happening. That is not to say that we should not take action against pornographic sites. The original Bill contained a number of quite significant enforcement measures, such as requiring payment providers, website hosting companies and advertisers to stop dealing with websites that had been identified as not complying with the law under the Bill. There are already signs that a number of the big providers are going to comply. MindGeek, which is probably the biggest operator, has said that it will introduce age verification systems, although it wanted others to do so as well. I hope that it will happen.

[Claire Perry]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Whittingdale]

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I am very conscious of the Deputy Speaker’s strictures.

I was not persuaded of the necessity of introducing ISP blocking. It represents a considerable infringement of the civil liberties of individuals who want to access material that, as everybody has recognised in this debate, they are perfectly entitled to access. At a time when we are very concerned about the growth of censorship online, and when certain countries would like to take this as a precedent for saying, “It is fine to block content that we do not particularly like,” I think that it is a dangerous road to go down. I hope that the measures originally in the Bill will prove sufficient, that operators will introduce age verification and that we will pause before taking the next step and introducing ISP blocking. To that extent, I rather hope that this Digital Economy Bill is like the Digital Economy Bill that we debated in 2010. That Bill provided for the Government to intervene and require ISP blocking, but the measure was never introduced.