Online Safety Bill

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I have two observations, two pleas, one offer of help and four minutes to deliver all this, so here goes.

Observation one is that this Bill is our answer to the age-old question of “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” or, in the vernacular, “Who watches the watchmen?” With several thousand strokes of the pen, Parliament is granting to itself the power to tell tens of thousands of online services how they should manage their platforms if they wish to access the UK market. Parliament will give directions to Ofcom about the outcomes it wants to see and Ofcom will translate these into detailed instructions and ensure compliance through a team of several hundred people that the platforms will pay for. In-scope services will be given a choice—pay up and follow Ofcom’s instructions or get out of the UK market. We are awarding ourselves significant superpowers in this Bill, and with power comes great scrutiny as I am sure will happen in this House.

My second observation is that regulating online content is hard. It is hard because of scale. If regulating traditional media is like air traffic controllers managing a few thousand flights passing over the UK each day, then regulating social media is more like trying to control all the 30 million private cars that have access to UK roads. It is hard because it requires judgment. For many types of speech there is not a bright line between what is legal and illegal so you have to work on the basis of likelihoods and not certainties. It is hard because it requires trade-offs—processes designed to remove “bad” content will invariably catch some “good” content and you have to decide on the right balance between precision and recall for any particular system, and the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, has already referred to some of these challenges with specific examples.

I make this observation not to try and elicit any sympathy for online services, but rather some sympathy for Ofcom as we assign it the most challenging of tasks. This brings me to my first plea, which is that we allow Ofcom to make decisions about what constitutes compliance with the duties of care in the Bill without others second-guessing it. Because judgments and trade-offs are a necessary part of content moderation, there will always be people who take opposing views on where lines should have been drawn. These views may come from individuals, civil society or even Ministers and may form important and valuable input for Ofcom’s deliberations. But we should avoid creating mechanisms that would lead to competing and potentially conflicting definitions of compliance emerging. One chain of command—Parliament to Ofcom to the platforms—is best for accountability and effective regulation.

My second plea is for us to avoid cookie banner syndrome. The pop-ups that we all click on when visiting websites are not there for any technical reason but because of a regulatory requirement. Their origins lie in a last-minute amendment to the e-privacy directive from Members of the European Parliament who had concerns about online behavioural advertising. In practice, they have had little impact on advertising while costing many millions and leaving most users at best mildly irritated and at worst in greater risk as they learn to click through anything to close banners and get to websites.

There are several elements in this Bill that are at risk of cookie banner syndrome. Measures such as age and identity verification and content controls can be useful if done well but could also be expensive and ineffective if we mandate solutions that look good on paper but do not work in practice. If you see me mouthing “cookies” at you as we discuss the Bill, please do not see it as an offer of American biscuits but as a flag that we may be about to make an expensive mistake.

This brings to me to my final point, which is an offer of technical advice for any noble Lords trying to understand how the Bill will work in practice: my door and inbox are always open. I have spent 25 years working on internet regulation as poacher turned gamekeeper, turned poacher, turned gamekeeper. I may have a little more sympathy with the poachers than most politicians, but I am all gamekeeper now and keen to see this Bill become law. For those who like this kind of thing, I share more extensive thoughts on the Bill than I can get into four minutes in a blog and podcast called “Regulate Tech”.