25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I confess an interest in that I earn most of my income from the web and that the social enterprise I am promoting at the moment, which is called The Good Careers Guide, depends for its potential success entirely on web technologies, so I am perforce an optimist for the web but, I hope, a rational one.

As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, we are in the middle of an unprecedented upheaval, but we probably do not yet realise the size of its consequences. I am optimistic that this will lead to a far better world than we have at the moment, but we will have to work hard to make sure that it does. We in Parliament have a very important role to play in that, acting in the interests of citizens and the country to tame the forces which might otherwise overwhelm us.

The noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, talked about the importance of education and of including all our citizens in the benefits of the internet. Doubtless, the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, will also speak about that. I entirely agree with that.

I hope, too, that we will take a stand against those parts of the internet which have become, or seem to be becoming, more powerful than states. We should stand beside Sherlock Holmes in confronting our digital Charles Augustus Magnussens and the amoral, all-knowing Amazon, Google, Facebook and others. I think we should stop short of Sherlock Holmes’s solution of actually shooting them, but we should stand up to them. We should not allow them to use legal tax avoidance to destroy our own domestic companies which cannot take advantage of the routes that the international companies do.

We also have to take a strong look at ownership. I own my library, which was my parents’ library and my grandparents’ library and beyond that, but my children will have no library. All they are being offered at the moment is the opportunity to rent, and they will have nothing to give to their children. That is the other side of the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. Why I do not approve of piracy is because the owners of copyright are trying to deprive us of the right of ownership once we have paid for it. We need something along the lines of an information right—something to give us as citizens the right over our own information against the all-powerful organisations which have made themselves a necessary part of life and demand all our information and all power over it if we are to use their services.

Politics and politicians have a very important part to play in the future of the internet. I very much hope that the Government will face up to that.