25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, on inspiring this debate. My decision to contribute was a bit belated—a bit lastminute.com, if she will pardon the allusion—and given three minutes my speech will need compression techniques.

The cybergenie is well and truly out of the bottle. After a very panoramic view of the range and speed of development, there is not much I can add. No doubt 25 years after Gutenberg and Caxton revolutionised communications in the 14th century, there was a similar debate. I look at the right reverend Prelates, and I am almost certain that there was, given the way that quite contentious pieces of text were circulating.

What we know is that the world wide web—the internet—presents an enormous range of benefits and challenges. It is all pervasive, as the noble Baroness told us, in every sphere of our society, whether health, education, banking, retail, science or defence. The ability for the world to be a truly global place and for people to communicate quite cheaply using Skype is another profound change in the way people communicate.

There are lots of positive benefits but perhaps some of the biggest challenges that the Government face are things such as cybersecurity. Everything now rests on the web or the internet in one way or the other. Keeping that information safe is a big challenge. Only yesterday, we saw a horrifying use of the internet in child abuse and paedophilia. Young children in the Philippines were being used to gratify the obscene needs of some people scattered around the world. We have to look at all aspects of that. There is the question of taxing the companies which make enormous profits on the internet and the world wide web in a way that does not hamper growth but makes sure that they make a real contribution to the economies that they benefit from. Equality of access is another point to which the noble Baroness drew our attention. There is still a digital divide when it comes to speed of access and, for some, a generational divide. We need to do more to encourage the older generation to participate, as the noble Lord, Lord Chadlington, said in his contribution, although I think that as each successive generation comes along, they will be more able to do that, and the younger generation to be internet savvy. I agree with the noble Baroness that the essential skills that employers need are not just literacy and numeracy but computer skills as well.

We need to remind ourselves that 50 years ago Gordon Moore came up with Moore’s law. For those who are not aware of it, it says that every two years the number of transistors on a chip will double. Without that vision and the determination of industry to provide it, the internet would probably be a lot slower. We need to remind ourselves that we have more power in our mobile phones than they had when they landed the first man on the moon.

What do we want the Government to do? The Government should encourage the older generation to participate and perhaps have an overall digital strategy to ensure that society as a whole benefits from the world wide web and the internet. I am an incurable optimist so I believe that the internet glass is half full.