My Lords, we should be very grateful to my noble friend for a very full explanation of what he seeks to be approved today. It sounds dry and technical but, in fact, although I do not say that my noble friend Lord McNally is like Moses in the splendid portrait, bringing down the tables of the law to the Israelites, in seeking the approval of the House to the regulations what he is doing is important not only in this country but throughout Europe and in the wider world.
We are trying in the regulations to lay down a fair framework, as my noble friend said, which will provide effective remedies to victims without unduly burdening the freedom of speech. If he will allow me to say so—he has little choice—I remember him at an early stage insisting that the Defamation Bill should cover the difficult subject of defamation via the internet. That was an important decision taken by him, however difficult it was to give effect to it. It was important because we had no proper laws in this country striking a fair balance between free speech and defamation in relation to the internet. The regulations are part of the process which, I understand, will come into force in April. They will be read with interest in the United States, on the most libertarian side, and in China, on the most restrictive.
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In this country we are subject to the e-commerce directive, which strikes a European balance between the extremes of absolute immunity for internet service
providers and the Chinese firewall—the great wall of China—which seeks to regulate the internet. In Europe, we find a compromise and the beauty of these regulations is that they strike a fair balance, as the Minister has said. They do not deal with other problems of speech via the internet. They do not deal with privacy. They do not deal, obviously, with cybercrime. They do not deal with copyright, which is dealt with very well by our own courts. They deal with all that they can deal with, which is defamation. I am sure that it is right to do so by means of regulations rather than on the face of the statute. That enables flexibility in the future when, as I am sure we will have to, we will need to amend the scheme in the light of further technological change.
In one sense, we are trying to do something which King Canute’s courtiers failed to do. They could not stop the tide from coming in and we cannot in this country, by our one system alone, deal with all abuses on the world wide web. However, I would be sceptical about trying to seek too much international regulation of the internet because I fear that that would, unlike these regulations, be too coercive of free speech and too much overregulation.
I congratulate the noble Lord and the Government on these regulations. They are probably the last word that we will say in this House about the process of completing the work on the Defamation Act, which has taken three careful years by the noble Lord and his team, and by the other place. I am very glad to be present today to welcome these regulations.