My Lords, we have been talking about payments. I agree entirely that the big challenge is everybody moving offshore, and so the problem becomes foreign websites supplying pornography. The Committee is quite right about that. But I thought I ought to comment on the business of processing payments. One thing became apparent to us when we began discussing online age checking—and we are calling it that rather than age verification, because verification is tied up with identity. We need to separate the two because one is an attribute and the other is identity. I do not want to confuse the two, but I will not give the Committee a long lecture about that.
The point is that we soon discovered that there is an awful lot of stuff out there for free and therefore payment does not come into it. If we want to protect our children, we have to do so when no payment is involved. The very fact that someone can pay proves that they are at a legal age to watch this sort of stuff, but actually the big problem is the stuff that is out there for free. That is what we are really trying to block. The steering group of the BSI has representatives from the identity world, the ISPs, child protection charities, tobacco, e-cigarettes, alcohol, gaming, gambling, and academia, and government observers. The trouble with this issue is its complexity. I want to say briefly that payments are a bit of a red herring. On the other hand, blocking foreign pornographic providers is absolutely right and needs to be done.
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