My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 19, 22, 298 and 299 in my name and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, and the noble Lords, Lord Knight and Lord Clement-Jones. I will also briefly add at the end of my speech my support for the amendments in the name of my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. It has been a huge privilege to be her support act all the way from the beginnings of the age-appropriate design code; it feels comfortable to speak after her.
I want briefly to set out what my amendments would do. Their purpose is to bring app stores into the child protection elements of the Bill. Amendment 19 would require app stores to prepare
“risk assessments equal to user-to-user services due to their role in distributing online content through apps to children and as a primary facilitator of user-to-user”
services reaching children. Amendment 22 would mandate app stores
“to use proportionate and proactive measures, such as age assurance, to prevent children”
coming into contact with
“primary priority content that is harmful to children”.
Amendments 298 and 299 would simply define “app” and “app stores”.
Let us be clear what app stores do. They enable customers to buy apps and user-to-user services. They enable customers to download free apps. They offer up curated content in the app store itself and decide what apps someone would like to see. They enable customers to search for apps for user-to-user content. They provide age ratings; as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, they may be different age ratings in different app stores for the same app. They sometimes block the download of apps based on the age rating and their assessment of someone’s age, but not always, and it is different for different app stores.
Why should they be included in this Bill—if it is not obvious from what I have already said? First, two companies are profiting from selling user-to-user products to children. Two app stores account for some 98%-plus of all downloads of user-to-user services, with no requirements to assess the risk of selling those products to children or to mitigate those risks. We do not allow that in the physical world so we should not allow it in the digital world.
Secondly, parents and teenagers tell us that this measure would help. A number of different studies have been done; I will reference just two. One was by FOSI, the Family Online Safety Institute, which conducted an international research project in which parents consistently said that having age assurance at the app store level would make things simpler and more effective for them; ironically, the FOSI research was conducted with Google.
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A second research study, conducted by Internet Matters and TikTok, unambiguously shows that teenagers themselves would prefer having app store age assurance. Neither of those research projects suggests that the
age assurance should be instead of age assurance in the apps themselves. They view it as additive, as an addition that would make it simpler for them and ensure that fewer children reach the point of downloading apps that they should not.
The third reason why this is necessary is that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, Google and Apple are already doing some of this. They are doing it differently and should be commended, to some extent, for the progress that they have made over the past five years. Google Family Link and the family functionality on the Apple store are better than they were five years ago. However, we should be troubled that this is currently not regulated. They are age-rating apps differently. Can you imagine, in the physical world, Sainsbury’s deciding that alcohol was suitable for 17 year-olds and above, Tesco deciding that it was suitable for 18 year-olds and above, and government not being able to intervene? That is the world which we are in with access to pornography today.
I am the mother of a 17 year-old girl. I went into her iPhone last night and searched on the Apple App Store. Pornography apps come up as age appropriate for 17+. This is the consequence of an unregulated app store world. Today, as I said, the vast majority is with Google and Apple. On the day that the Government launch their digital competition Bill, we should hope that over time there will be further app stores. What is to say that those app stores will do anything to protect children as they try to compete with Google and Apple?
The final reason why we should do this is that a number of app developers, particularly small ones, have expressed to me a concern that app stores might abuse their power of age-gating the internet to block apps that compete with their own. That is exactly why we should regulate this space, rather than leaving it for Google and Apple to decide what an age gate should or should not look like. Self-regulation has failed to protect children online over the past 15 years. Many of us in the Chamber today have been working in this space for at least that long. There is no reason to believe that self-regulation would be any more successful for app stores than it has been for the rest of the internet.
I have tabled these amendments and ask my noble friend the Minister to recognise that I have done so in the spirit of starting the conversation on how we regulate app stores. It is unambiguously clear that we should regulate them. The last thing that I would want to do is have my amendment slow down the progress of this Bill. The last thing that I would want is to slow down Ofcom’s implementation of the Bill. However, we keep being told that this is a framework Bill to focus on systems and processes, and it is an essential part of that framework that app stores are included.
Very briefly, I will speak in support of the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, by telling you a story. One of my first jobs in the retail world was as the commercial director for Woolworths—we are all old enough in this Chamber to remember Woolworths —which was the leading retailer of toys. One of my first category directors for the toy category had come from outside the toy industry. I will never forget the morning when he came to tell me that an own-label Woolworths toy had caused a near-fatal accident with a child. He was new to the industry and had not
worked in toys before. He said, “It’s only one child; don’t worry, it’ll be okay”. I remember saying, “That is not how health and safety with children works. This is one incident; we need to delist the product immediately; we need to treat this incredibly seriously. Imagine if that was your child”. I do not begrudge his reaction; he had never worked in that sector before.
However, the reality is that if we do not look at the impact of the digital world on every child, then we are adopting a different standard in the digital world than we do in the physical world. That is why the “likely to be accessed by children” definition that has been tried and tested, not just in this House but in legislatures around the world, should be what is used in this Bill.