My Lords, this has been a really fascinating debate and I need to put a stake in the ground pretty early on by saying that, although my noble friend Lord Allan has raised some important points and stimulated an important debate, I absolutely agree with the vast majority of noble Lords who have spoken in favour of the amendment so cogently put forward by the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Harding.
Particularly as a result of the Bill’s being the subject of a Joint Committee, it has changed considerably over time in response to comment, pressure, discussion and debate and I believe very much that during Committee stage we will be able to make changes, and I hope the Minister will be flexible enough. I do not believe that
the framework of the Bill is set in concrete. There are many things we can do as we go through, particularly in the field of making children safer, if we take some of the amendments that have been put forward on board. In particular, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, set out why the current scope of the Bill will fail to protect children if it is kept to user-to-user and search services. She talked about blogs with limited functionalities, gaming without user functionalities and mentioned the whole immersive environment, which the noble Lord, Lord Russell, described as eye-watering. As she said, it is not fair to leave parents or children to work out whether they are on a regulated service. Children must be safe wherever they are online.
As someone who worked with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, in putting the appropriate design code in place in that original Data Protection Act, I am a fervent believer that it is perfectly appropriate to extend in the way that is proposed today. I also support her second amendment, which would bring the Bill’s child user condition in line with the threshold of the age-appropriate design code. It is the expectation—I do not think it an unfair expectation—of parents, teachers and children themselves that the Bill will apply to children wherever they are online. Regulating only certain services will mean that emerging technologies that do not fit the rather narrow categories will not be subject to safety duties.
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The noble Baroness talked about thousands of children being potentially at risk of not having the protection of the Bill. That is absolutely fair comment. Our Joint Committee report said:
“We recommend that the ‘likely to be accessed by children’ test in the draft Online Safety Bill should be the same as the test underpinning the Age Appropriate Design Code’.
The Government responded:
“The government considers that the approach taken in the Bill is aligned with the Age Appropriate Design Code and will ensure consistency for businesses. In addition, the status of the legislative test in the Online Safety Bill is binding in a way that the test in the Age Appropriate Design Code is not”.
In that case, since both those statements in the current Bill are patently not the case, it is incumbent on the Government to change the Bill in the direction that the noble Baroness has asked for.
My noble friend stimulated a very important debate about the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, in particular. That is another major potential omission in the Bill. The tech giants responsible for the distribution of nearly all apps connecting smartphone users to the internet are not currently covered in the scope of the Bill. She said that the online safety regime must look at this whole area much more broadly. App stores should be added to the list of service providers who will be mandated by the Bill to protect children and all users online. I am not going to go into all the arguments that have been made so well by noble Lords today, but of course Google and app stores have a monopoly on app distribution, yet they do not control users’ ages. They have the technical ability to prevent minors accessing certain applications reserved for adults, as evidenced by the existing parental control functions on both smartphone operating systems and their
corresponding app stores, and of course, as the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, said, this applies not just to children but to vulnerable adults as well.
I thought the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, put it very well: other sectors of the economy have already implemented such control in the distribution of goods and services in the offline world; alcohol consumption provides a good example for understanding those issues. Why cannot Google and Apple have duties that a corner store can adhere to? App stores do not have age assurance systems in place and do not actually seem to wish to take any responsibility for the part they can play in permitting harms. I say to my noble friend that the word “store” is the clue: these are products being sold through the app store and there should be age-gating on those apps. The only way to improve safety is to make sure that app developers and companies that distribute these apps do more to ensure that children and vulnerable adults are appropriately kept away from adult applications and content. That is an entirely reasonable duty to place on them: it is an essential part, I think, of the framework of the Bill that we should take these sets of amendments on board.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford talked about the fact that harms will only increase in coming years, particularly, as he said, with ever younger children having access to mobile technology. Of course, I agree with my noble friend about the question of media literacy. This goes hand in hand with regulation, as we will discover when we talk about this later on. These amendments will not, in the words of my noble friend, break the internet: I think they will add substantially and beneficially to regulation.
I say to my noble friend Lord Storey that I support his amendments too; they are more like probing amendments. There is a genuine gap that I think many of us were not totally aware of. I assumed that, in some way, the PEGI classifications applied here, but if age ratings do not apply to online games, that is a major gap. We need to look at that very carefully, alongside these amendments, which I very much hope the Minister will accept.