My Lords, I echo the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. This is an important group of amendments, and it has been a useful debate. I was slightly concerned when I heard the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, talk about using her daughter’s device to see whether it could access porn sites in terms of what that is going to do to her daughter’s algorithm and what it will now feed her. I will put that concern to one side, but any future report on that would be most welcome.
Amendments 2, 3 and 5, introduced so well by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, test what should be in scope to protect children. Clearly, we have a Bill that has evolved over some time, with many Ministers, to cover unambiguously social media, as user-to-user content, and search. I suspect that we will spend a lot more time discussing social media than search, but I get the rationale that those are perhaps the two main access points for a lot of the content we are concerned about. However, I would argue that apps are also main access points. I will come on to discuss the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Harding,
which I have also signed. If we are going to go with access points, it is worth probing and testing the Government’s intent in excluding some of these other things. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, raises in his amendments the issue of games, as others have done. Games are clearly a point of access for lots of children, as well as adults, and there is plenty of harm that can be created as a result of consuming them.
Along with some other noble Lords, some time ago I attended an all-party group which looked at the problems related to incel harm online and how people are breadcrumbed from mainstream sites to quite small websites to access the really problematic, most hateful and most dangerous content. Those small websites, as far as I can see, are currently excluded from the regime in the Bill, but the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, potentially would bring them into scope. That meeting also discussed cloud services and the supply chain of the technical infrastructure that such risks, including incels and other things, use. Why are cloud services not included in some context in terms of the harms that might be created?
Questions have been asked about large language model AIs such as ChatGPT. These are future technologies that have now arrived, which lots of people are talking about and variously freaking out about or getting excited by. There is an important need to bring those quite quickly into the scope of regulation by Ofcom. ChatGPT is a privately owned platform—a privately owned technology—that is offering up not only access to the range of knowledge that is online but, essentially, the range of human concepts that are online in interaction with that knowledge—privately owned versions of truth.
What is to stop any very rich individual deciding to start their own large language model with their own version of the truth, perhaps using their own platform? Former President Trump comes to mind as someone who could do that and I suggest that, if truth is now a privatised thing, we might want to have some regulation here.
The future-proofing issues are why we should be looking very seriously at the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Allan, as always, and I have reflected a lot on his very useful car safety and plane safety regulation analogy from our previous day in Committee. The proportionality issue that he raised in his useful contribution this time is potentially addressed by the proposed new clause we discussed last time. If the Bill sets out quite clearly the aim of the legislation, that would set the frame for the regulator and for how it would regulate proportionately the range of internet services that might be brought into scope by this set of amendments.
I also support Amendment 92, on bringing in safety by design and the regime that has been so successful in respect of the age-related design code and the probability of access by children, rather than what is set out in the Bill.
I turn to Amendments 19, 22, 298 and 299 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Harding and Lady Stowell, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones,
and myself. Others, too, have drawn the analogy between app stores and corner shops selling alcohol, and it makes sense to think about the distribution points in the system—the pinch points that all users go through—and to see whether there is a viable way of protecting people and regulating through those pinch points. The Bill seeks to protect us via the platforms that host and promote content having regulation imposed on them, and risk assessments and so on, but it makes a lot of sense to add app stores, given how we now consume the internet.
I remember, all those years ago, having CD drives—floppy disk drives, even—in computers, and going off to buy software from a retail store and having to install it. I do not go quite as far back as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, but I remember those days well. Nowadays as consumers almost all of us access our software through app stores, be it software for our phones or software for our laptops. That is the distribution point for mobiles and essentially it is, as others have said, a duopoly that we hope will be addressed by the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill.
As others have said, 50% of children under 10 in this country use smartphones and tablets. When you get to the 12 to 15 bracket, you find that 97% of them use mobile phones and tablets. We have, as noble Lords have also said, Google Family Link and the Apple Family Sharing function. That is something we use in my family. My stepdaughter is 11—she will be 12 in June—and I appear to be in most cases the regulator who has to give her the Family Link code to go on to Google Classroom when she does her homework, and who has to allow her to download an app or add another contact—there is a whole range of things on her phone for which I provide the gatekeeper function. But you have to be relatively technically competent and confident to do all those things, and to manage her screen time, and I would like to see more protection for those who do not have that confidence—and indeed for myself as well, because maybe I would not have to be bothered quite as often.
It is worth noting that the vast majority of children in this country who have smartphones—the last time I looked at the stats, it was around 80%—have iPhones; there must be a lot of old iPhones that have been recycled down the family. To have an iCloud account, if you are under 13, you have to go through a parent or other suitable adult. However, if you are over 13, you can get on with it; that raises a whole set of issues and potential harms for children over the age of 13.
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I am less familiar with the user journey and how it works on Google Play—we are more of an Apple family—but my understanding is that, for both Google Play and the Apple App Store, in order to set up an account you need credit card billing information. This creates ID verification, and the assurance that many of us are looking for is then provided as an additional safeguard for children. This is not something that anyone is arguing should replace the responsibilities set out in the Bill for internet service providers—for example, that they should carry out risk assessments and be regulated. This is about having additional
safeguards at the point of distribution. We are not asking Apple and Google, in this case, to police the apps. We are asking them to ensure that the publishers of the applications set an age limit and then facilitate ensuring that that age limit is adhered to, according to everything that they know about the user of that device and their age. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, for her amendments on this important issue.
Finally, let me say this in anticipation of the Minister perhaps suggesting that this might be a good idea but we are far down the road with the Bill and Ofcom is ready to go and we want to get on with implementing it, so maybe let us not do this now but perhaps in another piece of legislation. Personally, I am interested in having a conversation about the sequence of implementation. It might be that we can implement the regime that Ofcom is good to go on but with the powers there in the Bill for it to cover app stores and some other wider internet services, according to a road map that it sets out and that we in Parliament can scrutinise. However, my general message is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, that we should get this right in this legislation and grab the opportunity, particularly with app stores, to bring other internet services in—given that we consume so much through applications—and to provide a safer environment for our children.