My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for that very detailed response, which I will have to read very carefully because it was quite complicated. That is the answer to my question. Terms of service will not be very easy to identify because to answer my questions he has had to pray in aid issues that Ofcom will necessarily have to assess—terms of services—to get at whether the companies are performing the duties that the Bill requires of them.
I will not go further on that. We know that there will be enough there to answer the main questions I had about this. I take the point about search being distinctively different in this area, although a tidy mind like mine likes to see all these things in one place and understand all the words. Every time I see “publicly available statement”, I do not know why but I think about people being hanged in public rather than a term of service or a contract.
3.30 pm
The noble Lord, Lord Allan, made the point that nobody ever reads these terms of service. We generally agree with that, but if you are married to a lawyer, as I am, you read an awful lot more of these things than you perhaps feel are good for your diet. I cannot even go on holiday until I have proven to her that I have read every word of my insurance policy on what I will be shipped home with. It is a frightening thought that some people do that because they like doing it, and she does.
I will not take this much further. The jibe that I had at the beginning—that this does not quite fit with the rest of the Bill—is still there, but we will not get much change out of what we are doing. The important thing is that, even though it is a rather complicated route, it looks as though Ofcom will have, possibly retrospectively and with more transparency than actual powers, the ability to look at terms of service when they are not working.
What I miss is the ability to set a standard for terms of service that is broadly acceptable to people, which was exactly the point that the noble Lord made: they cannot be so complex that you will not read them but they have to be sufficient to achieve what they do. I am still lost about what you can use the triple shield for if you do not know whether the services will deliver what you know you do not want. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.