My Lords, the proposers of these amendments have made a very good case to answer. My only reservation is that I think there are rather more subtle and proportionate ways of dealing with this—I take on board entirely what the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, says.
I keep coming back to the deliberations that we had in the Joint Committee. We said:
“All statutory requirements on user-to-user services, for both adults and children, should also apply to Internet Society Services likely to be accessed by children, as defined by the Age Appropriate Design Code”.
This goes back to the test that we described earlier, to
“ensure all pornographic websites would have to prevent children from accessing their content”,
and back to that definition,
“likely to be accessed by children”.
The Government keep resisting this aspect, but it is a really important way of making sure that we deal with this proportionately. We are going to have this discussion about minimum age-assurance standards. Rather than simply saying, “It has to be age verification”,
if we had a set of principles for age assurance, which can encompass a number of different tools and approaches, that would also help with the proportionality of what we are talking about.
The Government responded to the point we made about age assurance. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, was pretty persuasive in saying that we should take this on board in our Joint Committee report, and she had a Private Member’s Bill at the ready to show us the wording, but the Government came back and said:
“The Committee’s recommendations stress the importance of the use of age assurance being proportionate to the risk that a service presents”.
They have accepted that this would be a proportionate way of dealing with it, so this is not black and white. My reservation is that there is a better way of dealing with this than purely driving through these three or four amendments, but there is definitely a case for the Government to answer on this.