My Lords, I am a poor substitute for the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, in terms of the substance of the issues covered by these amendments, but I am pleased that we have been able to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, on that. I will make a short contribution on the technology and the challenges of classification, because there are some important issues here that the amendments bring out.
We will be creating rules for categorising platforms. As I understand it, the rules will have a heavy emphasis on user numbers but will not be exclusively linked to user numbers. It would be helpful if the Minister could tease out a little more about how that will work. However, it is right even at this stage to consider the possibility that there will need to be exceptions to those rules and to have a mechanism in place for that.
We need to recognise that services can grow very quickly these days, and some of the highest-risk moments may be those when services have high growth but still very little revenue and infrastructure in place to look after their users. This is a problem generally with stepped models, where you have these great jumps; in a sense, a sliding scale would be more rational, so that responsibilities increase over time, but clearly from a practical view it is hard to do that, so we are going to end up with some kind of step model.
We also need to recognise that, from a technical point of view, it is becoming cheaper and easier to build new user-to-user services all the time. That has been the trend for years, but it is certainly the case now. If someone wants to create a service, they can rent the infrastructure from a number of providers rather than buying it, they can use a lot of code that is freely available—they do not need to write as much code as they used to—and they can promote their new service using all the existing social networks, so you can go from zero to significant user numbers in very quick time, and that is getting quicker all the time. I am interested to hear how the Minister expects such services to be regulated.
The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, referred to niche platforms. There will be some that have no intention to comply, even if we categorise them as a 2B service. The letter will arrive from Ofcom and go in the bin. They will have no interest whatever. Some of the worst services will be like that. The advantage of us ensuring that we bring them into scope is that we can move through the enforcement process quickly and get to business disruption, blocking, or whatever we need to do to get them out of the UK market. Other niche services will be willing to come into line if they are told they are categorised as 2B but given a reasonable set of requirements. Some of Ofcom’s most valuable work might be precisely to work with them: services that are borderline but recognise that they want to have a viable business, and they do not have a viable business by breaking the law. We need to get hold of them and bring them into the net to be able to work with them.
Finally, there is another group which is very mainstream but in the growing phase and busy growing and not worrying about regulation. For that category of company, we need to work with them as they grow, and the critical thing is to get them early. I think the amendments would help Ofcom to be able get to them early—ideally, in partnership with other regulators, including the European Union, which is now regulating in a similar way under the Digital Services Act. If we can work with those companies as they come into 2B, then into category 1—in European speak, that is a VLOP, a very large online platform—and get them used to the idea that they will have VLOP and category 1 responsibilities before they get there, we can make a lot more progress. Then we can deliver what we are all trying to, which is a safer internet for people in the UK