My Lords, I rise briefly to support many of the amendments in this group. I will start with Amendments 281, 281A and 281B in the name of my noble friend Lord Russell, to which I have added my name. The noble Lord set out the case very well. I will not reiterate what he said, but it is simply the case that the features and functionalities of regulated companies should not be separated by search and user-to-user but should apply across any regulated company that has that feature. There is no need to worry about a company that does not have one of the features on the list, but it is a much more dangerous thing to have an absent feature than it is to have a single list and hold companies responsible for their features.
Only this morning, Meta released Thread as its challenger to Twitter. In the last month, Snapchat added generative AI to its offering. Instagram now does video, and TikTok does shopping. All these companies are moving into a place where they would like to be the one that does everything. That is their commercial endgame, and that is where the Bill should set its sights.
Separating out functionality and, as the noble Lord, Lord Russell, said, failing to add what we already know, puts the Bill in danger of looking very old before the ink is dry. I believe it unnecessarily curtails Ofcom in being able to approach the companies for what they are doing, rather than for what the Bill thought they might be doing at this point. So, if the Minister is not in a position to agree to the amendment, I urge him at least to take it away and have a look at it, because it is a technical rather than an ideological matter. It would be wonderful to fix it.
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I support the other amendments in the group: Amendments 28 and 29, and the very interesting Amendment 30. We come back to a very similar issue, which is about design. The thing about Wikipedia is that it does not stand at the doorway and grab your attention, and it does not follow you for six months after you visit it. It does not have that algorithmic push. So, although I freely admit that there are some unsavoury things on Wikipedia, it does not push them at you or at young people. That is a really interesting thing for us to hold in mind when we talk about the next group of amendments on harm.
I am bound to say that, although the noble Lord, Lord Allan, might prefer his amendment and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, might prefer his, I prefer Amendment 245 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, which says that all services should be judged according to risk. This would stop this endless game of taking things out and putting things in, in case they behave badly, or taking things out for companies that we recognise now although we do not know what the companies of the future will be. We all have to remember that, even when we had the pre-legislative committee, we were not talking about large language models and when we started this Bill we were not talking about TikTok. Making laws for individual services is not a grand idea, but saying that it is not the size but the risk that should determine the category of a regulated service, and therefore its duties, seems a comprehensive way of getting to the same place.