My Lords, I also speak in support of Amendments to 281, 281A and 281B, to which I have added my name, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Russell. He and, as ever, the noble Baroness Kidron, have spoken eloquently, I am not going to spend much time on these amendments but I wanted to emphasise Amendment 281A.
In the old world of direct marketing—I am old enough to remember that when I was a marketing director it was about sending magazines, leaflets and letters—one spent all of one’s time working out how to build loyalty: how to get people to engage longer as a result of one’s marketing communication. In the modern digital world, that dwell time has been transformed into a whole behavioural science of its own. It has developed a whole set of tools. Today, we have been using the word “activity” at the beginning of the Bill in the new Clause 1 but also “features” and “functionality”. The reason why Amendment 281A is important is that there is a danger that the Bill keeps returning to being just about content. Even in Clause 208 on functionality, almost every item in subsection (2) mentions content, whereas Amendment 281A tries to spell out the elements of addiction-driving functionality that we know exist today.
I am certain that brilliant people will invent some more but we know that these ones exist today. I really think that we need to put them in the Bill to help everyone understand what we mean because we have spent days on this Bill—some of us have spent years, if not decades, on this issue—yet we still keep getting trapped in going straight back to content. That is another reason why I think it is so important that we get some of these functionalities in the Bill. I very much hope that, if he cannot accept the amendment today, my noble friend the Minister will go back, reflect and work out how we could capture these specific functionalities before it is too late.
I speak briefly on Amendments 28 to 30. There is unanimity of desire here to make sure that organisations such as Wikipedia and Streetmap are not captured. Personally, I am very taken—as I often am—by the approach of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. We need to focus on risk rather than using individual examples, however admirable they are today. If Wikipedia chose to put on some form of auto-scroll, the risk of that service would go up; I am not suggesting that Wikipedia is going to do so today but, in the digital world, we should not assume that, just because organisations are charities or devoted to the public good, they cannot inadvertently cause harm. We do not make that assumption in the physical world either. Charities that put on physical events have to do physical risk assessments. I absolutely think that we should hold all organisations to that same standard. However, viewed through the prism of risk, Wikipedia—brilliant as it is—does not have a risk for child safety and therefore should not be captured by the Bill.