UK Parliament / Open data

Online Safety Bill

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for tabling the amendment. If I had been quicker, I would have added my name to it, because he may— I use the word “may” advisedly, because I am not sure—have identified quite a serious gap in terms of future-proofing. As far as I understand it, in a somewhat naive way, the amendment probes whether there is a gap between provider-generated content and user-generated content and whether provider-generated content could lead to a whole lot of ghastly stuff on the metaverse without any way of tackling it because it is deemed to have fallen outside the scope of the Bill.

I am grateful to Carnegie UK for having tried to talk me through this—it is pretty complicated. As a specific example, I understand that a “Decentraland” avatar pops up on gaming sites, and it is useful because it warns you about the dangers of gambling and what it can lead to. But then there is the problem about the backdrop to this avatar: at the moment, it seems to be against gambling, but you can see how those who have an interest in gambling would be quite happy to have the avatar look pretty hideous but have a backdrop of a really enticing casino with lots of lights and people streaming in, or whatever. I am not sure where that would fit, because it seems that this type of content would be provider-generated. When it comes to the metaverse and these new ways of interacting with 3D immersion, I am not clear that we have adequately caught within the Bill some of these potentially dangerous applications. So I hope that the Minister will be able to clarify it for us today and, if not, possibly to write between now and the next time that we debate this, because I have an amendment on future-proofing, but it is in a subsequent group.

About this proceeding contribution

Reference

831 c1771 

Session

2022-23

Chamber / Committee

House of Lords chamber
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