My Lords, I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, said that this was a probing amendment and I will speak to it in that spirit. It needs a response to clarify the concerns that there might be on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord McNally’s “little man” who uses the internet if we were ever to go down a route where there were these broader requirements for people always to identify themselves when speaking across the internet. As I read the amendment, there would be an absolute requirement for people in the United Kingdom always to identify themselves if they wished to avail themselves of internet platforms.
We need to bear in mind the key concepts in the context of other areas where government has quite rightly identified a need to be able to detect wrongdoing on the internet and to go after those who are carrying out that wrongdoing, whatever form it may take. Those are the basic concepts that we think about when considering the right to privacy and the necessity of proportionality. We certainly should not have a counsel of despair; we should try to identify people and make them own their own content in the circumstance of an allegation of defamation. I think that we are agreed across the Committee about that basic principle of trying to connect the people who have a complaint with those who have made that speech.
I certainly would not hold to a counsel of despair that says, “This is impossible”. In most cases, people can be identified. Most of the cases that we will be dealing with will be arguments between people who are identified and known to each other and who have an issue around whether the speech that one has made
about the other is unlawful and defamatory and whether one of them wishes to take some action over that. In some of the cases that we have seen recently and that people have quoted, such as the Lord McAlpine case, it is clear that there has been an ability to identify and go after the principal people complained against.
When we think about those who genuinely are going to be able to hide behind anonymity, we are talking about a minority of instances. That is why I ask whether the test of requiring everyone to identify themselves whenever they speak would be a proportionate response to what will be a relatively small set of circumstances and whether it is necessary to do that.
Where I certainly have some sympathy, and we have had some reference to this already in today’s debate, is with regard to the cost of getting orders to disclose identity details. Again, we should be clear that those who provide internet services need some form of judicial authority to be able to disclose people’s personal data. I hope that we would all agree on the basic principle that it would be inappropriate for a service provider to disclose personal data about an individual simply on request; there has to be some kind of process that enables that release to be lawful and to be lawfully made. However, the current circumstances, as we have heard today, make that very expensive.
There is probably a lot of mileage that we could cover in terms of using legal processes that require the disclosure of data to narrow down the cases that we are talking about, where someone is genuinely and maliciously hiding behind anonymity, but I consider, as I referenced earlier, that those cases will be very much a minority. When we consider the measures that we should take in response, we should bear in mind that they should be proportionate and not do something excessive to deal with that tiny minority of problematic cases.