My Lords, I want to say a few things at this point because this amendment refers to age-verification policies, which Ofcom is supposed to be producing. I do not want to say very much about it, but there are things other than direct adult content online. For example, we need to block the sale of pornographic DVDs, which can be supplied through several of the major sites where you can buy all sorts of other stuff that it is perfectly legal to buy. The problem is that you need to block at individual page level for a lot of stuff, otherwise people will get around this fairly easily.
The real problem is that filters do not do anything about the material they are blocking. They work on look-up tables, which are compiled by various people who look at websites, or individual pages on websites, and the filter goes through the list. But a filter is not a magic device that knows when somebody is looking at pornography. If the material is not in the table, the filter does not know about it. Someone has to keep the table up to date and there are organisations that do that, and they do it very well, or at least they do their best. However, we should not think that the filter is a silver bullet that will provide the cure. That is why we need somehow to incentivise the vendors and content providers on the internet—the people who deliver the material over the web—rather than the people giving access to the web. That is probably why there will have to be legislation to incentivise them to behave in the right way. We should have both positive and negative incentives, so that people who behave well get some advantage and people who behave badly have a disadvantage.
11 am
Interestingly, I have talked to some of the adult content or pornographic providers and they are quite keen to have good, simple age-checking system, if it is cheap enough. They waste a lot of bandwidth on people who buy nothing and who can get into these sites for free. Credit card checks do not work because they arrive too late in the process. There are all sorts of things out there which one would not expect.
One reason I am speaking on this is that I am chairing the steering group on the British Standards Institution’s Publicly Available Specification 1296, which is about online age-checking. The idea is that this can be used by organisations and companies to try to do the right thing. It is difficult and complicated but we will probably produce the first draft for the steering group early in the new year. With luck, and if it is
good enough, it will give the Government something they can refer to when they come to make legislation and it will help people to comply with the law. I am talking about this at this point because the requirement for Ofcom to produce age-verification policies is referred to in the Bill, and I hope that the work of the steering group will be of help in that.
I am not against the principle of trying to make sure that things are filtered, as the Bill seeks to do. Filters provide a very good initial lock but they are not the perfect solution—they are not going to cover everything and we need to do better than that. The Bill may cause a lot of chaos in the internet service provider world and it may distract from the much more important issue of making sure that those who run the websites—the only people who really know what they are delivering—have an incentive to behave in the right way.