My Lords, I follow the noble Lord, Lord Russell, particularly in talking about Amendments 43, 87 and 242, which raise some interesting and quite profound questions on what we are expecting from the market of internet services once the Online Safety Bill is in place.
It is worth taking a moment to remind ourselves of what we do and do not want from the Bill. We want services that are causing harm and are unwilling to take reasonable steps to address that to leave the UK market. That is clear. As a result of this legislation, it will be likely that some services leave the UK market, because we have asked them to do reasonable things and they have said no; they are not willing to comply with the law and therefore they need to be out. There is a whole series of measures in the Bill that will lead to that.
Equally, we want services that are willing to take reasonable steps to stay in the UK market, do the risk assessments, work at improvements and have the risks under control. They may not all be resolved on day
one—otherwise, we would not need the legislation—but they should be on a path to address the risks that have been identified. We want those people to be in the market, for two reasons.
The first is that we want choice for people; we do not take pleasure in shutting people who are providing services out of the market. Also, from a child safety point of view, there is a genuine concern that, if you limit choice too far, you will end up creating more of a demand for completely unregulated services that sit outside the UK and will fill the gap. There is a balance in making sure that there is a range of attractive services, so that teenagers in particular feel that their needs are being met. We want those services to be regulated and committed to improvement.
Something that is in between will be a hard decision for Ofcom—something that is not great today, but not so bad that we want it out tomorrow. Ofcom will have to exercise considerable judgment in how it deals with those services. This is my interpretation of where proportionality and capacity come in. If you are running a very large internet service, something such as PhotoDNA, which is the technology that allows you to scan photos and detect child abuse images, is relatively straightforward to implement. All the major providers do it, but there are costs to that for smaller services. There are some real capacity challenges around implementing those kinds of technology. It is getting better over time and we would like them to do it, but you would expect Ofcom to engage in a conversation as a smaller service—smaller not in terms of its users but in its engineers and capacity—may need a little longer to implement such a technology.
A larger service could do proactive investigations. If it has a large team, once it has identified that something is problematic, it can investigate proactively. Again, a smaller service may not have the bodies on the ground to do that, but you would hope it would develop that capacity. It is important to recognise something about capacity if we are to encourage those that are half way between to come to the light side rather than slip off to the dark side.
I am interested in the Minister’s interpretation of these words and the instruction to Ofcom. We will be dependent on Ofcom, which will sit on the other side of a real or virtual table with the people who run these companies, as Ofcom can insist that they come in and talk to it. It will have to make these judgments, but we do not want it to be conned or to be a walkover for an organisation that has the capacity or could do things that are helpful, but is simply refusing to do them or somehow trying to pull the wool over Ofcom’s eyes.
Equally, we do not want Ofcom to demand the impossible of a service that genuinely struggles to meet a demand and that has things broadly under control. That is the balance and the difficult judgment. I think we are probably aiming for the same thing, and I hope the Minister is able to clarify these instructions and the way the Government expect Ofcom to interpret them. We are looking for that point at which Ofcom is seriously demanding but does not get overbearing and unnecessarily drive out of the market people who are making best efforts to do their risk assessments and then work hard to resolve those risks.