My Lords, I want to respond to some of the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. I have been looking forward to this debate equally, as it touches on some crucial issues. One of the mistakes of the Bill that I place on the Government is that it was sold as somehow a balancing Bill. It is not; it is a speech-limiting Bill, as all Bills of this kind are. Its primary purpose is to prevent people in the United Kingdom encountering certain types of content.
If you support the Bill, it is because you believe that those restrictions are necessary and proportionate in the context of Article 8. Others will disagree. We cannot pretend that it is boosting free speech. The United States got it right in its first amendment. If you want to maximise speech, you prohibit your parliament regulating on speech: “Congress shall make no law that limits speech”. As soon as you start regulating, you tend towards limitations; the question in the UK and European contexts is whether those limitations are justified and justifiable.
7.30 pm
I happen to think that certain limitations are, and there are reasons for that—not least, as we have to remind ourselves, because the Bill does not regulate the entire internet. As we discussed when we talked about exemptions, most direct speech by an individual in the United Kingdom remains unaffected. Email is unaffected; personal websites are unaffected. It regulates search and user to user. If you have concerns, as perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, does, you may feel that it goes too far, but we should be careful not to equate social media with the entire internet. When you are thinking about one’s right to speak, all those channels matter, not just the channels we are talking about. There is a case for saying that restrictions are necessary and proportionate with respect to Article 8, in the context of a regulation that regulates part—albeit an important part—of the internet.
Another thing to recognise—and this is where I perhaps depart from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan—is that we are in a sense dealing with privately managed public spaces on the internet. There is a lot of debate around this but, for me, they are functionally equivalent to other privately managed public spaces such as pubs, hotels or sports grounds. In none of those context do we expect all legal speech to be permissible. Rather, they all have their own norms and they enforce them. I cannot go into a sports ground and say what I like; I will get thrown out if I carry out certain actions within most
of those public spaces. We are talking about privately managed public spaces; anyone can go in but, in entering that space, you have to conform to the norms of that space. As I said, I am not aware of many spaces where all legal speech is permitted.