My Lords, I will speak briefly on a couple of amendments and pick up from where the noble Lord, Lord Allan, just finished on Amendment 186A. I associate myself with all the comments that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, made on her Amendment 191A. As ever, she introduced the amendment so brilliantly that there is no need for me to add anything other than my wholehearted support.
I will briefly reference Amendment 253 from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. Both his amendment and my noble friend Lord Moylan’s point to one of the challenges about regulating the digital world, which is that it touches everything. We oscillate between wanting to compartmentalise the digital and recognising that it is interconnected to everything. That is the same challenge faced by every organisation that is trying to digitise: do you ring-fence or recognise that it touches everything? I am very supportive of the principles behind Amendment 253 precisely because, in the end, it does touch everything. It is hugely important that, even though this Bill and others still to come are creating an extraordinarily powerful single regulator in the form of Ofcom, we also recognise the interconnectivity of the regulatory landscape. The amendment is very well placed, and I hope my noble friend the Minister looks favourably on it and its heritage from the pre-legislative scrutiny committee.
I will briefly add my thoughts on Amendment 186A in this miscellaneous group. It feels very much as if we are having a Committee debate on this amendment, and I thank my noble friend Lord Moylan for introducing it. He raises a hugely important point, and I am incredibly sympathetic to the logic he set out.
In this area the digital world operates differently from the physical world, and we do not have the right balance at all between the powers of the big companies and consumer rights. I am completely with my noble friend in the spirit in which he introduced the amendment but, together with the noble Lord, Lord Allan, I think it would be better tackled in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill, precisely because it is much broader than online safety. This fundamentally touches the issue of consumer rights in the digital world and I am worried that, if we are not careful, we will do something with the very best intentions that actually makes things slightly worse.
I worry that the terms and conditions of user-to-user services are incomprehensible to consumers today. Enshrining it as a contract in law might, in some cases, make it worse. Today, when user-to-user services have used our data for something, they are keen to tell us that we agreed to it because it was in their terms of service. My noble friend opens up a really important issue to which we should give proper attention when the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill arrives in the House. It is genuinely not too late to address that, as it is working its way through the Commons now. I thank my noble friend for introducing the amendment, because we should all have thought of the issue earlier, but it is much broader than online safety.