My Lords, before speaking to my Amendment 239A, I thank my noble friend the Minister, the Secretary of State and the teams in both the department and Ofcom for their collaborative approach in working to bring forward this group of amendments. I also thank my cosignatories. My noble friend Lady Stowell cannot be in her place tonight but she has been hugely helpful in guiding me through the procedure, as have been the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Knight, not to mention the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. It has been a proper cross-House team effort. Even the noble Lord, Lord Allan, who started out quite sceptical, has been extremely helpful in shaping the discussion.
I also thank the NSPCC and Barnardo’s for their invaluable advice and support, as well as Snap and Match—two companies which have been willing to stick their heads above the parapet and challenge suppliers and providers on which they are completely dependent in the shape of the current app store owners, Apple and Google.
I reassure my noble friend the Minister—and everyone else—that I have no intention of dividing the House on my amendment, in case noble Lords were worried. I am simply seeking some reassurance on a number of points where my amendments differ from those tabled by the Government—but, first, I will highlight the similarities.
As my noble friend the Minister has referred to, I am delighted that we have two packages of amendments that in both cases recognise that this was a really significant gap in the Bill as drafted. Ignoring the elements of the ecosystem that sell access to regulated services, decide age guidelines and have the ability to do age assurance was a substantial gap in the framing of the Bill. But we have also recognised together that it is very important that this is an “and” not an “or”—it is not instead of regulating user-to-user services or search but in addition to. It is an additional layer that we can bring to protect children online, and it is very important that we recognise that—and both packages do.
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Finally, considerable work needs to be done to do this properly—to properly research how we should regulate app stores and other app store-like things, and to do the full package, which I am pleased to say that both groups of amendments do. They instruct Ofcom to do the research but also give the Secretary of State the powers to enact any recommendations that come from that research.
However, there are four differences that I will briefly tease out. I live in hope, but I suspect that two we will continue to disagree on—but on two I hope my noble friend can give us some reassurance that we are in fact aligned. I shall take the two that I fear we will disagree on first. First, on timing, the Government’s amendments require Ofcom to conduct the work two to three years after Sections 11 and 25 come into force. I suspect that that means that we are talking about four to five years away, which is a very long time in the history of the
digital world; whereas my amendments require 12 months after the first element of Sections 11 and 25 coming into being, so probably about two years. We are looking for an air gap between the implementation of user-to-user regulation, search regulation and app store regulation—but I would argue that the government amendment is too big an air gap. I ask my noble friend the Minister to consider whether it is possible to reduce the length of time to a digital speed rather than an analogue one.
On my second point, on which I am not so hopeful—but I am certain that we will come back to it again on Wednesday—the Government’s amendments require Ofcom to consider whether app stores cover harmful content. Once again, we have an amendment that focuses on content rather than functionality, systems and processes, and the non-content harms that a number of us are most worried about. It is a real shame that, in this new amendment, the Government have chosen to use the very language that is causing us so much concern in other parts of the Bill; whereas my amendments ask Ofcom to look at the objectives of Part 3 of the Bill, which I think is a much neater way. I genuinely believe that the Government want to capture the non-content harms, and I ask the Minister to consider whether it is possible to tidy up their amendment at Third Reading.
In two areas, I hope that the Minister can give me reassurance. First, on transparency, the government amendments are clear that Ofcom needs to publish the output of its research—its report to the Secretary of State—but they are not clear that the Secretary of State needs to publish if they choose not to implement Ofcom’s recommendations. Possibly I am just a novice in parliamentary procedure and they just would not be able to get away with that, and one of us will remember the point in time to ask the right question and it will come up in a ballot at the right time, but can my noble friend the Minister assure me that, in fact, the Secretary of State will publish, even if they choose not to implement any further regulation of app stores?
Finally, on scope, my amendments talk about app stores and “other access means”, to make sure that this is future-proofed. Today 99% of all user-to-user services are reached through the Apple App Store and Google Play. We all hope that that will change and that there will be competition in the stores that we use and the means and mechanisms that we use; hence the group of amendments that I have tabled refer to app stores and “other access means”.
The government amendments do not really define what an app store is and I notice that my noble friend the Minister did not either. Can he give us some assurance that he is confident that the wording in the government amendments is future-proof and not prone to the rebranding of app stores into something else and/or replatforming among these enormous tech companies so that we access them through some other form of technology, and that they will still be caught by the Ofcom review?
These are my four questions. Fundamentally, I am extremely grateful for the collaborative way in which the Government and all of us in this House have developed this. We have been able to move this forward constructively, and I am very pleased and grateful.