My Lords, being the understudy for the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, is quite a stressful thing. I am, however, reliably informed that she is currently offline in the White House, but I know that she will scrutinise everything I say afterwards and that I will receive a detailed school report tomorrow.
I am extremely grateful to my noble friend the Minister for how he has just summed up, but I would point out two things in response. The first is the circularity of the legal uncertainty. What I think I have heard is that we are trying to insert into the Bill some clarity because we do not think it is clear, but the Government’s concern is that by inserting clarity, we then imply that there was not clarity in the rest of the Bill, which then creates the legal uncertainty—and round we go. I am not convinced that we have really solved that problem, but I may be one step further towards understanding why the Government think that it is a problem. I think we have to keep exploring that and properly bottom it out.
My second point is about what I think will for evermore be known as the marshmallow problem. We have just rehearsed across the House a really heartfelt concern that just because we cannot imagine it today, it does not mean that there will not be functionality that causes enormous harm which does not link back to a marshmallow, multiple marshmallows or any other form of content.
Those two big issues are the ones we need to keep discussing: what is really causing the legal uncertainty and how we can be confident that unimaginable harms from unimaginable functionality are genuinely going to be captured in the Bill. Provided that we can continue, maybe it is entirely fitting at the end of what I think has been an extraordinarily collaborative Report, Committee and whole process of the Bill going through this House—which I have felt incredibly proud and
privileged to be a part of—that we end with a commitment to continue said collaborative process. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.