I am enormously grateful to the Minister for his response. However, it falls short of my hopes. Obviously, I have not seen the letter that he is going to send us, but I hope that the department will have taken on board the commitments made by previous Ministers during discussions on the Online Safety Bill and the very clear evidence that the situation is getting worse, not better.
Any hope that the tech companies would somehow have heard the debate in the House of Lords and that it would have occurred to them that they needed to step up to their responsibilities has, I am afraid, been dashed by their behaviours in the last 18 months. We have seen a serious withdrawal of existing data-sharing provisions. As we approach even more use of AI, the excitement of the metaverse, a massive escalation in the amount of data and the impact of their technologies on society, it is extremely sobering to think that there is almost no access to the black box of their data.
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For that reason, I encourage the Minister to think ambitiously about how regulators such as Ofcom can be supported by academia, science, civic society and the whole of society in doing their work and bringing in—as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, rightly emphasised—that degree of independence and challenge that is needed from outside the formal regulatory basis. I very much hope that he leans in on this and steps up to the opportunity to set this right. I will withdraw my amendment and leave the ball with the Minister.