Online Safety Bill

Viscount Camrose Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

My Lords, no Bill that we can devise now can ever offer a complete solution to every online risk while balancing all the competing priorities. But I welcome this Bill as a critical early step down a hard road, because it sets up an adaptive structure to respond to emerging technologies and needs. We heard the phrase “living legislation earlier”, and that expresses it very well.

I would like to offer three examples of what some of our future challenges in this space are going to be. The first is AI: given the sheer quantity of content and genuine difficulty of some decisions that have to be made about that content, no platform can make the delicate judgments at the huge speed and scale we are looking for without automated algorithmic solutions. That inevitably comes to mean AI overseeing our activity and, given the vast behaviour-modification capabilities of the large platforms, AI coming to modify our collective behaviour in ways we are unlikely to understand or control. However benignly intended, the results of such developments are far-reaching and unknowable.

Secondly, there is digital identity. We have heard some brilliant contributions about this and I think we can all agree that a cornerstone of dangerous behaviour online is anonymity. Age-verification checks are easily circumvented today and I wholly support, of course, the analysis and proposals of my noble friend Lord Bethell in this area. There is a broad principle here: that online behaviour should be guided by the same constraints as behaviour in real life. In my view, the only real way to bring that about is by requiring a digital identity for everyone. That is not to say that everybody has to identify themselves at all times, but they should be identifiable if the need arises and should criminal or dangerous behaviour take place.

Thirdly, and lastly, there is the issue of enforcement, particularly in Web 3.0. We can foresee the enforcement of compliance by well-known platforms led and owned by household names, but we are increasingly going to see more and more online services provided by much larger numbers of decentralised platforms, run by so- called DAOs—decentralised autonomous organisations. These are organisations without boards and managers; they do not necessarily have employees or even bank accounts. They are going to require very different levers of enforcement. Put simply, you cannot easily apply criminal sanctions with neither owners to arrest nor real assets to seize. I am pleased that the Minister and his team have already started thinking about these organisations, as discussed at the briefing that he kindly arranged last week.

Of course, worrying about these future problems in no way diminishes the very real challenges of the present, which have been covered so movingly in our debate today. However, none of the risks to online safety is going to get any easier to manage. The growth of malicious activity and extremism will be multiplied by the greater emotional intensity of the immersive experience that will be enabled by some of the virtual reality technologies that we are now starting to see come on to the market. With this Bill, we are making a bold and important start, which I welcome, but I fear that the harder part of our journey lies ahead of us.