Shortly after the Queens Speech this year which set out the Government’s extensive legislative programme in the field of digital regulation I took part in the Lords debate which responded to the Speech. 

My Lords, I shall focus mainly on the Government’s digital proposals. As my noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter, the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, and many other noble Lords have made clear, the media Bill and Channel 4 privatisation will face fierce opposition all around this House. It could not be clearer that the policy towards both Channel 4 and the BBC follows some kind of red wall-driven, anti-woke government agenda that has zero logic. The Up Next White Paper on PSB talks of

“embedding the importance of distinctively British content directly into the existing quota system.”

How does the Minister define “distinctively British content”? Is it whatever the Secretary of State believes it is? As for the Government’s response to the consultation on audience protection standards on VOD services, can the Minister confirm that Ofcom will have the power to assess whether a platform’s own-brand age ratings genuinely take account of the values and expectations of UK families, as the BBFC’s do?

Having sat alongside the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, on the joint scrutiny committee on the draft Online Safety Bill, I agreed with all his remarks today. I welcome the fact that its provisions are directed primarily at the business model of the social media platforms—in particular, the inclusion of scam advertising within the Bill and the inclusion of pornographic sites—but it is vital, if we are to have privacy protecting age verification, that principles for age assurance are included in the Bill. I welcome the intention to legislate for the new criminal communications offences recommended by the Law Commission, but without these being passed into law, the Bill will be completely defective, and we must incorporate the hate crime offences too.

But there are key issues that will need dealing with in the Bill’s passage through Parliament. As we have heard from many noble Lords, the “legal but harmful” provisions are potentially dangerous to freedom of expression, with those harms not being defined in the Bill itself. Similarly, with the lack of definition of children’s harms, it needs to be clear that encouraging self-harm or eating disorders is explicitly addressed on the face of the Bill, as my honourable friend Jamie Stone emphasised on Second Reading. My honourable friend Munira Wilson raised whether the metaverse was covered. Noble Lords may have watched the recent Channel 4 “Dispatches” exposing harms in the metaverse and chat rooms in particular. Without including it in the primary legislation, how can we be sure about this? In addition, the category definitions should be based more on risk than on reach, which would take account of cross-platform activity.

One of the great gaps not filled by the Bill, or the recent Elections Act just passed, is the whole area of misinformation and disinformation which gives rise to threats to our democracy. The Capitol riots of 6 January last year were a wake-up call, along with the danger of Donald Trump returning to Twitter.

The major question is why the draft digital markets, competition and consumer Bill is only a draft Bill in this Session. The DCMS Minister Chris Philp himself said in a letter to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell—the Chair of the Communications and Digital Committee—dated just this 6 May, that

“urgent action in digital markets is needed to address the dominance of a small number of very powerful tech firms.”

In evidence to the BEIS Select Committee, the former chair of the CMA, the noble Lord, Lord Tyrie, recently stressed the importance of new powers to ensure expeditious execution and to impose interim measures.

Given the concerns shared widely within business about the potential impact on data adequacy with the EU, the idea of getting a Brexit dividend from major amendments to data protection through a data reform Bill is laughable. Maybe some clarification and simplification are needed—but not the wholesale changes canvassed in the Data: A New Direction consultation. Apart from digital ID standards, this is a far lower business priority than reforming competition regulation. A report by the New Economics Foundation made what it said was a “conservative estimate” that if the UK were to lose its adequacy status, it would increase business costs by at least £1.6 billion over the next 10 years. As the report’s author said, that is just the increased compliance costs and does not include estimates of the wider impacts around trade shifting, with UK businesses starting to lose EU customers. In particular, as regards issues relating to automated decision-making, citizens and consumers need more protection, not less.

As regards the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill, we see yet more changes to the Electronic Communications Code, all the result of the Government taking a piecemeal approach to broadband rollout. I do, however, welcome the provisions on security standards for connectable tech products.

Added to a massive programme of Bills, the DCMS has a number of other important issues to resolve: the AI governance White Paper; gambling reform, as mentioned by my noble friend Lord Foster; and much-needed input into IP and performers’ rights reform and protection where design and AI are concerned. I hope the Minister is up for a very long and strenuous haul. Have the Government not clearly bitten off more than the DCMS can chew?