Baroness Howe: My plan to make the internet safer
3 min read
With her new Online Safety Bill introduced this week, Baroness Howe argues that failing to make the most of existing technologies to protect children 'would constitute a dereliction of duty'.
On Monday this week I was delighted to introduce my new Online Safety Bill in the House of Lords. In bringing my new Bill to Parliament I am pleased that significant progress has been made in the last four years since I tabled my first Online Safety Bill, but there is a great deal more to be done.
The 2015 Conservative Party manifesto committed to requiring pornographic web sites to introduce robust age verification checks to ensure that they cannot be accessed by children. The background document published with the Queen’s Speech made it clear that the age verification provision will be made in the forthcoming Digital Economy Bill.
Delivering on the Government’s age-verification commitment will be primarily a matter of engaging with pornography that is projected into Britain from web sites based in other jurisdictions. ATVOD’s (the Authority for Television on Demand) seminal report, For Adults Only, demonstrated that of the 25 most popular pornographic web sites in the UK, 23 are located abroad. The only way to address this problem is, as ATVOD suggested, by engaging directly with the economic model upon which these sites depend. While not insignificant free content is made available in the first instance, the sites need to start charging for their services at some point. The key is therefore to require: a) pornographic web sites wishing to access the UK to get a UK license, subject to the provision of robust age verification checks and b) financial transaction providers to only process transactions with people in the UK with licensed pornographic sites. This is proposed by clauses 8 to 12 of my Bill. If unlicensed sites are cut off from their income stream this will generate a powerful incentive for them to introduce proper age verification and get a UK license.
Other key challenges addressed by my Bill include the need to ensure that all internet service providers - not just the four biggest ISPs - provide robust adult content filter options (addressing all adult content: violence, gambling etc. as well as pornography) and on the basis of common filtering standards.
Sometimes people tell me that trying to make the internet safe is a fool’s errand. I respond by saying that I agree which can sometimes take them by surprise. They misunderstand what I am about. Making the internet safe is, I fear, beyond our grasp. My focus and purpose is instead on the vitally important and entirely deliverable objective of making the internet safer.
Nelson Mandela once said, ‘There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.’
In a context where the technology is available to help make the internet safer, failing to make the most of that technology would constitute a dereliction of duty and would not show the soul of the United Kingdom in a good light.
The good news is that while progress is much slower than I would like, we are engaging constructively with this challenge. I very much welcome the steps that the Government has taken to date and hope that the publication of my Bill this week will help to highlight relevant public policy solutions ahead of the publication of their own Digital Economy Bill.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote is a crossbench peer
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