Online Pornography (Commercial Basis) Regulations 2018 — House of Lords, 2018-12-11
Topic: Technology
Floella Benjamin (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I welcome the Government’s decision finally to lay this guidance and the regulations for the House’s approval. It has not come a moment too soon. As the Minister knows, I have been concerned for some time that we should progress implementation of Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act and stop dragging our feet while harm is being done to our children. Almost every week, I hear of cases of children as young as four experiencing the traumatic horror of accidently discovering pornographic material online. This can be devastating for young minds, causing them anxiety and depression This is ground-breaking child protection legislation and we should be proud, because it will be the first of its kind in the world. The UK is leading the way in online safety and setting an example for other countries that are looking to introduce similar controls. We can demonstrate that it is possible to regulate the internet to ensure that children can be protected from online pornographic material that we would never let them near in the offline world There is an abundance of evidence showing how harmful this material can be and, significantly, that children often do not seek it out but stumble across it. Research by the NSPCC found that children are as likely to stumble across pornography by accident as to search for it deliberately. Also significantly, the NSPCC reports that children themselves support age-verification. Eighty per cent of young people felt that age-verification is needed for sites that contain adult content The age-verification regulator, the British Board of Film Classification, has been working on implementing the legislation for a number of months and has kept me briefed on its progress. I am confident that it will successfully deliver age-verification in the UK to prevent children stumbling across and accessing pornography. Its guidance sets out principle-based standards which will encourage even more innovation and allow for new means of age-verifying consumers in the future. This is important because if this regime is to work, age-verification needs to be robust and privacy must be protected My concern, as always, is with child protection, but I recognise the need to ensure that this regime is seamless enough to prevent commercial incentives to avoid compliance. For this reason, I am pleased that the BBFC has said in the annex to the guidance that it intends to introduce a voluntary scheme to bring in a higher privacy standard than the GDPR—which is already of a high standard I would like the Minister to reassure us that this scheme will be in place shortly and that the Government will fully support it. It is most important that, as the age-verification regulator, the BBFC will have a range of enforcement powers, including requesting ancillary service providers and payment service providers to withdraw their services to non-compliant websites, and instructing internet service providers to block them. These powers should be highly effective in achieving the legislation’s objectives and should be used as swiftly as possible to encourage compliance. I ask the Minister: how will the Government encourage ancillary service providers, who can only be "requested" to take action, to co-operate fully with the BBFC? I have been told by the BBFC that PayPal, Visa and MasterCard have already indicated that they will withdraw services where there is non-compliance. I also welcome the support that I understand will be given by the ISPs and mobile network operators. Their role will be crucial.