Hansard

As others have done, I welcome Kate Forbes to her position. I think that this is the first time that I have been in a debate with her in her new role in the chamber. I am sure that we all wish her well.

I draw members’ attention to the fact that I am a member of the Open Rights Group.

I welcome the chance to take part in this debate. I recognise that positive points are being made on all sides; however, I also recognise that aspects of the agenda are being missed by all sides. The Government motion, which I have got no great beef with and will happily support, says that increasing digital participation will, in turn,

“provide better access to fair work and higher-wage jobs”.

It will for some people, but digital participation alone is no guarantee of that. We are all very aware of those involved in the gig economy. They may be highly connected and adept at using online platforms, but they are being exploited in poorly paid and insecure work.

Digital participation, like many other innovations in life, can be used for good or for ill. The economy that we build around it can be fair and sustainable, or it can be exploitative and wasteful.

The Conservative amendment mentions the digital economy’s impact on, if I can put it this way, the real-world economy—that is, the high street. The digital services tax that was announced in yesterday’s budget is an interesting innovation. It is likely to be too modest in scale to reverse the impact that the UK Government is talking about, but it is acknowledging a genuine issue and we should all welcome the fact that that conversation is taking place.

However, the continual spats between Governments about exactly who is to blame for broadband roll-out not being as fast as some people would like it to be is a dynamic that solves nothing. If we want the state to act, we should argue for public ownership of infrastructure, and I do not hear that case coming from either Government.

We should also consider what the long-term goal is for broadband. How fast is “fast enough”? This is not simply a question of building infrastructure anew every decade or so when technology moves on apace and the demand for data goes up. The energy considerations alone of getting faster and faster are being ignored.

For the vast majority of domestic applications, is having only a 10 megabits per second connection really digital exclusion? I question that. I have stood in my living room flying around the virtual reality version of Google Earth, which is a fully 3D-rendered planet streaming through a broadband connection, perfectly happily without the extremely high speeds that we are talking about as though they are an absolute requirement for everybody. There is a point at which we should say that the speeds that we have are fast enough.

Labour cites many issues in its amendment that we should all share a great deal of concern about, not least the impact of inequality of digital participation. However, it is easy to say that “the Government has failed”, and, like a great many Labour amendments that we see in the chamber, its amendment today does not include much by way of positive proposals.

I will argue a little deeper and question the nature and not just extent of digital participation. Is digital participation about creating an online space in which we merely consume services and products, or is about creating a space for collaboration, creativity and community? It is the nature of that participation that we should be concerned about.

Is the role of education about empowering young people to be merely passive consumers or about empowering them to take hold of powerful new tools to make their society better? What can digital participation mean without digital rights? Publications from both the UK and Scottish Governments have been too silent on that question. There has been a particular failure in response to the scandals affecting companies such as Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in recent years.

A free and open internet is not just a commercialised space, and it cannot be allowed to be simply a commercialised space in which more and more control over our lives is taken silently and invisibly by service providers, content providers and advertisers. That applies even to the social media platforms that we all enjoy using—well, sometimes we can still manage to enjoy them—which many of us choose to use without necessarily being conscious of the degree of control that is taken by them.

In its recent paper on the impact of Brexit on digital rights, the Open Rights Group said:

“International trade deals have a long history of disregarding democracy and reflecting corporate agendas.”

The group also mentioned that tech giants around the world are becoming very dominant in

“negotiations with the US for cross-border trade and e-commerce.”

Among the arguments that it made was that digital privacy must not be allowed to be undermined in the name of protecting the free flow of data and that censorship should not be promoted through draconian or voluntary online IP enforcement commitments. I would like those issues, as well as the issues of the role of surveillance in our society, whether by state or corporate players, and that of privacy and consent to be addressed. They raise more questions than answers and I do not pretend otherwise. However, discussing digital participation only in terms of uptake fails to give us the fuller picture that we need. We should be at least as interested in the nature of participation and the changing social, economic and even political relationships that will emerge in our society.