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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I would like to add to what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said. I agree with him that these lines should not be deleted; indeed, they should probably be somewhat added to. The Minister sent a helpful little note around on some of the things that we have already debated. On the page headed, ""What might such reasonable steps be in practice?"," it says, and this amplifies the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, ""Within a household the information and options to impose controls over what can be accessed are built into the routers and the browsers. This means that it is possible to impose those controls in relation to a number of different computers"," and so on. I have a certain amount of technical knowledge, but I do not know how I would set up my router to prevent access to certain types of material—to certain specific websites, maybe, but those websites may be harbouring both copyright and non-copyright material, and it is the copyright material that we are trying to legislate for, not the access to websites. The browsers reside on each individual computer so those are not available centrally. The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas—that if these people are connecting over wi-fi you cannot do anything about it—is still valid, despite that note. I am grateful for the note, though; much of it was extremely helpful. This needs to be explored more deeply. The whole issue of advice on how to protect is essential. As I said at a previous stage, certain senior members of the Government—I do not mean this politically; I simply mean members of the Executive—would do well to be taught how to protect their networks, because I know they are unprotected.