00:00 Introduction 01:00 From filmmaking to campaigning 04:00 Turning children’s rights into legislation 09:00 Winning amendments and building support 13:00 Delegated legislation and regulatory accountability 18:00 Can Parliament keep up with technology? 22:00 Challenging “tech exceptionalism” 27:00 Reforming Parliament’s legislative machinery 32:00 Big Tech’s resistance playbook 40:00 AI, copyright and celebrity allies 43:00 Parliamentary ping-pong: when should peers give way? 47:00 Is the political tide turning against Big Tech? 51:00 Book details and closing remarks

• Kidron, Beeban (2026) Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back (Penguin)

• House of Lords Communications Committee, inquiry into the Online Safety Act 2023: implementation and impact

• The Online Safety Act 2023, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology Resources Collection, Gov.uk

• Kate Dewsnip, The Online Safety Act: Scrutiny, safeguards and civil liberties, The Constitution Society, 1 December 2023

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And this week with Parliament in recess, we talked to someone we wanted to interview for quite a while. Baroness Beeban Kidron, filmmaker and crossbench peer has been one of Parliament's most effective campaigners for a safer internet.

She started by pressing for measures to protect children and extended her campaigning to protecting the creative rights of writers, artists, and musicians whose work's being fed into into artificial intelligence models without their permission.

Ruth Fox: We talked to her about the art of legislating for the online world and the huge scale of the pushback from the tech giants at any attempt to regulate them.  It’s a battle she knows [00:01:00] from the inside, and one she explores in her new book, Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back.

Mark D'Arcy: Baroness Kidron, welcome, first of all, to the pod.

Baroness Kidron: Thank you for having me.

Mark D'Arcy: How did you get into this issue? How were you alerted to the idea that things needed to be done legislatively about internet safety?

Baroness Kidron: At the time I was a filmmaker, it was before I came into politics. And in 2012 when a smartphone became the price point that an adult might give on to a child, I walked into my own kitchen and I saw four 15-year-old girls not speaking.

And that just really hit me because I don't think I'd ever seen teenagers not speaking in close proximity. And as I walked across the room, I realised they were looking at a screen, and I thought, in my head I just went, oh, I wonder what it's gonna be like growing up here in my kitchen. And there. And then of course I thought, [00:02:00] where's there?

And because I was a filmmaker at the time working between Los Angeles and London, I sometimes in between used to make, uh, documentaries. So I picked up my camera and about three weeks later, I started making a documentary film about teenagers and the internet. And halfway through that experience, after I had spent hundreds of hours in the lives and bedrooms of teenagers filming all the things they were doing, I realised it was a generational injustice.

That they had been thrown into a world that was absolutely deliberately and willingly and even optimistically thinking that all users would be equal. But they hadn't really thought about children, that if all users are equal, you are treating a child as if they are adult. And it just, it coincided with, when I came into the Lords, it was like a [00:03:00] light bulb in my mind.

And at that time, I actually tried to talk to the tech companies. I tried to talk to the children's charities. I talked to some of my new colleagues in Parliament. And it was just that period where everybody thought, oh, it's the future. And I had got the wrong end of the stick and I was just the middle aged woman who didn't get the new rock and roll, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I sort of looked over both shoulders and thought, oh, well, shit, I'm gonna have to do something. And that was the moment. It was a very particular moment. And, and I'd had a very decent big career, Hollywood and back, for 30 years. But I've never made another film. It was just pain of consciousness. No one wanted to deal with it. This was my job on earth and I've been pretty relentless since. And maybe that's why I am relentless because I gave up quite a lot to do this task.

Ruth Fox: So, the other part of your life, as you say, is you're a legislator, you are a cross [00:04:00] bench peer. So how did you go from that moment of realisation to then the next step as a legislator thinking, right, what can I do here? What do I want to achieve in Parliament to change things?

Baroness Kidron: So, the first thing I thought is, hang on a minute: online is an environment like any other, and children have an existing set of rights. And so the very first thing I did was actually, I persuaded the Committee on the Rights of the Child that I could put together an expert group and do an addendum to the Convention on the Rights of the Child to say how it applied to the digital world.

And that work was done for the Committee and it, it formalised the fact that just like children's rights do move, from a factory somewhere in Asia to a farm somewhere in India, to a school somewhere in London, so too, they applied online. And once I had [00:05:00] that sort of intellectual framing and had done that work alongside Professor Sonia Livingstone, I then looked for opportunities of legislation coming through Parliament to see how I could take the same approach. And the big opportunity I had was the data bill that came through in 2018 as a result of Brexit. We had to bring in some data protection laws into the UK and I saw data protection as a key place where we could impose something that gave children a higher bar of privacy because children have the right to privacy.

And it was during that data bill. And it is very funny 'cause I've recently had another battle in another data bill. So, it's, it's obviously a place that is really [00:06:00] important to digital legislation because in the end, if you think about it, whether it's AI, whether it's online, whether it's social media, whether it's gambling, gaming, a lot of it has to do with the rules around data. What they can take, what they can perceive from it, what they can infer from it, what they can do with it. A lot of what goes wrong in the digital sphere has to do with the rules around data.

Mark D'Arcy: So what evils were you trying to stop?

Baroness Kidron: Ah, well that's a very big question. I mean, I think the truth of the matter is that there are different kinds of harm for children.

And if I say the one that everyone recognises is the content harms, that might be pornography, that might be violent material, it might be self-harm, it might be extreme dieting, body dysmorphic images, et cetera, et cetera. There's the contact harms and I think people [00:07:00] recognise those, the introduction of adults to children in a casual way that allows predators to actually contact children, whether it is for bullying or whether it is sexual predation, et cetera, et cetera.

But there are other harms that we were looking at as well. And I think that how the world has moved from 2018 to now is people understand the harm of addiction and these companies really using behaviour psychologists to try and entrap the user, in this case, the child, not to do anything else apart from use their product.

And that started an extraordinary arms race for children's attention. And that arms race involved a lot of technical things that really deprived children of all the things that they actually need. So the final harm, if you [00:08:00] like, is the opportunity cost. The final harm for a child is a combination of what it is they are doing. And what it is they're not doing. And this arms race for their attention meant that they weren't doing sports, that they weren't meeting friends, that they weren't looking people in the eye, they weren't participating in the cultural life or the civic life or the community life, you know, around them. And increasingly as parents felt the burden, they weren't even participating in family life.

And so what was happening was it was interrupting all the things that they needed to do, as well as introducing harmful experiences and harmful content.

Mark D'Arcy: So you get up on your feet in the House of Lords and you try and introduce amendments to these data bills to try and blunt that. What happened then?[00:09:00]

Baroness Kidron: Ah, well, you know, the, the first thing is you put down an amendment. And, and I think this is a really important point that people outside Parliament don't always understand: the first amendment you put down has to tell the whole story of what you're trying to achieve.

So the first amendment that I put down said that we would have a code for kids that would give them a higher rate of privacy. And there was a list of, you know, 14, 15 things that it would do. The eventual amendment that I won actually just said there would be a code for kids. But all of those things from the original amendment were said at the despatch box by the Minister of the day saying, and that code would cover this, that, and the other.

And what that meant was that we didn't put the code in primary legislation. We just put the determination that there would be a code in primary legislation, [00:10:00] and the regulator then built the code. I have to say it started off with "no you won't", "no you won't", "no you won't". And eventually it became a very collegiate thing after the event.

So when they agreed to do the code, I had a very close relationship with the ICO who were the regulator that were given the code. And I talked to many, many ministers and officials about it. And it was a very good example of how Parliament works at its best.

Ruth Fox: So the ICO's, the Information Commissioner's Office. What changed? Was it simply that having got the amendment through in the Commons, then the environment changes? What tipped it? What were you able to do against a, you know, a lot of opposition within the government and the minister not being keen at all? What changes it from your perspective that you managed to keep, you know, you're, you're a cross bench peer, you don't have a party group, you're not whipped. How are you able to [00:11:00] corral support.

Baroness Kidron: I think there's three parts of it. And I will say that in my view, passing legislation, you know, to be successful is more of an art than a science. And to fail is often science over art.

And what I mean by that is that actually the righteousness of what I was saying was clear. Yeah. Nobody really at the time understood how privacy and how data privacy could actually have the correct impact. So I did an awful lot of meetings with an awful lot of stakeholders in and outside Parliament to explain how protecting children's privacy would in fact protect them from harm. And then I think the important bit is that [00:12:00] when you pass the law, when it is agreed, then it's an instruction and that changes everything.

So the reason that the law is so important is that it creates an instruction that something must happen. And I find that when something must happen, people are much more interested and tolerant and curious about how it might happen than they are about the first set of things before they know that they must in fact do it.

So, what you move from is a political arena where people are going, oh, is this just making more regulation? Is this gonna work? Is this necessary? We don't really want to do it. And it's quite a defensive posture. Into then dealing with a group of people who have to deliver what has been agreed. And so now they're suddenly saying, oh, how can we do it best? What did you mean by this? What evidence do you have? [00:13:00]

Ruth Fox: But you're essentially giving over, when you make that decision in legislation - we're onto my favourite subject, delegated legislation - you're essentially giving over the power to ministers or perhaps in this case, to the regulator to Ofcom, the power to make those regulations.

And Parliament has very minimal say at that point. You know, it, the House of Lords for example, can debate them, but it can't amend them. It's an accept or reject option. And the House of Lords isn't gonna reject them. The Commons has even less influence over them. And, and in your book, I was very struck that you felt that Ofcom hadn't implemented what Parliament had wanted in quite the same way that, that you, you'd set out.

Baroness Kidron: Well, yes to all of the above. So the first thing I would say is I would be very, very interested in reforming the process by which secondary legislation is accepted or rejected.

Mark D'Arcy: Listeners will not be able to see the beaming smile that's just broken out on Ruth's face at this point.

Baroness Kidron: I, I think that's really, really [00:14:00] important.

I think it is good that we hive off pieces of legislation for further review, to actually draft it in a way that has more time, more expertise, and more malleability in the system than just simply saying something on the record or on the page as it were. So I am for secondary legislation, but we absolutely have to have more control and we have to have more say and it should be more malleable to the will of Parliament.

I think your second point, I will just say that at the time the ICO was led by Elizabeth Denham and she wasn't keen on it in the first place, but once she was given it, she took the mandate so seriously.

And I will make this point to anybody listening, this is a piece of legislation that has travelled the world. It's in many countries now, many American states. We've been through a whole [00:15:00] court thing of the tech companies trying to stop it being adopted in California, but it is now adopted in California and so on. It is a novel piece of legislation that has been exported from UK right around the world, partly because when she was given that mandate, Elizabeth Denham and her team, Steve Wood in particular, who was the person responsible for the code, decided to make it impactful, a world first, be unafraid of the lobbyists and the pushback, and even the next bit of government who tried to sort of water it down, having agreed to it. So there is an excellent version.

When you raise some of the criticism I've made Ofcom that is around the Online Safety Act, where I feel, in fact I know, it is a matter of record, that they've actually cherry picked the Act. They've [00:16:00] decided which bits they will and won't do. They've doubled down on some bits and they've let other bits go.

So, for example, a colleague of mine from the Conservative benches at the last minute, you know, we really fought all together on a cross party basis to make sure that categorisation of tech companies would be by risk or size, not just size. And we won that, we got the amendment. And then Ofcom decided in their genius to just do size.

And that's ludicrous because actually in this context, a very small platform or service product can do a vast amount of harm. So risk, and, and equally there can be some very good, big players who don't do harm at all. So why are you putting them through this? So, you know, it it, it was a ludicrous thing.

Similarly, we had different [00:17:00] ages and stages. I mean, you do not need the same protections for a 5-year-old as a 17-year-old. Anybody who's ever met a child of either age knows that, and yet Ofcom decided 18, or under 18 was their view of what should happen. So that's a very, very poor pickup of a regulator.

And although they do a lot of talking to parliamentarians, they don't do a lot of listening. And I think there's a very big difference between getting into the detail and getting, you know, really people's expertise and actually treating Parliament as if it was a slight irritant that doesn't know what it's doing.

There were a lot of us on that Bill who absolutely had more expertise than the regulator, more expertise than the government department of the day. And that is not to be [00:18:00] dismissive of them, because I think people have different parts to play in all of this, but actually the very nature of the civil service is to be a generalist and to move around.

And the very nature of Ocom at the time was an economic regulator of sectors that really wanted regulating. Yeah, they were all used to it. Whether you're the Post Office or the broadband or the TV or the BBC whatever you are, they all are expecting. Well, both ideologically and practically the tech sector does not want to be regulated, doesn't expect to be regulated, rejects it. And that is why Ofcom misunderstood the task.

Mark D'Arcy: So what would a, a parliamentary system that was more agile, that perhaps kept a fast changing industry under much closer review look like? What would be done differently?

Baroness Kidron: Well, I think a, a number of us at number of times have said we should have a joint committee of digital regulation.

And [00:19:00] we should just have constant looking to say, is it working, is it not working? Making recommendations.

Mark D'Arcy: So joint committee would be MPs and peers.

Baroness Kidron: MPs and peers, both Houses, chairs from, you know, from communications and DCMS and so on, and maybe even business involved, but actually have some people who are looking at this constantly.

And, and I want to do a shout out here because in fact the Lords Committee are doing a post-legislative scrutiny inquiry on the Online Safety Act. And they are, if you look at what they're doing right now, you see how valuable it is. But we should be having that on a perpetual basis.

But I, I think I want to just push back on the assumption in your question, if I might, which is the idea that Parliament can't keep up.

I would like to point out, and I think, you know, because you've read my book, that many of the things that have yet to happen have been raised in [00:20:00] Parliament and been rejected by governments. And everything in the recent Meta settlement that, that made headlines around the world, where the American Attorneys General took Meta to court and then made a settlement, which was both eye-catching amount of money, but also much more importantly, design changes. Yeah. Every one of those design changes has been raised by us in Parliament over the last decade. It's not that we don't know what to do, and it's not that we can't do things that are future proof, it's that we're being prevented doing them.

And I think that's a really big difference because ministers again and again and again, stand up at the Despatch box, you know, they suck their teeth and they go, it moves too fast, we can't keep up. And I go, well, what about all the things that you're not doing? So for example, just a few weeks ago, we had a big fight in the Lords trying [00:21:00] to get the cyber bill to include AI, and specifically to include food production and distribution. Well we are recording in the week where all the freezers across Europe were put up to 50 and ruined the food. But the government has pushed back. We were not allowed. And I could give you, and I won't bore your listeners, but literally an arm length of things that we've asked for and we didn't get. And I'll just mention one, a duty of care. A duty of care for tech companies to have for their users. That would be transformative.

There are other things coming down the pike, like the Law Commission's consultation about extending product liability to tech products. I urge all listeners to put in and say, that is a really good idea to the consultation, which I believe is still open. But what I'm really trying to get [00:22:00] across here is, please nobody think that we can't regulate tech, we can regulate tech. We just aren't.

Ruth Fox: Why is that then in terms of, of ministers, are they too accepting of what civil servants say? I mean, you refer in your book to the revolving door between tech and, and regulators and and so on. Is it that there's too much churn with, with ministers, too much turnover so they, they never sort of are in the job long enough to learn enough about it, whereas the parliamentarians who are working on this, on the backbenchers are there for, for many, many years. What's the problem?

Baroness Kidron: Well, I think there are probably two major problems. I think the first problem is that the tech companies have done this astonishing job of what we call tech exceptionalism, lobbying and telling a narrative, saying tech is different. And actually tech isn't different. They are companies, they make a [00:23:00] profit, they have shareholders, but they do not have the same rules as everyone else, you know?

So suddenly they go, oh, it, it is all the user's fault. And you go, but hang on a minute. If you were creating a train or a medicine or a car, you wouldn't be able to say that the functionality that you give in the system is all the user's fault because they took it or because they drove it. You know, everybody has their own responsibility, yeah, in normal life. And they have had now nearly three decades of what I call tech exceptionalism. And they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, pounds, euros, et cetera, maintaining that.

Mark D'Arcy: So you are arguing, for example, that when Facebook has algorithms which drive people relentlessly towards more extreme content, that it's their fault, not the user's fault, that they get that content?

Baroness Kidron: Well, it's their intention. I [00:24:00] mean, let's not even worry about fault. It is their intention. It's that they have developed a product that deliberately spreads more and more extreme content or extreme behaviours. That is what keeps attention. And therefore they've developed that product. Now, if you put very addictive things into the water, into the food, you'd have responsibility for that.

But in this case, we have allowed them not to have responsibility. Now that is changing around the world, not only here in the UK, but around the world. And people saying, hang on a minute. No, not on our watch. So I think it is changing, but they have done a very good job of that.

I think the other thing is that they have spun this sort of idea of inevitability and the idea of tech as automatic progress. And I would just push back again and say, there [00:25:00] are fantastic things that tech does. And I, I always get cast as a tech detractor, in fact I'm a very early adopter and I use a lot of technology in my daily life. So what I'm trying to say is, you know, we have to think about tech as a tool and say, is this a helpful thing it's doing?

And is this a thing that actually is undermining people, undermining democracy, interfering with child development, hurting people? And let me give you a really, really very obvious example. I was at a, a conference about chatbots in Paris a few weeks ago. And the health researchers showed that actually all the major chat bots when confronted with a question that gave a certain set of symptoms and were asked "should I or should I not go to hospital", 51% of the time [00:26:00] they told the health researchers not to go to hospital when they should. Now, I personally do not mind getting my health information from a chat bot, but I want that chatbot to be subject to the same training, the same rules, the same responsibility as my doctor. And I think that that is a very clear way of saying it's not the technology, it's the rules, it's the governance, it's the accountability.

Ruth Fox: I take your point about parliamentarians being able to keep up in terms of being on top of the issues, being able to raise debates and, and questions in, in the House of Lords or indeed the Commons. But I think one of the, the questions is, can the system, the legislative and regulatory system keep up specifically?

And in your book you talk about the way [00:27:00] the other industrial revolutions in the 19th century, how Parliament legislated the Factory Act's, for example, to control the way in which the new industries were emerging and the social and economic impacts they were having, and why therefore should tech be different to that?

But that period also drove quite a lot of change in terms of the way Parliament worked in order to be able to, to do that, whether it was the Factory Act's or whether it was the, the railway bills that so many went through, uh, Parliament in the, in the 19th century to develop our transport system. And it just seems to me that we have got a legislative system that's largely carved out of late 19th century, early 20th century provisions and procedures that haven't adapted that much. And we are now trying to regulate areas that are, well, we're coming into very shortly, the fourth decade of the 21st century.

Baroness Kidron: I think it's a really good point, but I think it plays out badly because what happens is [00:28:00] people go, oh, Parliament isn't fit for this age, therefore Parliament shouldn't do anything.

They don't go Parliament really, needs to change its own processes to be fitter for this age. And that's what worries me. So if in answer to your question, if I could have a magic wand, yes, I would have a joint committee. I would give that joint committee some overseeing powers and some more direct relationship with the regulator to say that committee is not just telling government what could be done sometime in the future. That committee has some authority to determine, very transparently, what it is demanding of the regulator. So cut out a few loops there. How about the fact we still get everything on paper and we do not have track changed legislation? So you could see it in real time, you know, and you could say to the government, do you know what, [00:29:00] you've done that, but don't you understand that that's actually kicked everything else into the long grass? Why don't you just do it slightly differently and do it in more real time, both technologically and where the conversation is? Why don't we have some super experts within Parliament? Not that they get an extra say, we still have to have the vote and the democratic process, but maybe some super experts could be put into certain areas of legislation. You know, it has to eventually be voted on. But there is such a huge expertise in NGOs, in third sector organisations and people who do delivery, you know, of, of certain things and, and they struggle to get ministerial attention. They struggle to get civil service attention. And actually there's such a richness.

And I recently, I sit on the Joint Security Strategy [00:30:00] Committee and I, and I recently went to a meeting of Russia experts before the summer, while it was still the previous version of this government. And each one, each one said in some form or another very, very politely, we are the Russia experts. We appear to be at war with Russia, but nobody's asked our opinion.

So I think what I'm saying is there is a much bigger pool of expertise that would make things go quicker. And then finally, and maybe even most importantly, I would like to see much less prescriptive bills, that are one sixth of the length, and that they focus on outcomes rather than on process. And you will know probably better than I, because I've only been in Parliament since 2012, but it seems to me [00:31:00] that we've gone from an era of saying, of legislation saying either we have captured common law, how we already behave, and we are just saying, you must continue to do that or, we would like you to behave in a different way and this is the outcome we are seeking. To a sort of very, very detailed, and I would argue, absolute gift to the richest in society, you know, to go to, to the courts and challenge every last word, but you know, to this sort of endless prescriptive process, tick box kind of thing that doesn't actually get us where we want to be and isn't confident about the state's authority or indeed the authority of the courts to be the final determiner of what it is that Parliament meant.

[00:32:00] So I would like to see outcome focused very, very short, and actually for the courts to take really close attention of Parliament's intention in coming to a view about whether something has actually been done or not done. And for that to be the bar. Because I think in trying to avoid all of that sort of legalese, they actually end up creating it and also creating a whole lot of bad law that is really a sort of a near miss rather than solving the problem.

Mark D'Arcy: One of the most striking parts of the book for me, and you've touched on it several times in this interview, is the level of pushback that the tech companies engage in to defend their turf, to stop encroachments by the courts or by the state or by regulators on what they're doing.

And I wondered if I can get you just to talk through the, the, the list of plays in their playbook [00:33:00] that you describe in the book, starting perhaps with running down the timeline. If in doubt, just keep delaying and eventually a government will run out of steam.

Baroness Kidron: Yeah, no, it's extraordinary. And I, I would say at the beginning of my list, just remember how very rich they are and that regulation, rather than making them worse, would make them better, but would make them a little bit poorer. And so they are very, very focused on having no regulation.

So one of the things is that they, they spread doubt. They put reports out that say on the one hand, on the other hand, they put money into academia, they talk to ministers and officials and say, yeah, lots of sucking the teeth and saying maybe, maybe, maybe. They don't even have to say what we are suggesting won't work. They just have to spread the doubt. They use the word balance. They go on the one hand, on the other hand. And I [00:34:00] just want to say, little Jimmy in his bedroom balanced out with a trillion dollar company with their lawyers and their product teams and their behaviour psychologists, or a woman who wakes up and finds that her image has been turned into something pornographic or that violence had been done to her, up against Elon Musk's Grok. You know, the idea that we need to balance between the individual and these trillion dollar companies with all their powers is a sort of a weapon that they use. They buy off the opposition. That's really ugly and true. But if you look around and you see, is it the children's charities? Is it suicide helplines? Is it people who, uh, do digital literacy in schools. Is it academic departments looking at ethics in AI. You [00:35:00] have a look and see how many people have money from tech and it just mutes them. Yeah.

I recently put myself forward as a witness and I made a witness statement in Meta's argument with Ofcom about worldwide fines. They're trying to argue that they never said that they would do it worldwide and they only want to do it on British revenue. Interestingly, they don't want to pay tax on British revenue, but they do want to pay fines on British revenue. But I was only asked to do it because a very well known children's charity had signed a piece of paper saying that they wouldn't challenge Meta as part of their funding, et cetera, et cetera.

I think the revolving door is a huge problem. I mean, we've seen it. We've got, I can't remember all the names, but Rishi Sunak and his Chief of [00:36:00] Staff and George Osborne and Nick Clegg and Tom Watson, and keep going, keep going. They've all got gigs in all the tech companies, and that means that they have huge, informal entry into the political ecosystem. And it is true, that both as a parliamentarian and as a campaigner, I am very aware that I have some special access both ways. Yeah. Because I am a parliamentarian and because I'm a campaigner. But just imagine if I had previously been the Prime Minister, what kind of special access I would have.

And then sort of in a funny way, the absolute kind of cynical, I mean, so much of it is cynical, but this is really cynical, is that just keep on fighting until you tire the opposition [00:37:00] out. And I have seen it again and again where either they make governments lose confidence in the legislation or they take them to court, um, and then they hope for regime change and then that's somebody else's argument and you have to start all over again.

Or as I've already mentioned, in California, we did three rounds of court cases before, eventually they gave in and they did it anyway. And what that means is that California kids for those three years were not protected. So what they're doing is, they're making money while they can and then eventually they'll do it.

And I think Ofcom rightly would describe their frustration that they can be involved in cases where they chase these people all over the world. And then finally at the 11th hour, they geoblock the UK and then they've complied. So what that means is [00:38:00] that Ofcom's case is gone. They could have geoblocked right at the beginning, but they..

Mark D'Arcy: Explain for us geoblocking, sorry,

Baroness Kidron: Geoblock means that a service is not available in the UK to UK users. Yeah. So it's, it's sort of a huge cat and mouse thing.

And then I do talk in my book about something that I felt was very insidious, and it had two elements for me personally. One is that, you know, there's a lot of sort of whispering about, oh, she's terribly well-meaning, but she doesn't know her stuff. Or indeed the aggressive version, which is the kinds of emails I get where people say, I hope you rot in hell and I'll come and get you. And much worse than that, but I don't want to say it, that have to go to the police sometimes. Or indeed the, the US State Department did an inquiry into whether I was foreign state interference. And I would [00:39:00] say very categorically, I am a cross bench peer. I have never been in government. I think most governments see me as someone they've got to deal with, rather than a representative. So the idea that I'm representing a government elsewhere is nonsense. And, and I will take the opportunity of saying I am very grateful and I'm very privileged to be invited by all kinds of governments, all over the world, to talk to them about how they might approach this. And I'm very welcome in most places. But it, it is yet another pushback that you take against an individual for campaigning for child safety, for AI to be subject to democratic rules, for creative copyright to be upheld, and all the things that I really care about. Which is basically, in a sentence, that tech be accountable in the same way as [00:40:00] any other business.

Ruth Fox: One of the things you have at your disposal as a parliamentarian that quite a lot of other parliamentarians don't have is your contact book. So, when you think about your campaign for copyright laws to protect creators, people like yourself, filmmakers, musicians and so on, and the campaign to essentially stop the tech companies basically drawing in all the creative material, the intellectual property out there on the internet to feed these AI language models, which they'd like to do, they don't want to pay for that information that's, that's servicing those models. They want to basically take it. You've led a, a campaign to push back against that. Let's just say you had some quite powerful advocates that you could call on. We're talking Paul McCartney and Elton John here. So you are able to sort of obviously get them involved in, in the campaign. That's not something that quite a lot of other parliamentarians would necessarily have at their disposal. And clearly, you know, you utilise that, that power. [00:41:00] But should it really come to that?

Baroness Kidron: Well, no. I mean I thought it was a travesty, how the government behaved at that time and I think to literally say to your population, we understand that this is being stolen, but we don't know what to do about it. And anyway, we've got a UK-US trade deal that we really care about, so what we are going to do is we are going to redefine theft and give it away to the thieves. That was what went on, in unparliamentary language, that is what the dispute was. And I thought it was disgraceful.

Now I will say this, that yes, when you get to the creative industries, you know, having come from that tribe as it were, I do have a good phone book. I do have friends who are still there. And as I made very clear in my parliamentary contributions, my husband is an author, a writer, writes musicals and plays and operas and so on. So I had an [00:42:00] interest. So I was very, very clear that this was personal for me and not simply political, although it is obviously right in the centre of my political interests.

But I'm going to make a different point, which is actually we've got some incredible medics in the Lords and they have all the royal societies behind them. And we have some incredible lawyers and then suddenly you get judges popping up all over the place and saying something. And indeed you've got some amazing people who are in education. And then suddenly you've got, whether it's the trade unions, you know, the teachers unions or the head teachers association. So I think that one of the things that is good about the Lords is because a lot of people come from somewhere they don't represent, I mean, we don't represent at all because we're not elected, because actually what's phenomenal about the Lords, whether you like it or [00:43:00] not, is that when you do have people who have had whole other lives, they bring all of that power to the legislation and to the conversation. I think it creates a different atmosphere.

Ruth Fox: Do you find when you are doing your amendments, you know, you are pinging your three amendments back to the Commons and saying, can you please think again?

Did you ever feel that you came under quite a lot of personal pressure to give way because you're not elected?

Baroness Kidron: Definitely. I was told directly that I was doing something that was unparliamentary, that was not in the tradition and that I should give way. I actually think that I wasn't, and there are two reasons.

One is really technical, which is that the government didn't make an argument. They used some process about whether this would or would not cost money and their financial privilege to push [00:44:00] back. And they thought that was very clever, but it's actually unparliamentary in itself, so they behaved badly. So my bad behaviour was mitigated because I couldn't have a conversation.

I think the other thing that I'd be very open about is, I went to them again and again and again. And I said I would rather not argue about this, I would rather come to terms. And actually there's another tradition in the, in the House, which is that if people in the Lords feel that strongly, especially when it's on a cross-party basis, and I will point out that the Labour government of the day could not get their own vote out, quite apart from all the other people on all benches who voted with me. Yeah. That actually, if the Lords feels that strongly, then it is the expectation that they come with [00:45:00] something that will answer the need and they came with nothing.

So in the end, yes, the elected house must win. We all do respect that. I believe, I'm not sure, but you will know that we voted on it, I think the only thing that's been voted on more times than that was the Rwanda issue. And every single time we got more votes rather than less, it was a building issue rather than not.

And I want to make this point, which is we do very technical work. And in fact, I was looking at some amendments to do with health data this morning, and they are so technical that it's very difficult for people outside Parliament to get very excited about them. But this was a cultural matter. And I want to say it wasn't just Parliament and it wasn't just Paul McCartney and Eton John. I was getting thousands of [00:46:00] letters from people saying, keep going, keep going. You are doing this for us. These are our stories that you're protecting. This is the music I played at my wedding that I want my daughter to have her version of. This is our national story, our cultural story. This is who we are as a country. Do not give that up to big tech.

Ruth Fox: I remember talking on the podcast, Mark, you might, you might recall this when these amendments were going through that you were also helping the Hansard Society because we discovered that some early versions of our journal, editions of our journal content, academic Parliamentary Affairs were being scooped up by the large language models and, and being, and being utilised without our permission, without the publisher's permission.

So, uh, yeah. Thank you.

Baroness Kidron: I very much hope that you've gone to the companies, put an exception, gone to the companies and told them to, to take them out. Because I think that this is a fight that's not finished yet. [00:47:00] I think you're gonna find that other places in the world are actually going to start protecting their creative and create a market for copyrighted material, and the UK will have given up its advantage, instead of actually doubling down on its advantage.

Mark D'Arcy: Now we are talking to you in the backwash of the United States midterm elections where one of the big issues was data centres, which seemed to be crystallising all the anxieties about the way the tech companies behave. Do you sense, given that a lot of people are seeing the big vote for the Democrats as a revolt against the tech companies, do you sense that there's some kind of tipping point approaching where opinion is crystallising in other countries too, against the behaviour of big tech?

Baroness Kidron: I do. Absolutely. And interestingly, I've just come back from a trip to Canada and the US and I've had very direct experience of it. And I think that the data centre arguments are really interesting because so many of these [00:48:00] arguments are very, very difficult for people to get their head round. And in fact, that was why I wrote the book, was to try and help people in very simple language say, actually, you know what, child safety, AI copyright is all the part of the same problem. And look how it lines up here. And I think that the reason that data centres have been such a big issue is partly because they are physical. They manifest in communities, they get built, they can be seen, they push out harms forever, chemicals, and they take resources.

Guess what? Amazon does that to our high streets. Guess what? Meta's products do that to our children. They push out harms and they drag in the resources, which might be time or attention and so on. And I think that displacement [00:49:00] of what we call the, the extraction economy, they take what is good, the upside for themselves, and they push out the problems onto society or individuals.

I think that that is really clear to people when a huge thumping, great warehouse that hums and actually puts up your electricity prices and makes your water dirty, you know, that really comes into focus.

So yes, I mean, listen, the lobby in America is extraordinary. You only have to look around and see how many senators and Congress people, big tech has money in their campaigns. So there is a problem about what the lobby does. But I can tell you this state by state, by state, right across America, they are making chat bots illegal to put them to kids. They're doing the age appropriate design code. They're [00:50:00] doing child safety things. They're doing takeout for women. They're doing nudification and they're looking for red lines on AI. They're looking for copyright up and down the country. So I think there is a new mood. And the real thing is, do the Democrats come together and ride the wave and say, hang on a minute, this was a moment where they were the robber barons, and we're gonna bring that to a halt. Yeah. Or do we see politics as usual and we see some terrible fight for the leadership of the Democratic Party next year and to be president and they forget why it is that this blue wave came.

And I really want to make clear, I'm not saying tech is the only problem in the world, but it is one very big, clear problem. And one of the things is, it's a huge transfer of wealth from many people to a few. And so actually turning that tide around would be [00:51:00] very, very helpful for all sorts of nation states right across the world.

Mark D'Arcy: Beeban Kidron, Baroness Kidron, thanks very much indeed for talking to Ruth and me on the pod today.

Baroness Kidron: Absolute pleasure.

Ruth Fox: Well, that's all from Mark and me today. If you want to read Baroness Kidron’s book, Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back, its published by Penguin. We’ll put a link in the shownotes. Mark and I will be back on Friday, the 13th of November. What could possibly go wrong? Thank you for listening. If you're new to Parliament Matters, do remember to follow us on your podcast app, and if you enjoy the programme, then leave us a rating or review, especially if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

It'll help more people discover the podcast and understand why Parliament matters. And if you're watching our captioned episodes on YouTube, then please like this video, leave a comment and subscribe to the Hansard Society's channel.

And finally, if you share our belief that Parliament matters, why not join the Hansard Society? Your membership helps support this podcast and our work for a more effective Parliament. But for [00:52:00] now, from Mark and I, goodbye.

Mark D'Arcy: Goodbye.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm, or find us on social media @HansardSociety.