Clause 2 - Prohibition of tobacco advertising
Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Bill
9:45 am
Ms Yvette Cooper (Parliamentary Secretary (Public Health), Department of Health; Pontefract and Castleford, Labour)
We have considered the matter in detail to ensure that the defence would work for BT in such circumstances. As I understand it, for BT to cut someone off it would have to know that the person was going to visit a particular website on a particular day at a time when a tobacco advertisement was being shown. There is no way that BT could be aware of that, or, therefore, prevent it, so it would have a defence. With current technology, if BT is unaware—which it is bound to be—of one's intentions on a particular Sunday afternoon when one feels like surfing the web, it could not prevent that particular encounter with a tobacco advertisement.