It’s not often I find myself defending Phorm, but at the House of Commons today the behavioural advertising service was genuinely hard done by.

Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Miller invited a hand-picked panel of internet experts and politicians to a roundtable discussion entitled: The Internet Threat: Who needs privacy when we can have relevant ads?  A title that makes its stance on behavioural advertising pretty damned clear. And there were only two companies mentioned in the press release: BT and Phorm.

She further loaded the dice by picking a selection of renowned Phorm critics including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who’s spoken out against Phorm and its like in the past; Dr Richard Clayton and  Nicholas Bohm from the Foundation for Information Policy Research, the organisation that branded BT’s secret Phorm trials “illegal”; and Jim Killock from the Open Rights Group.

Nothing wrong with that, and the credentials of the panel are beyond dispute. But for some reason, Baroness Miller wasn’t prepared to give Phorm a seat at the table, relegating its CEO Kent Ertugrul and various flunkies to the back of the room with us journalists. BT were invited to speak, but declined.

Phorm eventually had its say:  Ertugrul sat waving like the smart kid in the classroom that the teacher deliberately avoids, until finally Baroness Miller relented and let him speak, but he certainly wasn’t given the same “airtime” as the rest of the panel.

It was, to some extent, a kangaroo court, with the defendant struggling to get a word in edgeways, while the prosecution generally repeated the same charges. It only served to invoke a degree of sympathy for Phorm – former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis even asked Ertugrul for his business card, as he clearly wanted to get both sides of the story.

The sad thing was Miller didn’t need to gag Phorm. The most interesting exchanges occurred when Berners-Lee and Ertugrul were briefly allowed to debate openly with one another. There were highly intelligent, articulate people on the panel: they didn’t need protection. They more than held their own when they were allowed to directly exchange views with Phorm.

Democracy is best served by an open debate. Of all people, you’d have thought the Liberal Democrats would have grasped that.