Judgment Approved by the court for handing down. “25. The contrast between section 127(1)(a) of the 2003 Act— under which the respondent was charged—and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 (a contrast struck by Lord Bingham at para 7 of his speech) is crucial to an understanding of the true nature and ambit of liability under section 127(1)(a). Whereas section 127(1)(a) criminalises without more the sending by means of a public electronic communications network of inter alia a message that is grossly offensive, the corresponding part of section 1(1) of the 1988 Act (as amended by section 43(1) of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001) provides that: "Any person who sends to another person (a) a letter, electronic communication or article of any description which conveys (i) a message which is . . . grossly offensive . . . is guilty of an offence if his purpose, or one of his purposes, in sending it is that it should . . . cause distress or anxiety to the recipient or to any other person to whom he intends that it or its contents or nature should be communicated." 26. In short, for liability to arise under section 1(1), the sender of the grossly offensive message must intend it to cause distress or anxiety to its immediate or eventual recipient. Not so under section 127(1)(a): the very act of sending the message over the public communications network (ordinarily the public telephone system) constitutes the offence even if it was being communicated to someone who the sender knew would not be in any way offended or distressed by it. Take, for example, the case considered in argument before your Lordships, that of one racist talking on the telephone to another and both using the very language used in the present case. Plainly that would be no offence under the 1988 Act, and no offence, of course, if the conversation took place in the street. But it would constitute an offence under section 127(1)(a) because the speakers would certainly know that the grossly offensive terms used were insulting to those to whom they applied and would intend them to be understood in that sense. 27. I confess that it did not at once strike me that such a telephone conversation would involve both participants in committing a criminal offence. I am finally persuaded, however, that section 127(1)(a) is indeed intended to protect the integrity of the public communication system: as Lord Bingham puts it at paragraph 7 of his speech, "to prohibit the use of a service provided and funded by the public for the benefit of the public for the transmission of communications which contravene the basic standards of our society". (Quite where that leaves telephone chat-lines, the very essence of which might be thought to involve the sending of indecent or obscene messages such as are also DPP v Bussetti