Digital Economy Bill

As we all know, the Queen’s Speech yesterday was written by Gordon Brown and contained a fantastic list of things he’d do should the British public ever elect him as Prime Minister. While everyone was falling about laughing at the idea of new laws to make both budget deficits child poverty illegal, you might have missed some gems from Digital Economy Bill, which was announced today and will be published tomorrow (Friday).

In verbiage reminiscent of Wilson’s “White heat of technology” twaddle, the Queen was obliged to say:


“My government will introduce a bill to ensure the communications infrastructure is fit for the digital age, supports future economic growth, delivers competitive communications and enhances public service broadcasting.”

The actual bill appears to include such ideas as the £6/year tax on all land telephone lines (why not mobiles?) to ensure that everyone in Britain can get 2Mbps broadband by 2012. Do these politicians understand what the term ‘broadband’ means? Why should we be subsidising the infrastructure for ISPs who’ll be charging us whatever the like for the use of the new network we’ll be paying for in this extra tax.

Perhaps the biggest ‘idea’ is a clampdown on Internet based piracy. New Labour’s sleazy spin-doctor Peter Mandelson was on about this recently, and it’s going to be in the bill. Apparently persistent offenders will get a series of stiff letters and the ISP will eventually pull the plug on them. Get real! Anyone with the slightest idea how the Internet works knows that you can’t tell whether material transiting a network is subject to copyright. You can’t even tell what it is! No amount of legislation will change that.

On the same tack, children are going to be protected by making it illegal for video game retailers to sell games intended for over 12’s to under 12’s. That’s really going to work. The government can’t keep hard drugs out of a prison, so how are they going to stop anyone getting hold of dubious video games.

Another nice little earner for the treasury is switching over to digital radio by 2015. If you thought updating to digital TV was bad, they now want you to scrap all your radios too. Including those in cars? DAB radios use 20 times the power of simple FM receivers – not exactly a green idea either.

I do hope that whoever wins the election next year will ditch these stupid ideas, but do the conservatives have any better idea about what the Internet really is?