After much of a wait, the British government’s Digital Britain report has come out. The first part is good, as in very, very good. The British government seeks to provide universal broadband coverage by 2012; it talks about situations in which households cannot afford at least a 2 Mbps connection as a mistake. Additionally, the government is seeking to improve mobile infrastructure, both by making 3G available everywhere (even underground in the Tube train network) and by investing in the construction of a 4G network.
The internet is infrastructure, which is something that the government has realized. In the same way that roads allow for more by way of business, so too does the internet make more available. Governments are in the best position to build infrastructure as they (ideally) are not businesses; they do not seek to profit from their constituents. So what it really comes down to is whether or not governments can recognize what falls under the category of something they should be spending money on. In this instance, Britain got it right.
With all this in mind, there is plenty by way of bad news in the report, especially in the form of the British government’s stance on piracy. While the report does say that it believes that the majority of people much prefer acquiring content through legal means rather than through piracy, the government has also said that the government newly established online watchdog agency, Ofcom, will encourage both bandwidth throttling and protocol blocking. These are both of concern as no group has yet to do this properly – you cannot block bit torrent, for example, without blocking the all the legal file exchanges that take place over it.
Still, it does seem that Britain may be taking a bit of more informed stance against piracy. The report lists its goal in dealing with piracy, more than anything else, shutting down people who steal copyrighted materials for profit. So rather than going after students who download a handful of songs for personal use, we should expect to see a targeting of the guys who download music and then sell burned CDs on the street. This is very good – if this is indeed how anti-piracy enforcement will actually work.
- Full report available here
