Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Mandelson may have ended Labor's chances
According to the important US blog BoingBoing "Peter Mandelson has tabled his "Digital Economy Bill," a terrible piece of legislation that requires ISPs to police their customers on behalf of the music industry when the latter claims that its copyrights have been violated (no evidence necessary). The UK music industry blames piracy for £200 million in annual losses, and this is Mandelson's excuse for abridging human rights and fundamental justice in his witch-hunt for pirates.
But the government's own research shows that Mandelson's plans will cost the UK ISP industry £500 million to implement, and when these costs are added to each customer's bill (as they surely will be), the rise will be enough to knock an estimated 40,000 British families off the Internet
What's more, the government's own Digital Inclusion research has shown that poor households with Internet access enjoy a substantially higher quality of life than their offline neighbours, thanks to a variety of factors, from low-cost online shopping, to savings through online utility billing, to better research tools for school-kids, job-seekers and people with health problems.
Half a billion pounds down the drain, 40,000 of Britain's most vulnerable families knocked offline, and for all that, there's no reason to believe that Mandelson's plan will do anything to out piracy."
IMO: Sounds like this could be right. BoingBoing are often right. Looks like Mandelson is as good at dealing with the internet as Gordon Brown is at regulating banker's salaries. That is, quite worthless. Now Mandelson certainly appears to belong to a sexual minority group of a kind notoriously good at manipulating the media to its cliquish advantage but not necessarily in possession of far reaching and constructive views in other ways. It is easy to say that perhaps both he and Gordon Brown were bad choices. But on those terms we are left saying that most MPs of all parties in Westminster were bad choices. Probably this is true,and it could be said they should mostly be voted out of office for good at almost any cost. In practice our reasonable best hope may be for a considerable reform to the voting system, and I would have hoped that at least some elected MPs have the self-respect to work on that.
But the government's own research shows that Mandelson's plans will cost the UK ISP industry £500 million to implement, and when these costs are added to each customer's bill (as they surely will be), the rise will be enough to knock an estimated 40,000 British families off the Internet
What's more, the government's own Digital Inclusion research has shown that poor households with Internet access enjoy a substantially higher quality of life than their offline neighbours, thanks to a variety of factors, from low-cost online shopping, to savings through online utility billing, to better research tools for school-kids, job-seekers and people with health problems.
Half a billion pounds down the drain, 40,000 of Britain's most vulnerable families knocked offline, and for all that, there's no reason to believe that Mandelson's plan will do anything to out piracy."
IMO: Sounds like this could be right. BoingBoing are often right. Looks like Mandelson is as good at dealing with the internet as Gordon Brown is at regulating banker's salaries. That is, quite worthless. Now Mandelson certainly appears to belong to a sexual minority group of a kind notoriously good at manipulating the media to its cliquish advantage but not necessarily in possession of far reaching and constructive views in other ways. It is easy to say that perhaps both he and Gordon Brown were bad choices. But on those terms we are left saying that most MPs of all parties in Westminster were bad choices. Probably this is true,and it could be said they should mostly be voted out of office for good at almost any cost. In practice our reasonable best hope may be for a considerable reform to the voting system, and I would have hoped that at least some elected MPs have the self-respect to work on that.
# posted by uv : 1:55 PM
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