My main concern with any kind of legislation regarding internet monitoring and privacy issues is that they are decided without full understanding of the technologies and people involved.

There is simply not enough debate about it. The fact that this has been rushed through the troubles me greatly but is not at all surprising regardless of the ‘wash period’ the current government are in. The faster they can move bills like this along, the less time anyone has to find out what is really going on and hold a balanced debate about it.

My dissertation was written on a similar subject – online privacy, are we forfeiting privacy to pay for security.

The fact that you can have your internet connection cut off is an interesting theory but how would it work in practice

  1. What would happen if someone hacks into my wireless and downloads illegally? Would I get cut off or a strike against my name?
  2. What if someone at my company downloads illegally, does the company’s internet get cut off?
  3. If I’m a freelance web designer and my little sister downloads a film, do I lose my internet connection which I need in order to do my job? What is the justification for strangling my livelihood?
  4. What about a public wireless network, will that get disconnected?

What is the differentiation between someone actively distributing content and someone who downloads an episode of Lost that has already aired? Is there even a distinction in the governments eyes?

The scope of this is too large for the government to understand and as a result the only thing the Digital Economy Bill will do is driving people to use encryption and proxys to avoid having their traffic inspected.

There are services like TorrentPrivacy already available for a negligible fee. This whole thing boils down to the music and film industry being money hungry. Show me a ratio of what I pay for a song or film against how much the artist gets and you will see why so many people torrent copyrighted materials. Then half of that goes to the government in tax anyway.

The cynic in me wants to say that the only reason the government cares about copyright infringement is because they make so much money in tax from the sale of content and income of the artists / labels.

How do they monitor this anyway? The last I heard ISPs said it was nearly impossible to do. The only ISP quoted as saying they were for this bill was Sky! And they’re a content distributer first!

The government are fearful of losing control and refuse to accept and embrace new technologies. This whole thing is a step closer to the situation with the Great Firewall of China and it disgusts me.

Declare that you don’t recognise the Digital Economy Bill, and your name will be added, just tweet: (make sure to keep the #whatdebill hashtag to be counted)