I am reporting it here for the record and following on from yesterday’s short post announcing it. You can read a bit more on the Lib Dem website here.

The Digital Economy Bill is going right to the wire I feel.

Obviously I’ll keep us all updated but it may make next week quite interesting on the Parliamentary front if the motion is carried.

A weekly newsletter sent by Music Industry representatives BPI to stakeholders such as Sony Music, Warner Brothers and EMI Music also discusses the results of a TalkTalk sponsored survey that finds that “71% of 18 – 34 year olds would continue to infringe copyright, in spite of the Bill provisions, and would use “undetectable methods” to do so”.

There is also the suggestion that MI5 might have helped pay for the survey!

The fact is that it is really easy for users of Torrent sites to sign up for undetectable encrypted services – they are advertised on the front page of the sites. Also when Timico blocked staff access to Facebook and other Social Networking sites (not my doing) anyone that was interested found an alternative way to get there via a proxy server. It isn’t a tech expert thing. It’s and age thing.

Look out next Wednesday for Panorama at 8.30pm on BBC 1 which is broadcasting “Are the Net Police Coming for You?” featuring Feargal Sharkey, Scouting For Girls, Billy Bragg and Sway and Geoff (Taylor of the BPI?).

Read the actual newsletter here. It includes the email addresses of its recipients!!

PS we stopped blocking Facebook – stupid thing to do

The hour’s worth of presentation (no such thing as a free launch party) wasn’t too onerous and the speech by rugby world cup-winning coach Sir Clive Woodward was entertaining – ask me how many F words he used when you see me next.

Virgin Media Business is the re-branded business arm of NTL/Telewest. The consumer division changed long ago. I must say that the presenters said all the right things from a business partner’s perspective.

My experience with using NTL hasn’t been 100% smooth in the last year and they do need to get their act together on service delivery. During the speeches they put their hand up to this and made promises to get better.

We were told that Sir Richard Branson requires businesses carrying the Virgin brand to provide him with Service Level Guarantees and I left believe that the management would deliver. Time will tell but UK plc does need healthy competition in the carrier market. Branson himself spoke in a video.

Photos below are of me mingling with celebrities at the party (A listers ) including David Beckham who was a surprise guest. I must get my hair cut.

Trefor Davies with Sir Clive Woodward

Sir Richard Branson video

Trefor Davies with Colin Annette, Sales Director BT Wholesale

me with surprise guest David Beckam - at least I'm sure it was him - hope his manager doesn't find out that he was out partying (note beer in hand)

The informed betting is that the General Election is going to be on May 6th. The betting for the dissolution of Parliament is either the 1st or 8th April. Normally notice given is 6 weeks but I’m told that because the Labour Party is (allegedly) short of funds they only want a 4 week election campaign – eat yer heart out US of A. My bet is the 8th because they will all want a nice Easter break before the pitched battle to come.

The Government has confirmed that the Budget will be on 24th March (at 12.30pm for the detail minded – warm the TV up soon). Normally we might expect a week to be given for the media to digest and comment about what will presumably be a budget pitched to give us all as much of a feelgood factor as possible after the last year or two of financial hell/instability/crisis/disaster/nightmare/worry/prosperity (delete as appropriate).

That means that our rulers will have one week, the week in the run up to Good Friday (2nd April) to finish the business of the House.

The way it normally works is by the ”washup” process. This is where you should prepare to be shocked.

The whips of each party get together in a room and go through each Bill negotiating a quick settlement. Big decisions are made with no serious debate or technical consideration of the consequences.

The Labour Party will trade broad brush issues with the Conservatives and the Lib Dems based on the need for speed.

Unfortunately this means that Laws dear to our hearts (not) such as the Digital Economy Bill will live or die based on some horse trading done in a rush in a darkened room, somewhere in Whitehall, for the sake of expediency. We have run out of time for this legislation to be properly processed. It has only been debated in the House of Lords!!

This is a disaster for democracy. It is a disaster for you and me and every man woman and child in the UK and to be honest is something that someone should be brought to account for.

I realise this will happen automatically to many of the individuals involved because they won’t be re-elected. Lords of course will be unaffected. It is also highly unlikely that you or I can do anything about it in any other way and that most people in the UK will not understand the likely implications (regardless of which Bill we are talking about). It won’t play a part in the Election process.

So the process of Lawmaking, which can rightly take long months, nay years is going to be short-circuited because of the political manoeuvring before an election.

Mistakes are going to be made that will affect us all.

Now one of the main subjects of discussion on this blog over the last few months has been the Digital Economy Bill/aka Digital Britain. This is hugely important to UK plc. The way the Bill has been put together is a testament to the political skills of those in power. In fact you cannot but admire the political adroitness of Peter Mandelson et al. I wouldn’t want to come up against him in a life or death debate (which actually is where we are in some respects).

The Digital Economy Bill contains many sections covering a wide range of “digital” subjects. They are all important and some individual sections are variously more important to different political groupings.

The upshot is that whilst no single party agrees on all the aspects of the Bill they all want different bits of it to succeed and are therefore generally supportive of it as a whole.

It isn’t possible to say “we don’t like this bit, lets just do away with it and pass all the good bits”. It either all gets passed or none of it. That’s the way the system works and this Bill has been cleverly put together knowing this.

This is not good because some aspects, such as the reform of the radio airwaves, are eminently sensible and that no sane person would want to kybosh.

Unfortunately because of this rush some of the ill considered legislation such as that concerning online copyright protection will potentially be swept through, like lint sticking to a Parliamentary clothes brush. Fingers crossed!! Roll that dice!!! Not the way I run my business!!!!

Bad news all round. Bad news as well really, if they but realised it, for the rights-holders pushing hard for some kind of legal protection against copyright piracy (illegal downloading). The legislation will not work and the need to provide emphasis on reform of the business model of the creative industries will be missed in the fog of the election .

There is nothing you can do about this other than to vote with your heart. We are stuck with this system. A fixed term parliament along American lines might be the answer.

In the meantime the ISP industry, within which I and many readers of this blog work, has to get its act together. ISPs are key to the prosperity of the UK they need to work out a strategy for a Digital Britain that will be effective.

This strategy needs to be communicated to the Government of the day in a coordinated manner and not in the reactive way we have responded to the Digital Economy Bill. ISPs need to be driving legislation not scrabbling around defensively on the back foot.

My own views are that the Digital Economy Bill should be scrapped now but I need all the signatories to Wednesday’s letter to publicly say so as well and I doubt there is time left to do it.

Following on from my comments last week regarding the outrage amongst ISPs over clause 120A the industry has united and written a letter published in the FT this morning.  The signatories are a roll call of the heaviest hitters in the internet in the UK and include ISPA – drafts were circulated to us for comment on Monday.

It will be simply scandalous if 120A proceeds after this. Coincidentally and as a bit of an aside one of the consequences of 120A would be potentially to slow down the aforementioned lightening distribution of said news.  Half the websites concerned could be blocked!

To the letter

Well today the worlds biggest router manufacturer, Cisco, announced their latest and greatest product.  It isn’t something that you will want to plug into your phone line though because it would take up most of the living room and there wouldn’t be enough room left for the sofa.

It would also be a bit of an overkill because this router, the CRS-3, is powerful enough to handle up to 322 Terabits¹ per second, which  is roughly a hundred million times faster than the average UK broadband connection speed!

Cisco claims that the CRS-3 enables the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second; every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously; and every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes².

Uhuh do I hear you say?  So What??

Well you know everything has to progress and in fact regular readers of trefor.net will have occasionally picked up some relevant trends.

The first 100Gbps network rollout was covered here

News of the London Internet Exchange (LINX) carrying 2.5Tbps capacity here

Operators of 100Gbps networks will want to invest in this type of kit.  There aren’t many yet – in fact I only know of two but I’m probably wrong.

As more people do more with the internet the “network” has to “grow”.  The CRS-3 represents a $1.6Bn investment by Cisco to stay at the top of the tree – most of the equipment that powers the internet is manufactured by them. A lucrative spot that it won’t want to lose.

Who would buy it do you ask?  Well the CRS-3’s predecessor is the CRS-1 and Cisco claims to have sold almost 5,000 of these around the world.

As technology advances the rule of thumb is that the next generation gives you 10x the speed at 4x the price.  This is how costs come down in the long term.  Of course usage must grow to justify the spend but that it is doing.

So the owners of 5,000 boxes out there will at some time want to upgrade and with the starting price at $90,000 Cisco doesn’t have to sell many to start racking up the dollars. And you probably get barely more than the actual box for that starting price. You can bet that the high end version will approach seven figures (I’ll see if I can find out for later).

Anyway the CRS-3 announcement is an exciting one for geeks and if Cisco wants Timico to evaluate one I’d be happy to devote an engineer to it – try before you buy of course News about the CRS-3 on the Cisco website is here.

1 Tbps = 1000,000Mbps (ish)

2 Bad news for the rightsholders trying to prevent illegal online copyright infringement.  Is this a huge nail in the coffin of the old business model of the creative industries?

Photo below is a CRS-3 – note no sofa in sight! 

Entitled  ”Is Pre-Release Killing Our Business?” tomorrow’s discussion is centred around the fact that in order to raise awareness the music industry conducts promotional campaigns for up to three months before a CD is released.  This stimulates demand for a product that is not yet available and it only takes one promo copy of a CD to be pirated and loaded onto a P2P network for that CD to be freely available which of course eats into sales at launch.

Because of this industry bodies including ERA and the MMF are calling for abolition of pre-release windows in their entirety. Tomorrow night’s speakers including the BBC’s Head of Music for Radio 1 George Ergatoudis, Martin Talbot, MD of the Official Charts Company, Ben Drury of 7 Digital and Emily MacKay of the NME.

It just goes to show that the whole fight against music piracy is something that has to be conducted across many fronts.

More details on the Music Tank website here.

It strikes me that there are so many discussion points/arguments surrounding the Copyright aspects of the Digital Economy Bill that it will be worth collating them all in an easy to access format – watch this space.

It’s so exciting when you come across announcements such as that made by the Government this week saying that they are attempting to get over 7 million people who can’t get online today, access to the internet. By 2014!

This is of course great news!

The plan is being underpinned by funding in a number of areas

• Up to £12m to support the Plan through work of the Consortium for the Promotion of Digital Participation (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills)
• £300m for the Home Access programme to provide free computers and internet connections to 270,000 families with school children (Department for Children, Schools and Families)
• £30m over three years for UK Online Centres under the Smarter Government initiative.

The release also reiterates the Government’s Universal Service Commitment which will pave the UK’s networks with good quality broadband so by 2012. Every home and business will be able to access a connection capable of at least 2Mpbs. BIS words, my italics.

Just a couple of questions really. The £300m will get roughly a million people online (assuming the 2.3 kids per couple which is what it was when I was a nipper but may have changed!). So that’s another 6 million to go? £42m would appear to be on the light side to get that additional number of people online.

But perhaps the 2Mbps USC by 2012 will do it?  We are well into 2010.  Time moves fast in this life. There isn’t a viable proposition on the table to be able to meet this USC. It isn’t going to happen with the current plans in place.

BT for example does it’s network capacity planning on a 2 year horizon. Even with a surprise injection of Government funding the roadmap is almost in place now up until the end of 2012. I know things can change but…

The panacea straw known as BET, grasped at by the government, will blow away in the wind. It has not excited those that live and love amongst the haystacks because it is too expensive and in any case is an “up to 2Mpbs” service, not an “at least 2Mbps” service.

All the statements we get regarding Digital Inclusion and Universal Service Commitment are well intentioned but there does come a point in time where you have to get serious about it and I don’t believe what we are seeing happening now is “getting serious”.

We need a real commitment to making this happen. It needs a Government Department of its own with strong support and a leader that understands the issues and can champion the cause.

Now it is easy for me to say this. I am not in Government and don’t have to make the difficult decisions. Where does the money come from for example?

What I am sure of though that it is the right thing to do.

The current Government machinations are just noises being made in the run up to a general election. They run the risk or rushing things through and making mistakes, as is being seen to happen now with the Digital Economy Bill.

The only sensible thing to do is call a General Election now, reset the clock on legislation and get on with making Britain Digital with a proper sense of purpose.

This is a huge issue.  Rightsholders would be able to ask ISPs to block sites without a court order. If an ISP refuses and the rightsholder subsequently succeeds in getting a court injunction then the ISP will have to pay costs.

In this way the onus is on the ISP to determine guilt and not the court which ain’t right.

Courts in fact already have the power under 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act to grant an injunction requiring ISPs to block access to sites that contain unlawful copyright content.

97a strikes an appropriate balance between the interests of different parties and leaves the court free to consider each claim on its merits and independently of other factors.

Amendment 120A, however, abandons this balance, introduces a bias in favour of one party (rightsholders) and limits the court’s discretion to judge each case on its merits. There would appear to be no “equality before the law” under this amendment.

During the amendment debate comparison was drawn with the Internet Watch Foundation and the blocking of illegal child pornography sites. No sensible person would suggest that independently-assessed illegal child sexual abuse content can be compared with alleged unlawful breaches of the copyright of commercial companies.

Moreover the IWF blocking list is small and relatively cheap to operate. Amendment 120A could see the list of blocked sites grow to enormous proportions. Furthermore there is no mechanism in the Amendment to take sites off the list. The costs of operating this filtering will astronomical and it is fair to say will “break” the internet in the UK.

Another point is that there is no clarity here whether it is infringing content that will be required to be blocked, or whether it is an entire website. New market entrants that are involved in user created content of any type will be liable to being blocked if some of the user generated content is deemed to be illegal. Goodbye  innovation, it was good to know you.

Potentially this is the thin edge of the wedge. Once copyright breaching content filtering is required by law then it becomes a defacto mechanism for ‘other’ content to be blocked.

ISPs currently have the defence of “mere conduit” under which they cannot be liable for illegal content provided they take action as soon as they are aware of the illegality. This amendment chips away at that defence.

If Amendment 120A makes it into law it is going to cause real issues. The longer it goes on the more problematic the Digital Economy Bill appears to be. The industry Trade Association ISPA has put together a very strongly worded resonse to the Government on this which can be found here.