'Digital Britain' and the death of the internet as we know it.

I have long learnt to be suspicious of government announcements, and especially grandiose proposals, simply because they are normally hiding something. PR gurus can dress it up any way they want, and the PM or whichever MP is announcing the proposal can create a dramatic and powerful speech, but all that does is make me more and more questioning of the proposals, and whether they are all they seem. Of course, in politics, nothing is what it seems.

This is why it’s quite lucky I stumbled upon an article about Lord Stephen Carter’s announcement of a new era, what he called a new, ‘Digital Britain’, for all. This had passed me by, and I remember when it came out, I tuned out when I heard Gordon Brown droning on about how it could become more important than the transport and road network we have already. That is, until I found an interesting article from the Guardian, which exposed the sinister underbelly of these proposals. It seems, then, that Digital Britain is not the perfect e-utopia that Brown painted in his speech - it is, in fact, yet another step closer to the Big Brother-state that George Orwell predicted many many years ago. God, if he was still alive today, he would be shocked at how much the modern world is coming to resemble the state envisaged in '1984', written 60 years ago this year.

The most worrying aspect of this scheme is that it is in favour of internet pricing, and that it plans to take away internet neutrality, the most sacred of areas of the modern internet. The way the current internet works is this: you pay an internet service provider (ISP) a flat monthly fee, and in return, they provide you with access to the Internet. And that is pretty much unlimited - you can surf on anything you want. And the ISP's duty is to make sure they provide you with this service in a fast and easy fashion, and they must provide you with this service no matter what their opinions are on the websites you visit. However, with this new scheme, instead of paying the ISP a flat fee to access whatever you like, you pay ISPs to have certain packages of websites, much like with digital TV where you pay to have packages with certain TV channels. At the same time, the websites will be expected to stump up more money to pay to each ISP to allow people to access them, and ISPs will decide which websites you are allowed to see - if they do not like one particular website, they can choose to simply refuse to let you visit it. It is basically a massive con. The huge popularity of the internet thus far has been because, beyond that inital charge to the ISP every month, it is free-to-access. The amount of information available on the Internet is truely amazing. You can access anything you like on there - YouTube, Facebook, Google, this BlogSpot website from which I am blogging from, and all the millions and millions of websites which are on the World Wide Web, no matter how large or small. It is all about freedom of information, and sharing information. So much of our lives, everybody’s lives, revolve around the internet. And that is why people like Lord Carter, sitting cackling behind his overly-large spectacles, are trying to move to take this basic civil liberty away from us. By making users pay for website usage, and preventing us from visiting certain websites, it takes away the most basic aspect of the internet - its neutrality. It suddenly swings the balance - not everybody will be able to afford to put their websites up, due to the fact that they will have to pay ISPs to have their websites in their packages, and not everybody will be able to afford to access these websites. It will erase millions of small websites around the world, leaving only a select elite who can afford to pay these ridiculous costs. It will also erase countless more, as ISPs deem them not worth hosting, and therefore people will no longer be able to access them. This is basically supressing information. I hope this is not too confusing, as this is a massive issue - as I have said, the whole appeal and basis of the Internet is that it offers freedom of information. If this is taken away, it will be a grave injustice. There have already been attempts in other countries (I think Canada is the one that springs to mind) - I will be raising as much awareness as possible to ensure that it doesn't happen here.

But believe it or not, that is not all that Lord Carter is proposing in his 'Digital Britain' - sounds so sweet and innocent, doesn't it? For besides this, there are ideas to enforce stricter copyright laws. They want greater power to enforce copyrights on songs. The example used on the Guardian article is this: say you make a remix of a song, for example, In Da Club by 50 Cent. Let's say, as a laugh, you make a cover or a joke version of the song. It's just sitting there, doing nothing on your computer. You don't plan to release it or make any kind of money off of it, because it’s just a joke song. Maybe you'll send it to some friends, and they get a laugh out of it too. No harm, right? Wrong. Lord Carter's proposals indicate that he is with the 'multinationals and billionaires which control the rights' (Guardian article quote), which means that they will be given more power to shut down and prosecute people like the example above, even if they are not making any commercial gain off of it. YouTube is already beginning to fall foul of this - on some videos, the soundtrack has been erased due to it being 'unauthorised'.

I do not understand this. If a song is on a video on YouTube, where is the problem in that? YouTube is a free (at the moment anyway) website, where people can post up videos for free and they can then be viewed for free. Notice the usage of the word 'free' - something that this report as a whole is aiming to cut down on, it seems. The Digital Britain will be a Britain which stifles out young, creative talents in favour of the massive, money-hungry corporations. This may sound like a real left-wing rant, but it is becoming more and more true.

And the madness still doesn't stop. There are other proposals too, mainly involving more petty copyright issues, not directly stated but suggested, which confirms the belief that Carter's Digital Britain is in fact a nightmare for all. I will try my best to raise awareness towards these issues, and I hope you do the same - this is an issue which affects a lot of people, particularly the internet neutrality issue, which would destroy people's enjoyment of the internet as we know it. If people can club together on this issue then maybe, just maybe, people can put this government off these ideas and halt these money-driven plans in their tracks.
Because if these proposals are allowed to creep into force, then I wont even be able to vent my displeasure on this blog without having to pay AOL for the privilege. And after the appalling service they have given me over the years, the last thing I feel like giving them is more money.