How to regulate the Internet?
Dominique Lazanski 5:04pm
This week, the Open Rights Group launched a campaign against the proposed website blocking scheme between copyright holders and Internet Service
Providers. The campaign was launched on the back of a leaked document suggesting that a voluntary code for industry website blocking be introduced. The document was presented to Ed Vaizey,
the relevant minister.
Vaizey meets regularly with internet stakeholders to debate digital issues, including net neutrality, parental controls, and, of course, web blocking. These meetings are a vast improvement over the last government, which made technology policy decisions behind closed doors without much – if any – input from outsiders.
Stakeholders want a new structure for reviewing gross copyright infringement and aim to install an expert panel to review transgressions when identified by rights holders. This is an alternative solution to the blocking of copyright infringers under the Digital Economy Act.
Web blocking is a contentious issue, most of all because it's incompatible with a free and open society. It is also impracticably hard to implement; and even if it were implemented, Internet users can find ways around it. Vaizey himself prefers an industry-wide agreement that will allow copyright holders to monetise their content more successfully, so that government regulation need not be introduced. Hopefully industry and stakeholders will reach such an agreement among themselves. It is possible: as of yesterday, it looks like this kind of agreement will reign in the US.
Dominique Lazanski is the technological policy analyst at the Taxpayers' Alliance.
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Frank P
June 24th, 2011 5:31pm Report this commentWho's side are the 'Taxpayers Alliance' on here, Dominic? I get the whiff of incoming slithering towards political censorship, disguised in the garb of copyright theft. Paranoiac? Why wouldn't I be? The intertubes is the only medium that the leftist MSM haven't got sown up.
Scary Biscuits
June 24th, 2011 5:50pm Report this comment"How to regulate the internet"? Shouldn't it be whether to regulate?
Copyright law is already skewed far too far towards people inside the bubble, at the expense of freedom of thought and speech. It is time to let freedom reign and the rest of you can jump in a lake.
DavidDP
June 24th, 2011 6:15pm Report this comment"The intertubes is the only medium that the leftist MSM haven't got sown up"
Really? Because I was pretty sure that the best selling print newspapers in the UK are the Sun, the Mail and the Telegraph. Are they leftist then?
In2minds
June 24th, 2011 6:41pm Report this commentScary Biscuits -
"How to regulate the internet"? Shouldn't it be whether to regulate?
Agreed.
Barry Bilge
June 24th, 2011 7:08pm Report this comment"Stakeholders want a new structure for reviewing gross copyright infringement and aim to install an expert panel to review transgressions when identified by rights holders."
Are the public ever considered to be stakeholders? Are our representatives representing us as stakeholders or acting like a referee to competing vested interests except the public?
There already is a remedy for copyright infringement - the courts. It would be in the public interest for the Government to prevent 'stakeholders' from setting up their own star chamber.
Baron
June 24th, 2011 7:23pm Report this commentjust leaving it alone would be the right regulation, I reckon
Jeremy
June 24th, 2011 8:17pm Report this commentThey won't be happy until everybody has to be first vetted and then licenced before they can go online at all. They will edit out the inconvenient voices by simply refusing to licence them in the first place.
Those who actually make it through the process and get online will find they are at liberty to discuss only kittens, good housekeeping skills and the benefits of Christianity.
Verity will be happy.
normanc
June 24th, 2011 8:41pm Report this commentWho uses the web (http:// presumably) to download anything?
As for restricting everything else, good luck with that one.
If we want to prosecute otherwise decent citizens who google idiotic terms like 'where can i download the latest films' then click on the links thrown up then things really are bad. anyone with an iota of computing knowledge will easily bypass anything the ISP's will put in place.
Fergus Pickering
June 24th, 2011 11:32pm Report this commentIt is the nature of all government to repress and regulate. That is what the police are for - as far as government is concerned - and why they are generally overpaid. What we want is an unregulated internet but it isn't what we are going to get
Scary Biscuits
June 25th, 2011 10:24am Report this comment@DavidDP, "Are the Sun, Mail and Telegraph leftist?"
Clearly you haven't read the last on that list recently. It's not right wing in any sense I would recognise, only relative to the Guardian and the BBC.
The bias in the Mail is more subtle. They know their readership is left wing but the journalists and, especially, management working there are almost all left wing and pro-estabishment. That's why their headlines sometimes ring a bit hollow: they're trying to write what they imagine nasty right wing people would want to read rather than really believing it. For example, Osborne spending money on holiday: most right wing people are fine with that an aspire to the same lifestyle themselves. The Mail thought that a rich person spending money was an outrage. Their mask slipped for a day. Even on a normal day, however, you won't spot them arguing for the restoration of hanging or leaving Europe, opinions shared by a majority of Britons, let alone right wing nutcases like me.
The Sun just follows the wind. It enthusiastically supported Blair and now it supports son-of-Blair, Cameron. If you think that's right wing, you haven't got a clue.
Hexhamgeezer
June 25th, 2011 7:21pm Report this comment@DavidDP, "Are the Sun, Mail and Telegraph leftist?"
No, they are centrist. Next.
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