The Digital Britain Retort

I read the Digital Britain report in some detail on the way over to TED last week - was going to write a sketch of a critique at TED for a "Digital Britain Retort" - a short paper commenting on it that I want to write - but TED keeps you fully immersed so I can only really get down to it this week.

Still, there is a nice piece by Cory Doctorow in the Grauniad today on the subject - I like this comment:

The internet generation is growing up in an age of configurable media, where the tools in homes can be used to remix and re-imagine the media around them, giving them a fluidity and expertise in technology that may leave us with a generation of media experts ready to step up and become the next wave of British creators.

Unless, that is, we continue to prosecute and harass these kids who are using the net to collaborate on and share their remixes, treating them as criminals. No one chased the Beatles through the streets of Liverpool, calling them criminals for playing the popular tunes of the day in order to learn their craft. But today, the multinationals and billionaires who control the rights to the Beatles and other British culture are doing everything in their power to shut down the kids who are noodling with culture using laptops instead of guitars.

Lord Carter is proposing to shackle the experimenters who represent Digital Britain's future to safeguard some minor licensing streams for the winners of Britain's analogue past.

One thing they are doing right is to dragoon the industry into upping the bandwidth. We just finished a major research piece on the Future of Online Video, and it is a telling fact that the countries that are forging ahead are either using direct or indirect state pressure to create big bandwidth - pure competition is just not working owing to the high costs and risk. France has moved from one model to the other and is now well ahead of the other big European countries. It looks like there is a showdown tomorrow in the UK in fact:

Heads of three of the five UK network operators are meeting with Lord Carter tomorrow morning, along with representatives of the other two, to talk about his demand for 2Mb/sec for all and how to achieve it.

Lord Carter's proposal sees mobile operators trading spectrum to increase coverage, and the good Lord's report states explicitly that if they don't come to a suitable agreement by April then the government will impose one. This is something no one in the industry wants to see.

So the FT reports that everyone who owns network infrastructure has been summoned to meet Kip Meek - the former Ofcom official trying to sort out the details - tomorrow morning.

More, later, as they say.......