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Who is the New Government Man in Charge of Broadband Delivery UK

Tuesday, May 12th, 2015 (8:43 am) - Score 896

The newly elected Conservative Government has conducted somewhat of an exercise in musical chairs, which has resulted in the previous Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Sajid Javid MP, being replaced by John Whittingdale, the MP for Maldon.

The decision means that Whittingdale will now be in charge of the national Broadband Delivery UK scheme, which among other things is predominantly working with BT to make fixed line “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) services available to 95% of the United Kingdom by 2017/18 (read our summary of what to expect from the new Government).

It’s the latest in a long line of musical chairs style appointments to the role, which started off in 2010 with Jeremy Hunt MP and just two years later he was replaced by Maria Miller MP following concerns that he had been too cosy with the Murdoch’s (News Corp).

Unfortunately Miller didn’t last longer than two years either and in 2014 she succumbed to an expenses scandal, which resulted in the appointment of Sajid Javid MP to the role. Mercifully Javid appeared to have a more stable, if short, tenure with few problems to blight his name and has now been appointed as the Secretary of State for Business.

Taking Javid’s place is John Whittingdale, a man whom is well known for holding an outspoken position against the BBC TV Licence fee and his desires to reform the governance of English football. Whittingdale also has an economics degree and over the past couple of decades has held many related trade, business and culture positions within the Conservative party.

On top of that he has previously expressed concern about the harm that Internet piracy is doing to the creative industry, although a comment he made in 2010 suggests that he might actually have a better grasp than most MPs of the technical challenges.

John Whittingdale said of the Digital Economy Act in 2010:

At the moment, it takes a long time to download an HD movie, but when we move to a world in which such a movie can be downloaded in a matter of minutes, we will see real problems with piracy. It is terribly important that we take measures to deal with that. However, there are real problems with each of the measures proposed. On file sharing, culprits are to be identified by asking internet service providers to identify their customers through their internet protocol, or IP, addresses.

Nobody has yet explained to me how we will deal with university halls of residence; one has to suspect that a large proportion of the occupants of those are likely to be involved in illegal file sharing. Nobody has explained how we are to deal with internet cafés and wi-fi zones, all of which are proliferating. It cannot be right for us to cut off the whole of Starbucks just because one person went in for a cup of coffee and illegally shared files.

The second provision, on site blocking, was introduced at a very late stage. Again, there is no question but that piracy is taking place not only through file sharing but through the accessing of illegal websites. The provisions that have now been introduced, which I assume will also pass, still raise serious questions. Is it proposed that a rights holder will have to take out individual injunctions against every single internet service provider? Unless they do, as soon as one ISP blocks access, the people who want to obtain illegal content will simply transfer their business to the next ISP. It is very simple to set up a proxy server. If access to a website is blocked, those in the business of distributing illegal content will set up a proxy server somewhere else; instead of going through the front door, everybody will simply come in through the back door. If that proxy server is cut off, another will follow.”

Whittingdale is also an advocate for improving the national infrastructure, but at the same time we know very little about his position on broadband, save for a few past comments made in support of the Government’s direction and some frustration at BDUK’s inability to spend on general infrastructure improvements in dense urban areas (e.g. cities) due to state aid restrictions.

But otherwise he doesn’t appear to hold any particularly strong, perhaps ideological, beliefs about the future direction of broadband infrastructure. In that sense Whittingdale is likely to follow the Government’s existing plan and probably won’t make too many dramatic changes, but then that would be true of almost anybody in the role since most of the leg work has already been done.

In related news Ed Vaizey, the MP for Didcot and Wantage, will continue in his role as the Minister of State for Culture and the Digital Economy, which tends to involve a lot of broadband related speeches and engagements; this role straddles both DCMS and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). In fact he probably does significantly more, in a practical sense, on the broadband front than the Culture Secretary.

Still, it’s worth pointing out how some newspaper reports have suggested that the responsibility for telecoms related matters might end up being shifted completely back to BIS, which we think would not be necessary given the increasingly close links between media and Internet issues. Never the less we have asked the Government to clarify, but for the time being BDUK remains part of DCMS.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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