By: MarkJ - 1 February, 2010 (2:49 AM) - Score: 1190 - Fixed Line Broadband, Piracy

The Labour governments controversial Business Secretary, Lord Peter Mandelson, has tabled a new UK Digital Economy Bill amendment (200A) that could force those "suspected" of illegal P2P file sharing to pay for their own appeal.

The amendment, as spotted by Friday's Telegraph newspaper, is just one of many changes that make the bill look even worse than when it was originally announced. Interestingly the Telegraph claims that Lord Faulkner was "concerned" by the change, though the nature of his words seem supportive.


Sadly amendment 200A has already been "agreed" as part of last week’s House of Lords debate (26th January). However it is not known how much "suspects" will be charged to appeal their innocence, which is currently subject to further consultation.


Those choosing to view politicians as self-serving bureaucrats, the type who only care about their own wealth and appear to be utterly detached from reality, now have yet another reason to support that perspective. Many of the lords also seem ignorant to both the technical and economic problems inherent within the bill itself.

IP's cannot reliably be used to identify an offending individual and it is surely wrong to charge people for trying to defend their own implied innocence (this assumes that the guilty won't use an appeals process) against unreliable data. Likewise there is a perception that ISPs are cash rich. Here's one case in point example from the same House of Lords session (26th Jan).


The structure of an Internet access market is clearly not one that Lord Young and others have bothered to research. A typical broadband ISP has to invest colossal amounts of cash to build its network and, in order to remain competitive, its profit margin per customer will be tiny (just a few pounds or less in the case of some larger players; economics of scale). Hence any rise, even in the order of only a few pence, is damaging and likely to be passed on.

Some of the largest providers have also had to subsidise their service from other profit making (non-ISP) parts of the business purely to stay competitive. This is not a cash rich industry; one quick glance at a few quarterly financial reports will tell you that.