Digital Economy Bill Passes in U.K.

[Source: DSLReports.com, by Karl Bode; April 8, 2010]
Welcome to your new entertainment industry nanny state

The highly controversial "Digital Economy Bill" has passed in the U.K.  The bill, written largely by the entertainment industry, was pushed through the U.K. legislative process without a lot of public input into the potential damage the bill could cause.  The bill places U.K. ISPs into the role of copyright police and expands government responsibility to enforce copyright dramatically, carriers being told they now must track, notify and impose "speed blocks, bandwidth shaping, site blocking or account suspension" on copyright offenders.  The entertaining part is how this bill was rammed through the U.K. political process without real debate:

"Those who wanted a full debate on the bill basically had no chance.  Despite criticizing the bill heavily, the gov't basically said the debate was over, and apparently those who had been debating started shouting "Nooo!!!" ... And there you go.  The entertainment industry gets its ridiculous anti-consumer copyright law with no real attempt at debate or amendment in the House of Commons.  Concerns raised about how this bill could force the blocking of Wikileaks or the shutdown of Internet access at small business?  Ignored."

The "wash up" process used to push this bill through (live blog here) supposedly involves the promise to go back and fix all the idiotic portions of the bill later - something most believe won't actually happen.  In short, you have a bill written by the entertainment industry passed by politicians loyal to (paid by) the entertainment industry who don't understand the issues or technology at hand.  If you happened to be a U.K. politician who wanted a deeper debate on the nuances of making government and ISPs the personal police for the entertainment industry, you found yourself completely ignored.