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In the midst of Gordon Brown's latest travails, you might have thought that ministers would at least avoid going out of their way to annoy people.
Not so: Lord Mandelson is pushing ahead with legislation that will cut off the broadband connections of those suspected of illegal file sharing.
It's a provocation that has already stirred up a storm of protest.
In an open letter to The Times yesterday, Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse, owner of broadband provider Talk Talk, and Tom Alexander of Orange slammed the proposals as “an extra-judicial kangaroo court process”.
The letter also bore the signatures of Which?, the Open Rights Group and Consumer Focus. Even the artists the move is meant to protect do not believe it is the right approach.
A statement co-signed by bodies representing acts as diverse as Tom Jones, Sir Paul McCartney and Radiohead has called the plan “extraordinarily negative”.
They are right and Lord Mandelson is wrong. Seriously wrong. Seeking to cut off broadband connections is a punitive approach that will do little to change anyone's behaviour.
In an age when having an internet connection is fast becoming a necessity, cutting people off comes pretty close to removing a fundamental right.
In fact, that's just what the French Supreme Court said last month when it struck down President Sarkozy's attempt to push through a similar law.
And even if you accept that removing access to the internet is a fair punishment for illegal file sharing, there's another problem — proving who did the deed.
Most households have one broadband connection shared between all its members.
Then even if you can be sure that a particular internet connection is accessing content illegally, you cannot easily prove its legitimate owners are to blame.
People are not well informed about securing their wireless networks.
The guilty party could simply be piggy-backing on an innocent user's internet connection.
But there's a bigger problem here: ministers applying a solution that simply doesn't fit the way we consume information and entertainment now.
Our relationship with what we call “content” has changed radically over the centuries.
Printing changed ideas about ownership of the written world. Much later, in the Eighties, the emergence of the cassette tape led to the infamous slogan, “Home Taping Is Killing Music”.
That's a joke now; in time, Lord Mandelson's proposals will be too. Home taping didn't kill music and neither will file sharing.
Instead, if we're going to protect intellectual property online, we need more creative solutions. We must convince internet users that content can be worth paying for.
The model provided by Spotify, the music service that allows you to stream music for free in return for listening to ads or for a monthly subscription, shows that it is possible.
Similarly in the case of video, there's the ad-supported US site Hulu.
Both services pay content providers and offer consumers free content.
The internet is in any case far fleeter of foot than lumbering Whitehall mandarins.
As legislation emerges, so file-sharing networks evolve to counteract it.
Trying to figure out which file sharing is illegal is a technical challenge of immense proportions: ISPs would have to inspect every packet of data sent via their networks.
One Whitehall source told the BBC that Lord Mandelson doesn't “get” the internet.
These proposals suggest that he doesn't understand human nature either.
Attempting to stop file sharing with these tactics is like jumping on molehills to rid a lawn of pests. Users will simply pop up elsewhere — unless they're offered better alternatives.
Mic Wright is news editor at technology site www.stuff.tv
Reader views (3)
Mandelson should keep his mucky paws out of anything to do with privately held companies, which BT has been for nearly 20 years. He appears to have forgotten that fact.
Ditto with his proposed Broadband Tax: if BT or any other telco want to roll out fibre optic broadband to the UK, let them pay for it, not me.
- Nobby Clark, Perth, the Scottish one
Consumers retain the ultimate power in the brave, new internet world. Watch how they react to the ISP's, record companies and musicians as individuals are prosecuted.
In a micro-second protest groups and boycotts will appear and the corporate groups behind the legislation will realise they have made a mistake.
Look at what happened to politicians when the public found out the details of MP's expenses!
What and see the consumer-led backlash when this law is put into action.
- Manny Goldstein, London, England
All true, but the reality is even worse. Mandelson doesn't have the knowledge to make the decision, but nor does his civil service. The top-level civil servants are arts graduates, Oxbridge at the top, bogged down in a 19th Century structure, and hopelessly unable to foretell the technical changes happening to the world. The civil service does not have the staff or structure to manage ANY medium-term technical policy.
If Mandelson wanted to do something useful, he should set a realistic set of goals to get high-speed broadband rolled out rapidly across the UK, then restructure the competition laws to ensure those requirements are met by business. This should look to 1 gigabit/sec not 2 mbits/sec so British companies have a chance of creating innovative industries. This has to involve rapid prototyping, plus a large effort to stop BT slowing everything down.
Instead Mandelson is interfering at the detailed level, making the wrong decision about an irrelevant issue.
- Richard Stevens, London
