Britain is influential in European policy for telecoms and online content. It is not as loud as France, but in a quieter way, lets its views be known. British  policy is often the point from which the EU takes its lead in this field. Within the European Commission, the British influence on telecoms policy is evident in the ongoing initiatives to establish and maintain a deregulated  market. 

The current policy initiative is the Digital Economy Bill.

More than one third of the content of the Digital Economy Bill deals with copyright enforcement, and in particular a proposal to address peer-to-peer filesharing by means of  3-strikes  measures.  It is proposed  to “technical measures” to either suspend or terminate the user’s access or to slow their bandwidth to make it impossible to do file-sharing or any other advanced applications. 

“Technical measures” involve the use of network technology against the users, they will have implications for the neutrality of the network, and the neutral ‘mere conduit’ status of the network provider. They potentially will entail the implementation of deep packet inspection – the same equipment as used in China.

The broadband provider will be liable to do this, at risk of a quarter of a million pound penalty.
The Digital Economy Bill  also incorporates a provision  to take over the UK Internet Domain registry.



The Digital Economy Bill text is available here.


The House of Lords debates will be available here


The House of Lords  amendments to the Digital Economy Bill


UK Parliament webcasts including House of Lords and House of Commons

Note: The Digital Economy Bill is  awkward to follow because the amendments refer to page numbers which you will not have if you are looking at the texts on the web. There does  not appear to be a pdf of the document which they are referencing. You need to cross-reference the Clause numbers and the individual line numbers.