net.wars

The workings of British politics are nearly as clear to foreigners as cricket; and unlike the US there's no user manual. (Although we can recommend Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels and the TV series Yes, Minister as good sources of enlightenment on the subject.) But what it all boils down to in the case of the Digital Economy Bill is that the rights of an entire nation of Internet users are about to get squeezed between a rock and an election unless something dramatic happens.

The deal is this: the bill has completed all the stages in the House of Lords, and is awaiting its second reading in the House of Commons. Best guesses are that this will happen on or about March 29 or 30. Everyone expects the election to be called around April 8, at which point Parliament disbands and everyone goes home to spend three weeks intensively disrupting the lives of their constituency's voters when they're just sitting down to dinner. Just before Parliament dissolves there's a mad dash to wind up whatever unfinished business there is, universally known as the "wash-up". The Digital Economy Bill is one of those pieces of unfinished business. The fun part: anyone who's actually standing for election is of course in a hurry to get home and start canvassing. So the people actually in the chamber during the wash-up while the front benches are hastily agreeing to pass stuff thought on the nod are likely to be retiring MPs and others who don't have urgent election business.

"What we need," I was told last night, "is a huge, angry crowd." The Open Rights Group is trying to organize exactly that for this Wednesday, March 24.

The bill would enshrine three strikes and disconnection into law. Since the Lords' involvement, it provides Web censorship. It arguably up-ends at least 15 years of government policy promoting the Internet as an engine of economic growth to benefit one single economic sector. How would the disconnected vote, pay taxes, or engage in community politics? What happened to digital inclusion? More haste, less sense.

Last night's occasion was the 20th anniversary of Privacy International (Twitter: @privacyint), where most people were polite to speakers David Blunkett and Nick Clegg. Blunkett, who was such a front-runner for a second Lifetime Menace Big Brother Award that PI renamed the award after him, was an awfully good sport when razzed; you could tell that having his personal life hauled through the tabloid press in some detail has changed many of his views about privacy. Though the conversion is not quite complete: he's willing to dump the ID card, but only because it makes so much more sense just to make passports mandatory for everyone over 16.

But Blunkett's nearly deranged passion for the ID card was at least his own. The Digital Economy Bill, on the other hand, seems to be the result of expert lobbying by the entertainment industry, most especially the British Phonographic Industry. There's a new bit of it out this week in the form of the Building a Digital Economy report, which threatens the loss of 250,000 jobs in the UK alone (1.2 million in the EU, enough to scare any politician right before an election). Techdirt has a nice debunking summary.

A perennial problem, of course, is that bills are notoriously difficult to read. Anyone who's tried knows these days they're largely made up of amendments to previous bills, and therefore cannot be read on their own; and while they can be marked up in hypertext for intelligent Internet perusal this is not a service Parliament provides. You would almost think they don't really want us to read these things.

Speaking at the PI event, Clegg deplored the database state that has been built up over the last ten to 15 years, the resulting change in the relationship between citizen and state, and especially the omission that, "No one ever asked people to vote on giant databases." Such a profound infrastructure change, he argued, should have been a matter for public debate and consideration - and wasn't. Even Blunkett, who attributed some of his change in views to his involvement in the movie Erasing David (opening on UK cinema screens April 29), while still mostly defending the DNA database, said that "We have to operate in a democratic framework and not believe we can do whatever we want."

And here we are again with the Digital Economy Bill. There is plenty of back and forth among industry representatives. ISPs estimate the cost of the DEB's Web censorship provisions at up to £500 million. The BPI disagrees. But where is the public discussion?

But the kind of thoughtful debate that's needed cannot take place in the present circumstances with everyone gunning their car engines hoping for a quick getaway. So if you think the DEB is just about Internet freedoms, think again; the way it's been handled is an abrogation of much older, much broader freedoms. Are you angry yet?

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.