Communications minister Stephen Carter'sreport on Digital Britain, expected on 16 June, is an
opportunity to put Britain on the digital fast track, or to
perpetuate policies that will hamstring economic
development.
Carter hopes to achieve five goals:
1. To upgrade and modernise the UK's digital networks to enable
the economy to remain globally competitive
2. To attract investment for UK digital content, applications
and services
3. To create UK content for UK users, in particular impartial
news, comment and analysis
4. To ensure fairness and access for all
5. To develop the infrastructure, skills and take-up that enable
the widespread online delivery of public services and business
interface with government.
It's a tall order, but it can be reduced to simple terms.
Achieving these goals requires balancing vested interests against
innovation in a digital world. The vested interests, which range
from the fixed and mobile network operators, broadcasters like the
BBC, and the publishing industry, are powerful lobbyists. Their
power derives from control over (deliberately) scarce resources.
But by and large, they represent the past.
In the digital world the costs of duplication. replication, and
distribution of content are a small and vanishing fraction of the
cost of creation. That is why file-sharing, content and interest
mashups, user-generated content, conversations, not diktats, are
the way forward. This was manifest when California governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger said this week he wanted to replace school textbooks
with web-based learning materials.
Jonathan Zittrain argues in his book, The Future of the
Internet, that the success of the digital world was made
possible by the "incompleteness" of the personal computer and the
internet. This allowed millions of people to experiment, to add new
stuff to the mix.
Much of it was unpaid, and done either from pure altruism or in
the hope of recognition. Indeed, Tim Berners-Lee gave away the
intellectual property that led to the World Wide Web. Now he
advises Gordon Brown on digital access.
But many vested interests want to lock down the net, to "tether"
the devices that connect to the net, to track and trace every move
we make in cyberspace.
There are good reasons, mainly of national and personal
security, to do this. In addition, criminal exploitation of the net
is almost epidemic; more than 90% of e-mails are spam; some of it
carries a payload much worse that invitations to buy Viagra.
Those who argue thus say the state's first duty is to protect
its citizens, says philosopher AC Grayling. He argues that the
state has only one higher purpose: to safeguard our freedoms.
Those freedoms are best served by guaranteeing individuals'
capacity to go about their lawful business in private, says
Zittrain. Governments and other social institutions do need to curb
criminal use of that privacy, but without losing the inherent
capacity for innovation and economic growth that privacy protects,
he says.
In the early days of criminal exploitation of the internet, John
Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation,
said, "Noise is the price you pay for signal."
The debate and lobbying that surrounds the Digital Britain
report has produced a deafening noise. The country needs Carter to
give a clear and unambiguous signal about the way forward.