TheDigital Britainreport expected this afternoon is
likely to disappoint many.
Many of the issues it addresses are subject to efforts to create
a single
pan-European market for telecommunications. As such, key
aspects of the report, such as spectrum allocation, file sharing
and privacy are hostage to fortunes being negotiated in Brussels
and Strasbourg.
In particular, communications minister Stephen Carter is
expected to leave unanswered the crucial question of how to fund
the extension of high-speed internet access to everyone, a cost
estimated as high as £27bn by the Broadband Stakeholders Group, a
multi-interest lobby group.
No matter what Carter produces, it will be tainted by the fact
that
he will leave it to others, most probably business secretary
Peter Mandelson, to implement, when he leaves government in the
parliamentary summer recess.
The report is expected to provide the country with a roadmap of
how Britain can gear itself to compete in a world where competition
is based more and more on knowledge and the ability to turn it into
products and services.
Philip Virgo, spokesman for parliamentary-industry body
Eurim, described its ambition
as providing a "cross-cutting blueprint for an industrial strategy
in the information age".
Network owners and music and video publishers have lobbied
vigorously for protection for their existing and proposed
investments. But Carter's view is likely to be tempered by a recent
finding of communications regulator Ofcom's consumer panel that
42% of adults will not use such a service, even it is cheap and
available, because there is nothing on it that interests them
enough to bother.
This goes to the heart of an earlier criticism of the interim
report, acknowledged by Carter, that it did little to address
consumers' concerns, or those of content creators.
Businesses' interest in the report has centred on the question
of competition. The Communications
Management Association, whose members spend some £15bn a year
on communications, said that businesses' interests were best served
through encouraging and increasing competition among network
operators.
In its
Digital Britain manifesto published in February, the CMA called
for Ofcom to monitor competition continuously to ensure that it was
effective and sustainable, especially outside of the main
cities.
The CBI, the UK's largest business lobby group, concurred. In a
submission on the European Telecommunications Package, it
"strongly supported" efforts to create a single market in
communications and sought the promotion of competition through
increased political independence and operational effectiveness for
national regulatory authorities. A CBI spokesman said, "Our views
with respect to the Carter report are unchanged from that."
The CMA called for universal access to broadband, preferably
faster than the 2Mbps government has said it will ask for. "But
universal broadband access isn't enough by itself to guarantee our
future," CMA chairman Carolyn Kimber said.
"Unless effective policies are in place to prevent
anti-competitive restrictions on the use of the new networks, we
could face a return to a monopoly in both infrastructure and
services," she added.