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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

The noble Lord is taking my arguments too far. I was taking up his comment that prices would be higher. The only way you can impose higher prices on the consumer is to create a monopoly of some variety to inhibit competition. Otherwise, competition destroys any possibility of doing that. If Dickens had been alive today, he would look at the iPhone not as a threat but as a wonderful opportunity to get out there with drama in ways that no one had ever thought of before. He was a great user of new media in his day. To regard drama as threatened merely because the old ways of consuming it are having a difficulty when we are suddenly being presented with all sorts of new ways of doing it is a great mistake. Governments are entitled to make mistakes, but what I regret in this clause is polluting a perfectly good regulator with something which gives it duties in an entirely inappropriate direction, rather than doing what ought to underlie the sentiments of the noble Lord, which is reinforcing Ofcom’s interest in making sure that proper infrastructure is provided and that British Telecom gets off its butt and really gets at the quality of some of its old network. We were talking earlier about communications in the Channel Tunnel. Some of the mobile phone communication masts being put up now have 12 hours’ reserve power. We are building extremely delicate, unrobust networks. This is the sort of thing Ofcom ought to be caring about. It ought to be challenging the industry in the interests of the consumer. It ought to be clearing away obstacles which are being put in the way of progress by those who represent the old rather than the new. That is the way we ought to be looking at the Bill. I very much hope that we can take the good parts of what the noble Lord is hoping to do in terms of making sure that we have a decent infrastructure in this country and put it in the proper context of the duties that we fought so hard to get into Section 3(1) of the 2003 Act. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment. Amendment 1 withdrawn. Amendment 2 Moved by