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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I entirely agree with what noble Lords have just said. The amendment strikes at the heart of the complications of all this and at why the Bill is probably not going about the issue in the right way. Peer-to-peer technology offloads content from servers and can be very useful for universities which distribute large data sets for examination or for people to run large mathematical models against them et cetera. It can be useful for distributing software updates without overloading one or several central servers from a particular company. There are many uses for it. Equally, when we come to the definition of "computer", do we also include, for instance, personal digital assistants, which are effectively small computers in your pocket, and mobile telephones, which are also effectively computers these days? There are proposals to take the load off radio base station masts, for instance, by using mesh systems which will transmit from telephone to telephone. This would be a form of file-sharing. You would not know you were doing it, but you might be an intermediary in passing this stuff through. Later, we get to the definition put by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, which is a good one in many ways, but we must be careful that it does not draw in some desirable technology for having a resilient infrastructure around the country. This is the danger of trying to proscribe it. If we go the other way and do not proscribe it at all, then we get into exactly the problem which has just been mentioned. On streaming, I am told that already, in anticipation of this Bill, there are streaming servers being set up from which you can download as well as just watch. People will start downloading from specific servers. The only way to find out about this is through something like the Home Office’s proposed interception modernisation programme, where you track all the internet traffic of individual subscribers, or deep-packet inspection where you ask the ISPs to look at what is inside these packets. The latter is exactly why the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, who is about to speak, was so against the former system. Many other people were as well. This is why we have to be careful in the powers the later clauses give the Secretary of State to suddenly do other things. In a way, this amendment highlights the dangers in this Bill of handing incredible powers to the Secretary of State to stigmatise or interfere with desirable technologies. The Government do not realise the unintended consequences of what they are doing. They are so blinkered; they are looking at one issue only and not the other, desirable effects which get hit by the same thing. This is a useful amendment to illustrate the problem. It would be good to limit it to peer-to-peer but I do not want to see peer-to-peer stigmatised as the thing that is illegal or unlawful. It is not. However, I am worried by the powers that the Secretary of State might take to cause greater problems to other technologies out there which are hugely useful.