---

Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I speak to Amendment 40 and Amendment 82 in this group, which explore the effect the Government think the legislation here will have on corporate and communal facilities. As the Bill is drafted, I find it hard to understand what the effect will be, other than negative, on, for example, an internet café. Internet cafés and communal wi-fi, such as that being pioneered by Swindon, are aimed at exactly what I thought the Government were trying to include: digital inclusivity to enable people who cannot afford their own broadband connections to access all the things that those of us with our own connections enjoy, such as entertainment, learning and so on. If we are going to have a digital knowledge-based community and digital economy, we cannot exclude everybody who does not have their own internet connection. As drafted, this Bill will be extremely discouraging to anyone providing any form of connection like that. As soon as somebody goes on to it and downloads something that they should not it will be the provider of the internet connection who is liable. The Minister may say that they can have contracts with those who sign on with them to say that they will not illegally download, but that illegal download will have happened. That person will have paid their pound, had their half an hour and gone away, and the only sanction that the Bill envisages will be that that internet connection is either throttled or cut off after a certain point. I worry how that will affect those and other communal networks. The noble Earl, Lord Erroll, also spoke, for example about universities. We could speak equally about corporate networks. How will the sanctions here work in a university situation? Other noble Lords talked about just about everybody under 30 doing this. In a university environment, the connection must be used time and again in a way that would invite all of the sanctions in the Bill. How will the Government ensure that this legislation does not have an extremely chilling effect on the provision of communal networks?