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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am very content with the answer that the noble Lord has given me on the questions I asked. I think that he explains the limitations succinctly. I have many doubts, though, about what he said in reply to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller. One of the principal things he said was that there is a list of sites that you should not let other people on the network use. Those providing an open wi-fi system often include your local restaurant. They want to bring customers in, so they say, "Come in, bring your kit and you can drop into the wi-fi." In order for people who provide that service to be comfortable under the Bill, first someone has to provide them with the list of sites that they should block. At the back of that there has to be a proper appeal mechanism because, as noble Lords will know, you get on to various people’s spam blacklists from time to time. There are appeal mechanisms, and by and large they work, but there has to be a system with a list of sites that you do not expect a public site to make available, because they involve copyright infringement, and an appeal mechanism to go with it. Then you have to have an easy way of getting that list and implementing it on your system. I would be grateful if the noble Lord could write to me and say how far we are in having such technology available. However, even if we have it available, there has to be a defence in the Bill which says, "I have done everything I can in industry best practice. Even though you can see that this is going on, I have done my best." The problem is greater for somebody who is using an ordinary domestic router and having various people tapping into it. I am not aware that there is any mechanism where you can drop this software into your standard Netgear router, or whatever you have at home, to enable you to block other users of that router on the internet. You have no power to find out what they are doing, no access to their computer, no right to monitor their traffic or even to ask them what they are doing if they are over a certain age. To pick up the point that the noble Lord made about access to wireless networks, yes, you can say that someone who is using WEP is being delinquent and they should use WPA. However, going beyond that to produce something which is proof against someone who is kitted out with the best of the stuff that you can pick up on the internet is getting extremely professional. I have been through the instructions. It would take me a couple of hours and a good deal of head-scratching to set up the protections at home that I would need to be protected against the most proficient bore driver. It comes back to the question of balance. We have to have some way of making sure that people who are potentially providing a public internet service have done whatever is best practice and is reasonable to make sure that they are not enabling illegal file-sharing; but if someone has done that, they have to have protection under the Bill.