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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

I shall also speak to Amendment 93A, but will not move it at this stage. I always get confused when there is an "A" in an amendment. This is an important issue. The amendments are clearly probing, and to some extent if Amendment 93 were accepted, the argument for Amendment 93A would become less significant. The Government have to face the issue of mobile broadband networks because if we consider the structure of the industry, we see that currently more than 90 per cent of internet traffic is with six ISPs which would not be affected particularly by the amendments. The remainder of the internet traffic is with mobile broadband operators and clearly the amount of infringement is less than with the six major ISPs, by definition, as they have less than 10 per cent of the market among them. However, the retrospective nature of this provision hits a mobile broadband operator much more acutely than it hits the other ISPs because of the technical difficulties that the mobile operator will have retrospectively to capture the necessary data. Our starting point is with Amendment 93 to remove the retrospective nature of these provisions entirely, and if that is not acceptable, the alternative is Amendment 93A, which would provide for a different measure of calculation of infringements. Clearly, the Government will not accept these amendments today but they have to think carefully about what protections they can give to the mobile phone operators, particularly in light of the costs to those operators of having to comply. I beg to move.