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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, these sorts of things are very important. The Americans are greatly concerned about networks and neutrality because they have been having problems with people trying to grab control of a bit of the market. Also, ISPs are currently doing something called traffic-shaping, in which they decide what bits of traffic you are and are not allowed to have in an attempt to optimise the traffic over their networks, particularly at busy times. However, it could also have the inadvertent effect of favouring one form of traffic over another. The indirect effect could well be that beneficial things that come over peer-to-peer networks are acted against because there is pressure due to unlawful downloading. One could go on for hours trying to invent reasons for this, but I think that this is a more important amendment than people realise.