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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, this is a probing amendment. The period of six months that it specifies is not set in stone. The important point is to establish for how long the Minister envisages these orders being in effect. It would make sense for there to be a statutory time limit. If the appointed manager cannot remedy the failure in, say, six months or a year, it may well be impossible to solve the problem. This gives rise to the question of what the core role of the manager will be. The six or 12-month period should be adequate if the main role is to ensure the proper running of the registration of domain names and to ensure that abuses in registering names are stopped, rather than to look after the financial health of the registry. This amendment, or a similar one, would reassure those who are concerned that these powers should not allow a Government to step in permanently via the back door, using the excuse of a serious failure to carry out, in essence, nationalisation. I beg to move.