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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister has addressed many of these issues, but I still have a concern over "appropriate". In some ways it sticks—it just does not feel right in Amendments 2, 3, 5 and 6. I want to tell noble Lords the reason for this, which is generic to this industry. I learnt something new this weekend. I came across a new word: exabyte. I have never heard that before. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or a billion billion bytes—it is a pretty big number. In 2005, mankind created 150 exabytes; in 2010, 1,200 were created. So, over five years the total amount of data created on earth went up by a factor of 10, and I suspect the rate of increase is going to continue on an exponential basis. If we were standing here in two or three years perhaps we would need another word for a thousand exabytes. I do not know whether there is such a word; maybe there is. Even since the Digital Economy Bill was introduced in your Lordships’ House three months ago there have been many changes. We have had two major exhibitions in the world: the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and a month later the GSM Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. At both those events, major new products were introduced which were dramatic and will change the face of the whole industry. There have been smart phones, tablets, and of course a month ago Apple announced its iPad tablet. On the subject of Apple, last week it recorded 10 billion downloads from iTunes—nearly two for every person living on this earth. As I mentioned once before, there have been 3 billion downloads of apps for the iPhone. Convergence, about which we have talked many times in this House, is now a factor of life; it is happening at a very dramatic rate. Also since the Bill was introduced, we have heard that in the United States, AT&T’s network has been struggling with the amount of data required, and O2 has reported problems coping with the amount of data on a broadband basis or mobile network basis. To return to the word "appropriate", I want to make the point that I do not like the tone of the word. It does not feel right. It feels, as the Minister himself said in a meeting with me, as though the word is limp. It certainly does not capture the change that is taking place in this industry. It would be more appropriate if we were talking about agriculture or the steel industry, but the IT and mobile industry is changing so fast that we need something that recognises that change more, dare I say it, appropriately.