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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I will make a couple of general comments that apply to the proposed new clause. They concern the appeals procedure, and where laws or rules might conflict. I am afraid that this will get technical: it is for the people behind the Minister. In an IPv4 world, IP addresses are relatively fixed and easy to monitor. What I had not realised until last night is that in an IPv6 world, we go to 128-bit addresses—and that is already coming in. JANET, the educational internet network, has already moved to it. It needs to, because China also uses it. Come the Olympics, we will probably have to move to it for the BT backbone as well. What I had not realised is that multiple IPv6 addresses are issued, some anonymously—they have to be under tier 3 regulations—to people who are going on the internet. Therefore, some stuff will be impossible to monitor. The question is, which rule will be supreme? The appeals procedure will have to take into account—this must be inserted somewhere—the conflict of rules. I put in the technical stuff to highlight the challenges that will be faced. Something must be added at some stage to say that where rules conflict, there must be adjudication and a ruling about which takes precedence.