"Super fast broadband" by 2020

Mar 22, 2010 13:59 GMT  ·  By

Even as it moves to get more people offline, the UK government is now pushing to get more people online. That may sound peculiar, to say the least, but it is pretty much what the British government is doing in two separate moves, one to satisfy lobbyists, another to satisfy the voting public. The Digital Economy Bill, in its current form, will get people kicked off the Internet after being accused of file-sharing while Prime Minister Gordon Brown is now saying how its government would bring broadband connections to all and a central web hub for people to handle their business with authorities.

General elections are just a couple of months away and the political campaigning is going into full swing. It's no surprise then that all sides are beginning to make increasingly ambitious claims and one area of hot dispute has been the digital landscape. There are plenty of things moving in the space in UK at the moment, but most of them are in the wrong direction.

The controversial Digital Economy Bill has been rushed through the House of Lords, the UK Parliament's upper house, in order to have it pass through the House of Commons before the elections. The bill has some pretty interesting provisions and most aren't in the public's best interest but rather serve a small group of companies.

The most talked about is the three-strikes rule which would have people disconnected from the Internet after repeated accusations (not convictions) of file sharing. Another interesting provision would allow government to change only copyright law at wish, though this section has seen some improvements.

Perhaps in an attempt to sway the public's attention from these problems, the Prime Minister is again saying that the government plans to have broadband available to 100 percent of the British people by 2020. A much more interesting proposition, though certainly not one without its detractors, is the move to have as many government services online as possible.

The idea is to enable UK citizens to go online for all of their needs, things like apply for schools, get a new passport, pay council tax or even register a car. Further down the line, UK citizens will each get their own unique identifiers and web pages. The government believes this will save up quite a lot of money by closing down plenty of offices. Critics claim that the last thing the UK needs in this economy is more people losing their jobs. [via The Telegraph]