Nick Jones

Perhaps the most important skill for a politician is to understand society and the forces that mould it, one of which is technology. But politician’s understanding of the intersection of technology and society remains tragically poor as is illustrated by a couple of UK examples.

Disconnecting file sharers. The UK government has acted against the recommendations of its own advisers and is apparently contemplating a law which allows broadband disconnection from people who pirate music and media. As I pointed out a while ago when discussing similar French proposals this is a “solution” which may keep the media industry happy but has more holes than Swiss Cheese. It assumes that a broadband connection is associated with an single person, which is wrong as most are shared. Should a house or family be punished for the actions of an individual, even if they didn’t even know the piracy occurred? It assumes you know who the user of a broadband connection is, which is untrue half the time as there any number of internet cafes, free WiFi connections in pubs and restaurants, free WiFi in libraries (provided by the same politicians as a public service), prepaid mobile broadband and so on. Is the government so naive they believe that shutting off someone’s home broadband will prevent them accessing the internet and stealing media?

It’s just more political inconsistency, on the one hand my government is proudly announcing its plans to provide universal broadband and on the other proudly announcing its plans to take it away from people.

Free WiFi on Scottish trains and buses. Another techno-political oddity, this time from Scotland where politicians from the same party that’s proposing to cut off the file sharers have proposed that free WiFi should be available on Scottish trains and buses. This seems to be part of an environmental strategy based on the assumption that better connectivity on buses and trains would mean less cars on the road. This is another example of a policy proposal only loosely coupled to reality. Scotland is a wonderful country with some of the greatest scenery in the UK, but much of it is mountainous with large areas lacking 3G coverage, so short of putting a satellite uplink on every bus it’s not obvious how this proposal could be implemented. I guess also that many politicians don’t travel on buses, because at commuting times most of them are pretty crowded with standing room only. If you can’t get a seat you can’t work on a laptop or mobile so the WiFi is academic. If the real goal is to get cars off the road then maybe simpler solutions like reducing fares or providing more buses and trains would be more sensible.

A survey I saw a few years ago claimed the average UK one-way commute was about 20 minutes, which is hardly time to boot up Windows let alone do any work. But I guess it’s plenty of time to download some pirated music thanks to the generosity of the open source community who have kindly provided tools like SymTorrent for mobiles.