The Digital Economy Bill is a typical New Labour product, a hideous mixture of Mandelsonian pandering to business and Labour’s usual authoritarian impulse. It won’t work, it can’t work, but it will have dramatic side effects. Laurie Penny puts it best:
Suppression of free speech isn’t just about direct censorship – it’s about creating a climate of cultural orthodoxy in which certain ways of behaving and sharing information are suspect, and then putting power in the hands of intermediary regulating authorities [ISPs, for example] to enforce that suspicion.