The Digital Economy Bill vs. flatshares
I’ve avoided getting worked up about the Digital Economy Bill. My income currently depends on people buying music online – I kinda feel I’m obliged to be utterly humourless about how people act with regard to music piracy in the real world.
But.
The most troubling thing about the “disconnection” section of the bill is that it seems to imply that every household has a single point of legal authority. Perhaps those in favour of the bill have only lived in houses with someone like that, a parental figure, a single leaseholder? It’s certainly not a universal experience.
To date, I’ve never been the single point of legal responsibility in a household. Even after graduating I’ve still ended up in a variety of shared flats and houses. Attempting to work in London is like that. Sometimes, if you’re unlucky, you end up sharing a house with people you don’t particularly get on with. (And sometimes these people lose their jobs and spend all day in their room smoking and surfing the web. And how do they manage to go through so much toilet paper? It’s mind-boggling.) Anyway, it’s all rich life experience.
Like other utilities it’s usually the case that there’s only one phone line going to a shared house. Which means one DSL connection. Which means one router. Which means a wi-fi router with a shared password. (Unless the different items needing access can’t support a common authentication scheme for whatever reason. Ugh, in a dense enough area it’s hard enough finding a clear channel.)
But, while the DSL connection has a single bill payer, there’s no reasonable way (with today’s domestic networking equipment) for that person to even know what traffic is going over that connection, let alone have grounds to call a house-meeting or whatever it is they’d be expected to do as part of “policing” the house network.
And who even wants that job? “Network nazi”? Who wants to be nominated as the chump in line punished for the risk-taking of others? You can’t even take legal action against your flatmates since actual real evidence implicating them doesn’t even need to exist.
A possible arrangement might be for the bill-payer to require a bond from the network users before allowing them access (on top of the deposit or something). A chunk of money that’s at risk regardless of their personal action. But how much would that bond need to be? What price do you put on being banned from the internet? (Personally? A lot.) If I were the network bill-payer, how reasonable would it be to ask for my flatmates to deposit, say, the equivalent of a year’s rent up-front in order to use the wi-fi? That’s clearly not going to fly.
Just the possibility of this punishment existing punishes everyone in shared living arrangements regardless of any intent to engage in unlicensed file distribution. And it’s likely to increase the costs of accessing the internet for those in tighter financial situations.
