Insane reply from Labour
Well, that was pretty crazy. My letter below was mentioned in passing in the Guardian, the Financial Times, boingboing, Media Week, CrunchGear, TechEYE, bitterwallet, Anorak, Prison Planet (via Guardian), Infowars (via Guardian) and last but not least Brand Republic. After that I started ignoring the Google alerts (edit: and ars technica, woo).
Most interestingly, it seems Brand Republic contacted a Labour spokesperson who is quoted saying the following (end of the article):
‘A Labour spokesman said Timms was an expert in this area, pointing out that he wrote a book about broadband 25 years ago, “before many people knew what it was”.
The spokesman added: “He is in total command of the detail and it would be ridiculous to suggest that he doesn’t know the difference between intellectual property and internet protocol. This is an embarrassing slip and Stephen Timms will make sure it won’t happen again.”’
So, who can spot the insanity this time‽ First of all, 25 years ago, consumer broadband didn’t exist. In the UK, consumer broadband emerged about 10 years ago (I assume this isn’t ‘any connection above the speed of a modem’). So apparently he wrote the book on mythical broadband, which wasn’t in the UK for another 15 or so years.
Just to clarify, Labour just claimed that Stephen Timms wrote a book about broadband in 1985. That’s right, 4 years before MCI Mail, 4 years before Tim Berners-Lee starting playing with hypertext at CERN in 1989, just as TCP/IP was becoming mildly popular with basic dialup, just as a few geeks were playing with 1200baud modems and monochrome BBS, our all-knowing Minister for Digital Britain was writing books on broadband. Makes complete sense. I don’t consider a document about the impact of ISDN a couple of years later with ‘broadband’ in the title relevant, but it at least demonstrates a long term understanding of some technical issues (edit: sorry, it seemed the British Library link moved, updated to working Google Library link to Mr. Timms’ document).
While this might well be just another insane typo, and even if Mr. Timms knows the internet inside out and he’s just pressed the DE bill through for another agenda, it’s screamingly clear that most of the government who championed the DE bill are totally, painfully and absolutely clueless.
Now, I freely admit that my original letter (the ‘IP Address = Intellectual Property’ one that went viral) could well be a stupid mistake (and hopefully not a catastrophic lack of knowledge), but this is an important inter-departmental letter written by the very people who pushed the digital economy bill into law and they can’t even apparently proof-read the letters they send out, which is pathetic. An intern with 5 seconds and access to Google could have spotted the error. It also doesn’t bode well for the ‘digital economy’ when, after listening to the live rushed debates at midnight, it is painfully clear to anyone with any technical background that the digital economy bill was debated by people with absolutely no knowledge or clue what they were voting on. This includes ridiculous statements such as confusing what an ‘ISP’ with what an ‘email address’ is. I don’t expect seasoned ministers to know the inner workings of the internet, but I expect them to at least read up on the ramifications of what they’re voting on, and not bundle bullshit laws through at the behest of the media industry (who are making more money than ever, despite the internet ‘costing hundreds of zillions of millions of pounds’ and ‘tens of thousands of jobs’). Ministers have absolutely no right to vote in massively unpopular laws on subjects they know nothing about. I am still amazed that the current government can still shock me with its complete and utter incompetence.
@1 year ago with 8 notes#debill #digital economy bill #stephen timms #labour #election #ip address
