The Digital Economy Bill—in the scurry for ministers to finish legislative business in parliament before the General Election—passed into law on Thursday, after it received royal assent.
However, the bill's journey through both houses of the Westminster Palace was also hampered by the government's decision to routinely bring in last minute amendments to a wide-ranging piece of legislation that was all too often overshadowed by Brexit and a bickering main opposition party.
MPs rubber-stamped the bill on Wednesday, in a 90-minute session where concerns about the Tory government's plans to open up citizen's data across the public sector and beyond were raised just once.
The government also flattened a number of amendments made to the bill by peers in the upper chamber, which meant that a call for a Universal Service Obligation requiring download broadband speeds of at least 30Mbps by 2020 was dropped in favour of 10Mbps at some fuzzy time in the future. But when the draft legislation pinged back to the House of Lords on Thursday, business was brisk and the government's demands were met.
Liberal Democrat Lord Chris Fox told peers: "We are closing the door on a fresh, shiny new bill which still smells of new paint, but, just as with my house, I cannot help thinking that we will be raising the floorboards on this issue time and again in parliaments to come."
Government minister Lord Ashton rattled through the key aspects of the the bill before it was passed into law. He said:
The opposition have... supported things that will allow great advances in the digital economy, such as: the Electronic Communications Code, which is very technical but a crucial change; age verification for online pornography, where we listened and adjusted the regime to address the concerns of the opposition; the extension of age verification for pornography on on-demand television, so that 18-certificate material is kept away from children; government data sharing, which will enable us to deliver better services to the vulnerable; and the repeal of Section 73 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, which I think was accepted all round the house as a very good thing.
The Department for Culture, Media, and Sport said that the new law brought in "measures to modernise the UK for enterprise." It has also claimed that there will be better consumer protection in place for online users.
The porn identity
However, a controversial age verification mechanism that will serve as a gatekeeper to porn—in an effort to try to prevent kids from accessing the fruity material—lacks privacy and security safeguards, campaigners have argued. Others say that forcing ISPs to block smut peddlers who fail to insert an age checker on their sites amounts to censorship of perfectly legal content. It's also a policy that has been slammed as technically unworkable.
Digital government plans have been repeatedly rebooted and delayed under a seven-year-long Tory leadership that has failed to live up to its questionable pledge of making public services "digital-by-default" for all Brits by now. The new Digital Economy Act will, the DCMS said, "enable better public services using digital technologies." To do that, the government insists it needs to crack open citizen data by sharing it across departments, local authorities, researchers, and beyond.
Some amendments were made to Part 5 of the draft law during the bill's passage through the Lords, with the government agreeing to a public consultation before publishing codes of practice that are expected to layout the privacy and technical safeguards required for the broadly defined sharing of citizens' data. Controversially, the safeguards aren't on the face of the new law.
But MPs and peers are yet to see a final version of the codes of practice, even though the Digital Economy Act has now received royal assent. Ars has asked the DCMS about the planned public consultation, given that Whitehall is now in "purdah"—a word with a controversial history that, in parliamentary context, means civil servants have to conduct their work with sensitivity during the pre-election period. It hadn't got back to us at time of publication, however.
This is the second Digital Economy law to have fallen victim to a process known as wash-up: where bills dart past nodding politicians to complete the legislation's passage before parliament is dissolved. Bills cannot be carried over from one parliament to the next.
In 2010, the then Labour government's widely-panned, sprawling Digital Economy Act was briskly passed during the final days before the General Election in April of that year. It went on to largely collect dust after David Cameron's Tory-led government—along with its junior coalition partner the Liberal Democrats—moved into Whitehall, with some provisions of the law being effectively shelved, while others faced legal challenges that delayed its implementation.
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