Mark Pack

Doing the rounds of online news today has been Nick Clegg’s opposition to the Digital Economy Act:

Lib Dems will call for repeal of Digital Economy Act
Nick Clegg outlines fears over controversial new laws

The phrase “repeal the Digital Economy Act/Bill” has become a bit of a shorthand, often being used to mean “repeal the controversial bits” – either as a piece of verbal shorthand or because so much attention has focused on those parts that people using the phrase aren’t aware there is rather more to the Act. So I’ve double-checked Nick’s full views and they do draw the sensible distinction:

It was a disgrace that so little time was given to scrutinise the Digital Economy Bill and so we voted against the Bill at third reading. While most of the bill is welcome, we’ve always said that the parts of this law dealing with web blocking simply weren’t good enough.

The only way to improve bad law is to take it off the statue book and replace it with something better. We managed to get measures like account suspension delayed for a year, so there is still time to repeal technical measures that won’t work and put in place laws to tackle these issues in a fair and appropriate way. We have continuing concerns with respect to the measures on account suspension in particular.