Ever wondered what the internet would look like without net neutrality. Wonder no further:

If you want to prevent this from becoming reality, join the Pirate Party.

Britain is not the only country holding a general election this summer. In the Netherlands, the general election will be held on 9th of June, and the newly-formed Dutch Pirate Party, Piratenpartij Nederland, is hoping to take part.

The government's Digital Economy Bill has just got even worse:

Imagine that, in the Summer of last year, you had been following the MP's expenses scandal and heard that The Telegraph was publishing a rather less redacted version that MP's were prepared to give us. Interested, you navigated your way to www.telegraph.co.uk only to find it was not responding. After some searching around and asking friends you discover that the website has been blocked by most major UK ISP's. It seems a junior official in Parliament had asked them to block The Telegraph for copyright violation.

Just this could happen as a result of amendment 120A to the Digital Economy Bill that was passed yesterday in the House of Lords.

Amendment 120A was proposed by Lord Tim Clement-Jones, a Liberal Democrat life peer. The amendment could provide a lot of lucrative work for ...

The government have written an explanatory document stating how the Digital Economy Bill will work for libraries, universities and wifi hotspots. According to Lilian Edwards, who is professor of internet law at Sheffield University, the Bill is likely to kill wifi hotspots in places like pubs, cafes, and libraries:

"This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in," Edwards said.

"Even if they password protect, they then have two options — to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small café."

The "explanatory" document is also not very good at explaining what an IP address is:

The Internet ...

I was at an Open Rights Group event in Edinburgh yesterday, about lobbying MPs regarding the DE Bill. One of the attendees, Hugh Hancock, pointed out that he will likely be harmed by the DE Bill, even though he is a creative person who is part of the digital economy, one of the very group of people this bill is ostensibly intended to help. (Of course, we all know that the DE is really there to protect the content distribution industry, not creative people).

So I suggested a website be created where people who create digital content and will be harmed by the DE Bill can say so. And ORG have put a page up on their wiki doing just that: it's called Digital Economy Bill: Harming Creative People.

So if you're a digital creative, and will be harmed by the DE Bill, I suggest you add yourself ...