The first element is public perception. It is worth reminding ourselves that in the very early days a huge amount of content was put onto the Internet by academics and others giving their time freely. The first big wave of commercialisation (dot.com era)  largely involved giving away stuff free of charge to gain visitor numbers and loyalty…with a vague idea that this loyalty could be turned to profit down the track. Both these early developments set public expectations regarding Internet content – creating a challenging environment for those coming later wanting to charge for content.

Whilst the Content Industry likes to portray Internet piracy as simple common theft (and there is no doubt a significant element of this) it is more complicated. A sub-culture exists on the Internet of Robin Hood technical anarchists dedicated to stealing content from the wicked King John and his robber barons (as they see the content industry) and giving it freely to the poor. The political character of this activity feeds off the wider public perception that expects much Internet content to be free. Some of the heavy handed content piracy regulations has been counter-productive in re-enforcing an image of an industry intent on ripping off consumers. It adds a very vocal layer to the public debate.

The second key element is the pace of innovation that has made the Internet so revolutionary. This has only been possible in the almost regulation free environment of the Internet. The US Government in particular has for many years resisted rushing in to regulate the new medium – fearing that this would kill-off the explosion of innovation taking place. In place of rules or regulations has only been peer pressure…the origin of some of the Internet activism.

The Internet is now experiencing its second bigger wave of commercial on-line activity much more in line with main stream business models.  This has led to a political fault line between those who want see the real world of regulation (and more) apply to this more commercially oriented Internet and those that want to preserve the original regulation free climate that has been so powerful in propelling rapid innovation.  It is across this fault line that the policy arguments Internet content piracy is now raging.

The third element is the quandary the Content Industry finds itself in. When content is digitalised and put anywhere on the Internet it becomes unduly vulnerability to unauthorised copying and distribution. Added to this “undue vulnerability” are legal jurisdictional complications as the pirated material may well be hosted in one jurisdiction, sign-posted in another and consumed in a third. They would like the Internet transformed into a more secure environment to sell their high value content. Many governments seem to agree and are no doubt influenced by the new jobs and economic activity that the content industry can potentially contribute.

The above analysis covers well known ground but it is worth summarising in support of 5 key principals that are suggested to guide the debate on Internet content piracy :

1. Education around Fair Content Terms

The war against Internet piracy will only be won when the majority of the public believe it to be wrong. Education is therefore far more important than new draconian laws.  The key to combating the “Robber Baron” image is for the content industry to ensure that legitimate content is conveniently and widely available at fair prices. This state of affairs needs to be demonstrably in place before governments get sucked into new regulations that otherwise turn out to be unenforceable due to wide public indifference or even hostility.

2. Containment rather than elimination

It would be sad indeed if Governments, under pressure from embattled content owners, were to drive the Internet to take on the character of a Johannesburg suburb, full of fortified gardens, armed guards and only for the rich and privileged.  There will always be some level of Content Piracy in the background. This is no different to the bricks and mortar economy where there is always some level of theft going on but it is contained to a manageable level…the price to be paid for the mass of law abiding consumers to be able to enjoy going to the shops. Proportionality is the keyword.

3. Use of the General Law rather than Internet specific law

New laws can have unintended consequences. For this reason it is far better to exhaust the potential of existing laws. In support of this is the fact that it is impossible to mass market pirated material to consumers without also tipping off law enforcement agencies what is going on. The recent arrests in the case of the Megaupload file sharing website amply demonstrates this point. The fact that Internet activists can file share in secret is not something that should be of great concern to regulators (or the content industry) since – by definition – the potential financial loss to the Content owners is correspondingly miniscule.

4. Internet Regulation should not create conflict of functions.

The job of the police and courts is to deal with law breaking. The job of an ISP is to provide public access connections to the Internet. The job of a search engine company is to provide navigation around the Internet. The best outcome for the Internet is for every party to be allowed to reach for excellence in what they do.

This is where the Digital Economy Act got it so wrong in forcing one industry  (the ISP’s) to distort their normal business practice to suit the Contents Industry lobby. For example forcing ISP’s to write threatening letters to their own customers on behalf of another industry seems as disproportionate as it is wrong in principal.  If there are actions to be taken by ISP’s or Search Engine companies regarding Internet piracy  it should come as a result of a case by case Court order from an independent judiciary.

5. Balance and Diversity

It is inevitable that the future life and soul of the Internet will be shaped by innovation, market forces and regulation. It is essential to maintain the right balance between these three makers and shapers of the future Internet.

The regulator at the time (Oftel) recognised this original imbalance. Orange and T-Mobile were not only given much more spectrum at 1.8GHz than Vodafone and O2 had at 900 MHz but also enjoyed better mobile phone termination rates as a financial compensation to pay for the additional base stations needed to provide comparable national coverage. The denser base station network also significantly improved indoor coverage although not entirely closing the gap with the 900 MHz networks. The result was that the networks were broadly comparable and led to a very competitive (and successful) UK mobile phone market.

Ofcom’s aim has been to provide a comparable “assist” to H3G but it has been compromised by Ofcom’s own conflicting policy objectives. On the one hand Ofcom set the UK spectrum policy on a road to a fully hands-off approach that left the market to sort out who had which spectrum and what it was used for. At the same time Ofcom went in the opposite direction of micro-managing the spectrum to assist H3G. The plan was to force Vodafone and O2 to give 10MHz of spectrum at 900 MHz to H3G in exchange for Vodafone and O2 being allowed to do what they wanted with their 900 MHz spectrum (rather than just limited to providing GSM services). Vodafone and O2 refused this less than tempting offer and dug-in.

At this point Lord Carter arrived on the scene as the responsible Minister. He saw the potential for a political fix to help everyone dig themselves out of the impasse. He almost pulled it off. It involved Vodafone and O2 giving up 5 MHz of spectrum (rather than 10) and this would be given to H3G. All the affected parties signaled their willingness to compromise and Ofcom accepted stepping back to allow Lord Carter to broker a deal. Lord Carter brought in a consultant Kip Meek as a spectrum broker to sort out the details.

At this juncture H3G did something that turned out to be less than helpful. They came to a side understanding with T-Mobile to swap the 900MHz spectrum they would acquire in exchange for T-Mobile giving them 5 MHz of their spectrum at 1800 MHz. This was fully in line with Ofcom’s vision of spectrum trading…so why not? The “why not” was the understandable reaction of Orange. Where was their 5MHz of 900 MHz spectrum to keep competitive parity with T-Mobile?

The numbers no longer added up. The deal fell apart. So instead Kip explored an alternative approach to partially re-level the spectrum playing field over a long period. It involved a very elaborate idea of spectrum floors and caps applying to any new spectrum. Then the merger announcement between Orange and T-Mobile completely scuppered this initiative…the uncertainty made it impossible to find agreement. This left a complex situation considerably more complex but did not solve the basic issue for H3G.

The Government quietly buried most of the superfluous complexity and managed to un-couple liberalising the use of spectrum from the competition policy elements. The latter was pushed back to Ofcom. They were asked to carry out a competition assessment and deal with any competition issues within the rules for the next spectrum auction.  The can had just been kicked down the road.

Ofcom produced their competition assessment and policy proposals in March 2011. H3G were to be given an inside track to 5 MHz of the new 800 MHz digital dividend spectrum and there would be some limitations placed on the two 900MHz mobile network operators on what they could bid for at 800 MHz.  H3G were upset that the redress was only 5MHz at 800 MHz since it is widely known in technical circles that the most likely technology to use in this band (the new LTE technology) needed at least 10MHz to deliver any decent data rates. This issue was compounded by Ofcom’s also trying to assist Everything Everywhere (as well as H3G). This severely tilted the balance of probability so that at least one player would emerge from the auction with only 5 MHz of spectrum at 800 MHz…which would have been a very poor technical use of such valuable spectrum.

The other major point of debate coming out of the March Consultation document was the coverage obligation. The 800 MHz spectrum was likely to be the last big opportunity for a decade to push out broadband mobile services to rural areas but this would not be delivered by the market alone – a coverage obligation was essential. Ofcom did not rise sufficiently to the challenge of this unique opportunity and it led to a House of Commons motion and Select Committee calling on Ofcom to impose a much more ambitious coverage target.

A third less well reported issue was the potential liberalisation of one of the 2.6GHz channels for low powered in building mobile broadband coverage providing super-fast mobile data speeds. Here Ofcom were criticised by the IET amongst others for being too cautious.

Against this background do the new Ofcom proposals resolve all these issues?

My assessment of the revised proposals is that Ofcom has cracked the problem. The proposals look extremely robust from the direction of judicial review…fair and proportionate…with even this extra round of consultation thrown-in for good measure. Furthermore the policy looks and feels right within the numerous constraints. They deserve our praise for creating a basis that is as good as it is going to get for delivering the next generation of advanced UK mobile broadband networks.

The “break-out” of the conundrum Ofcom found was to uncouple the way they treated H3G from Everything Everywhere- even though they both lacked of spectrum below 1GHz. Ofcom reasoned that the combination of more spectrum Everything Everywhere hold at 1800MHz and their bigger number of base stations was actually providing much of the benefit that spectrum under 1 GHz would deliver. In addition only Everything Everywhere is positioned to launch LTE services within the spectrum it has already got. All the other operators need to acquire spectrum at the auction.

What Ofcom could have added is that this endowment of spectrum and base stations was a result of a regulatory favour given to Orange and T Mobile by Oftel a decade earlier. One of the reasons Orange got caught into this second round of regulatory favours was to maintain parity with T-Mobile. But the merger by the two companies themselves as well as H3G dropping their swap intentions has removed this justification. On top of this Everything Everywhere are now the largest mobile network operator in the UK, have therefore the best scale economies, great brands and a better developed infrastructure. Under these changed circumstances it would have been quite unfair to have given Everything Everywhere a further regulatory favour at the expense of their two smaller rivals Vodafone and O2.

The rural coverage issue now appears to be heading in the right direction…the direction being 98% coverage. Ofcom envisage linking the 800MHz  coverage obligation with the Government’s £150m mobile infrastructure programme for covering mobile Not Spots. This makes perfect sense.

Ofcom have also come a long way towards supporting innovation through being minded to allow one 2.4 GHz channel for a revolutionary inside-out approach to high density networks able to deliver mobile data speeds in excess of 100 Mb/s. Ofcom are signalling some vestiges of hesitation and would no doubt be encouraged by a wave of support in response to this consultation document. That is unlikely to come. It is in the nature of these sorts of innovations that the vested interests are on hand to oppose it but the beneficiaries will only emerge as the market evolves towards Femto cells. It is a time for Ofcom to follow their instincts…that is the nature of innovation.

Finally, there is a refreshing change of tone in this new consultation document. Five years ago Ofcom embraced a free market ideology in spectrum management that took them almost onto a different planet from the rest of the UK mobile industry. Some of the friction over the past few years between Ofcom and the industry can be put down to the resulting dialogue of the deaf. It is abundantly clear from the significant movement since March that Ofcom is under a spectrum management leadership that is both thoughtful and much better tuned into the real world and is also prepared to listen to the industry.  This bodes well for the future relations with the industry.

There will no doubt be worries by the Government of yet another judicial review delaying the spectrum auction. If this happens Ofcom’ careful work since March have now put them clearly on the right side of the arguments… so any further recourse to the Courts will only be an irritation and not a show-stopper. One might also question the judgement of any company who chose to upset the government now…just when a new Communications Act is coming fast down the track. It is time for the industry to draw a line under this long running saga and move onto a new far more positive and exciting agenda…rolling out the next generation of mobile broadband networks…the UK has a lot of catching up to do.

The headlines over 2011 map out the big events as the mighty Nokia stumbles… blind sided by the rise of Apple. Google takes over the venerable father of the mobile hand portable…Motorola’s mobile phone division. Android trumps Nokia’s Operating System Symbian. Mobile Network Operators start to lose the battle for loyalty in the home as their customers connect their Smartphones to WiFi for down-loading data. The mobile messaging space gets taken over by the Internet staples of  E-Mail, Instant Messaging, Facebook and Twitter…leaving it open to question just how much longer SMS will last…at least in Western markets.

This would not be any cause for concern if this transformation of the industry was synonymous with everything getting better. But is this the case?  What has most concerned me as a consumer (aside from the complexity of it all) is how the telephone function is getting marginalised in the design of the new smartphones. I suspect it is cultural and that the folk who are now designing mobile smartphones are computer and not radio engineers. How else is it possible to explain how the Apple gaff happened – where a consumer holding their mobile in a certain way killed the aerial performance. But don’t imagine that the other new age mobile manufacturers are doing a whole lot better. HTC for example are well recognised as a smartphone design leader…but the one I purchased in 2011…whilst outstanding for games…was a very poorly performing telephone. I had to hold the mobile horizontally to get the mobile phone to receive enough signal where I live…fine if I was making telephone calls lying on my back.

Another step back is the lack of standardisation of how to use a mobile telephone on a smartphone. Perhaps I am a slow learner but I now budget losing the first few incoming calls due to the learning time needed to work out how to receive a call on a new Smartphone from a different supplier (I am now on my fourth smartphone). My worst experience was with a Nokia smartphone where I lost count of the number of incoming calls aborted…the problem being that as I reached into my pocket to pull out the mobile I incidentally touched the screen in the wrong place. No doubt patent disputes may be the source of all these innovative ways to confuse the consumer for something so basic…One might also ask whatever happened to fair licensing terms for Intellectual Property as Court  injunctions flying around seem to be a feature of this new mobile world order?

The next great leap backwards for the mobile telephone is battery drain. My first mobile phone was a Technophone M1 in 1986 that promised 8 hours of standby time. There followed the great leap forward to the norm of some 300 hours of standby time by 2006. Since the arrival of the smartphone we have had the great leap backwards and it is no exaggeration to mention 8 hours again for those watching all that video on great smartphone screens…one of the various ways smartphones gobble up battery energy…leaving nothing in reserve for the telephone.  One of my sons has the latest Apple Smartphone and must lose his share of incoming telephone calls as he switches off his mobile to conserve what little he has left of his mobile battery energy by the end of the working (or playing) day.

We can be optimistic that technology advance will gradually claw back the standby time losses. We need to be less optimistic that the mobile radio performance will be improving anytime soon. All the warning lights are flashing that mobile antenna performance is set to get a whole lot worse  as the manufactures make more and more compromises to pack-in more and more antennas into tomorrow’s mobile phones (to embrace all the new frequency spectrum coming on stream).

Now here is an amazing fact…there is not one single mobile phone on the market today that has any data in the pages of specification marketing claims that says how well their smartphone performs… as a telephone…not even the receiver sensitivity gets a mention. This is where the fight-back to get a decently performing telephone functions on tomorrow’s smartphones needs to begin…good consumer information.

Perhaps the regulators need to nudge the mobile phone industry to publish data relevant to telephone performance such as receiver sensitivity. It would be a great spur to innovation and good design if manufacturers were also required to publish the best and worse antenna gain for each band.   Even better would be for the industry to agree some simple common figure of merit to reflect overall telephone performance…a navigational beacon for the humble mobile telephone function that is currently losing its way as progress is now driven by the new IT masters of the mobile universe…

There are three main reasons why the Chancellor’s statement has not caught the nation’s imagination. First most people are totally preoccupied with short term palliatives to the exclusion of fixing the long term underlying structural problems that have led us here. Second, the government could do a lot better in communicating its growth strategy. Third, all the measures the government have announced are the equivalent to the components of an industrial growth machine. We have yet to be shown the big picture of how these various components will be made to function together as an industrial growth engine. A free global market has many good attributes but delivering a bigger share of the global industrial base for the UK has clearly not been one of them. Let me take each of these points in turn.

It is fairly evident why everyone is desperate for a short term fix. The economy is slowing, incomes squeezed and unemployment rising and this is all happening now. None of the £30 billion of infrastructure projects can conceivable have any impact on these issues over the next 6 months or even 18 months. Other measures such as support for R&D will not bear fruits for another 4-5 years. So the media and demand side economists have taken the public debate away from fixing the long term structural flaws to a debate on instant remedies…Plan A versus Plan B. Yet all a quick fix can do (at best) is to buy a bit of time at various risks and costs. And if that is all we finish up doing…in 18 months…or in 3 years…or in 5 years…we will still find ourselves in the same bind.  So we desperately need parallel actions…things that deal with the here and now and equal energy put into fixing the fundamental problems of a country too dependent on a single industry.

So just how good are the government’s proposals for re-generating our industrial base to secure a more balanced economy?

There is nothing in my background that qualifies me to offer an opinion on Plan A  versus Plan B. But I do have relevant background on what makes for a good industrial policy. I served under Michael Heseltine when he was President of the Board of Trade and trying to re-invent industrial policy at the DTI. I headed up the Branch dealing with the telecommunications, radio and broadcasting industries. We went up a huge learning curve over a very short space of time…enough for me to be able to recognise a credible industrial strategy from empty mantras and wishful thinking.  The things George Osborne announced in the Autumn statement taken together with some of the earlier initiatives (eg enterprise zones) clearly pass of the test of a credible industrial policy and even more so with the Treasury so ostensibly behind  them. In my days in the Civil Service the Treasury were the enemy for any enlightened industrial policies…how refreshing (even exhilarating) that we are seeing such strong leadership coming out of the Treasury. Why am I the only one cheering?

A lot of the muted reaction can be put down to the distractions of  what might engulf us if the Euro project crashes. However I suggest that the government could do a lot better in communicating its new longer term growth strategy.  The missing piece is a credible over-arching narrative that pulls all the initiatives together. Put another way the Government is delivering the components of a growth strategy (in dribs and drabs)…the next step I suggest is to set out the blue-print of how these components mesh into a long term national industrial growth engine. All the initiatives need to be put on time-lines of when they deliver (creating credibility as well as setting realistic expectation), the port folio of industry sectors with growth potential need to be set alongside (allowing ordinary people to relate to the growth strategy) and the horizontal measures (training and the imaginative financing ideas) can then to be brought underneath to demonstrate its solid foundation.  The picture is all there for the making. The Prime Minister’s recent NHS Life Science Partnership announcement is a first class industrial policy initiative…but where is the rest of the picture?

This brings me to my third and final point. Once we have all these new infrastructures in place, finance in all its form flowing and our skilled people flowing out of Universities and Apprenticeships …is the job of government done? Quite the contrary, the job will have only just begun. Ideology tends to channel our thoughts to the extremes of either leaving everything to market forces (which is one of the reasons for the UK’s industrial base contraction) and expecting the government to regulate everything (which contributed to the collapse of communism). The countries that have been the most successful in nurturing and then sustaining a modern industrial base have used a quite different mode of government and that is as an active catalyser of modernisation, innovation and the networking needed to seize complex new opportunities.  Michael Heseltine called in “industrial sponsorship”, Peter Mandelson called it “industrial activism” and Germany doesn’t seem to call it anything but make an exceedingly good job of doing it.

The UK prosperity of the past 20 years has been powered by Financial Services, North Sea Oil and Consumer Credit. The credit cards are maxed out, North Sea Oil production is declining and whilst Financial Services remains an important future contributor…the froth will not be returning anytime soon. There is much for the country to do to diversify is wealth creation base and the clock is ticking in a world that does not hang around for the losers and the wingers…

In contrast to the branding success of a university degree, vocational qualifications have been a “branding” disaster.  This is not to impugn that vocational courses are not equipping young people for skilled jobs or to suggest any lack effort by the colleges that deliver them. It is just that the status of the resulting qualifications is seen by many young people and the general public at large as seriously inferior to a university degree. This gets fed back to the playground. The media amplify the differences with annual pictures of young people throwing their mortar boards in the air on graduation day and total silence for those getting their final vocational qualifications. As a result society loses the means to award respect to those who attain the most advanced vocational qualifications. With it goes an opportunity to communicate an inspiring message of hope to the 50% or so who will never go to University that the appropriate skills training will open-up interesting (and better paid) jobs for them. We are a society that has come to seriously undervalue our master craftsmen (and women) and skilled technicians. This needs to be turned around.

Why do vocational qualifications languish in such low status beyond this crowding out effect of University degrees? First there have been no concerted efforts by the Governments, Colleges and industry to promote the brand image of vocational qualifications. If you want to build a brand it takes a well honed and sustained communications campaign. When NVQ’s were launched this was not done.

Sitting under this lack of marketing effort is a product flaw (from a marketing perspective) in the NVQ structure – it is an undifferentiated qualification product at its highest level. With a University degree there are two sorts of differentiation widely recognised by young people, employers and the general public. The first is the class of the degree and the second is the University it comes from.  What is the vocational equivalent to a first from Oxford? Who are the crème de la crème of the NVQ4′s that an employer will pay a wages premium in order to get hold of? Where is the transparency that allows the wider public to distinguish between those that just scraped through and those that excel in a particular skill?

The result is that vocational qualifications are widely perceived as a booby prize for those that fail to make the grade along the purely academic route instead of their rightful place of a valued brand and status in their own right.

This is the worst time to be suggesting that public money is poured into a re-branding campaign to elevate the status of vocational qualifications. At it happens this would be a waste of money anyway until something is first done to create some differentiation for the vocational qualifications themselves. Differentiation is a key to develop a perceived value of a brand.

There is a job to be done by the government and colleges to add a layer (or two) of differentiation.  For the sake of example let us assume two layers and label them the silver award and gold award. This has to be standardised across all vocational qualifications. This makes a communications campaign to promote the brand value to the general public much more cost effective. Second, within each skill area the colleges in partnership with their respective industries have to decide what a silver and gold award signifies by way of superior achievement and this must correlate with a superior challenge and effort. This is essential to secure status of acquiring them. Industry must be encouraged to pay higher starting wages for those getting the silver and gold awards. Nothing will be more effective in securing positive feedback to the playgrounds and parents.

If the UK is to be successful in rebalancing its economy industry will need many more skilled workers as well as graduates. In addition a well structured and well promoted vocational educational qualification framework will add a whole new horizon of “perceived” opportunity and chances to earn respect for the 50% of young people not cut out to scale academic mountains. Society has to advance to the point where it is able to recognised excellence in all walks of life.

It is good so see that the Government has now recognised the importance of vocational training . However my point is that this is more than a policy and education challenge…it is a marketting “branding” challenge. It is about identifying excellence within what already exists, building brand value around it and then a sustained communication to promote the brand to the benefit of all who are associated with it. I am not sure the Government is building into their strategy such a professional marketting approach to brand development and without this…the old cultural attitudes will prevail.

The European Commission has now added insult to injury this year by introducing an amendment to Directive 2006/116/EC on the term of Protection of Copyright that extended the 50 years for musical copyright to a Biblical 70 years…a whole life-time of reward… whilst still leaving the technical inventor losing their protection after a mere 20 years!  Why this difference in time period of protection?  There is clearly a case to answer.

Relatively few people understand Intellectual Property Rights but the main underpinning principle is actually quite simple…it is called “fairness”.

The time limit determines when a creative outcome changes from the exclusive property of the creator to become public property that we all own and can freely use. It a balance between fair reward and allowing ideas to become a part of the common heritage of mankind.

On this measure it cannot be right that the man struggling in his bedroom with his guitar to create a winning song should enjoy 70 years of reward for his efforts and the man struggling in his garden shed with a technical invention gets only 20 years. The difference is obscene.

Either the general public are thieves of time…stealing from patent owners what should be rightfully theirs for another 50 years or Copyright owners are thieves of time stealing from us what should be freely ours after 20 years.

Some may argue that this difference of time periods is justified. So the argument runs… it is far more important to society that technical ideas are freed up relatively early to allow others to copy and improve upon them whereas songs are a more frivolous product and there is less impact on society if locked away for longer.

There are three arguments against this line of defense of the status quo. First, the creative industries are now just as important as say the vacuum cleaner industry and creative people could do a lot with say the Beetle songs in all manner of creative products such as cartoons… just as the rivals to Dyson could use cyclonic separation in their new vacuum cleaner products. Second if it is that important to society to free up technical ideas after 20 years this could be achieved by moderating the licensing regulations after say 20 years to free up use but still ensured a fair royalty is paid to technical inventors (to match that of musicians). The third argument is that this should just be about fairness…however inconvenient to Dyson’s industrial rivals.

There is also a strong strategic reason for the Western economies for extending the period of patent protection. The world trade organisation treaty has pitched the US and European relatively high labour costs against much lower labour costs of China, India and Brazil. Off-setting this has been an historic hegemony of advanced technologies coming out of the Western laboratories and companies. This has led to a complacent assumption that the West will specialise in the high value added end of the market and the emerging economies will specialise in the  low value manufacturing end of the market. But China and India in particular are advancing at spectacular speed up the advanced technology learning curve backed up by huge numbers of young talented graduates coming out of their Universities. It is much quicker to catch-up in the development of advanced technologies where the aiming point is well identified (from seeing what the West is currently producing) than to blaze a trail into the much more uncertain future through R&D programmes. The solar PV industry is a compelling example of this. Five years ago Germany was a clear global market leader in Solar PV technology. Today China is the global market leader. Europe’s R&D base is simply not dynamic enough or resourced enough to keep the European technology base ahead of the imitators…it is likely to run out of road over the next 7-10 years. Extending the period of patent protection will help to redress this imbalance between the speed of catching-up (imitating or even copying) with the much longer speed to breaking quite new ground.

The case to align the time periods of protection on moral grounds is overwhelming. This then leads onto a much more difficult issue as to whether copyright protection should be brought back to 20 years or patent protection extended to 70 years. If alignment is to ever be achieved in the real world it is likely to be based on a compromise figure somewhere between these two extremes. My straw man would  40 years as a sensible half way compromise with some slightly different status in respect of licensing the last 20 years to free up usage but still providing a fair reward for the creators.

Any idea of cutting back the period of protection for copyright is likely to outrage the powerful copyright community…but this should not be a reason for Governments to shy away from reform. The music industry are far from winning the general public over to the moral case for strengthening enforcement of copyright over the Internet. There is a widely held view that music copyright owners have been ripping off the public for years with over priced music CD’s and foot dragging (until relatively recently) in putting in place reasonably priced music down-loading sites on the Internet. In this context extending the Copyright for music from 50 to 70 years looks like an ugly case of featherbedding and probably is. That said, if fairness is the driving force, a distinction can (and should) be made in any future reform between the copyright of existing works and new works yet to come under copyright… with any shorter period of protection only applying to new works..

There  are many things wrong with Intellectual Property Right laws ranging from the ambushes regularly made on hardworking technology companies by patent trolls to the current over the top behaviour of the mobile phone manufacturers. There is a case for comprehensive reform. The piece meal approach to Intellectual Property Rights by the European Union needs to give way to a genuine broad ranging reform of Intellectual Property Rights that accords comparable status between our technical heroes and song writing heroes. There should be one period of protection for all Intellectual Property Rights…we should be eliminating the current discrimination not exacerbating it…and also safeguarding the hard earned value of our technical innovation base.

The use of Facebook and Twitter by individuals to try to gather and mobilise a mob is not in doubt. However what has subsequently been demonstrated is the legal audit trail that these technologies leave behind that has been useful for the authorities pursuing successful prosecutions later. The fact that there have now been successful prosecutions (and exemplary prison sentences)  is likely to be far more effective in limiting future law breakers use of Facebook and Twitter than any technical measure. This has probably already done a large part of the job of containing the misuse of these new technologies.

There remains the issue of how all the messaging technology, including that venerable old messaging technology SMS, were used in real time to organise the hit and run tactics of the mobs. The police found this mob mobility particularly difficult to cope with. In a battlefield this tactical use of communications by the enemy would be dealt with by jamming radio signals in the vicinity. In civil terms it equates to the local mobile base stations being switched off during riots. Critics have argued that this is disproportionate as those innocent people in the affected areas are losing their means of communicating any difficulties that they might be in.  Certainly any loss of 999 voice call access from mobile phones would be very serious and could lay the authorities open to litigation if it were ever proved that somebody died as a result of those nearby being unable to call for medical assistance.

However blocking the networks is not the only technical measure that could be considered. Another possibility would be to get ISP’s  in riot areas to put a 15 minute delay in handling messaging services (which are  not designed as real-time services anyway). This would dull the tactical advantage of mobs to relocate in real time but leave everyone else free to use messaging for legitimate purposes.  Such a measure would be far more proportionate and worth study.

The Blackberry Messenger use by gangs for organising riots is a different issue. The dangers of encryption for lawbreaking is the inability of police intelligence to  have any idea of what crimes are in planning.   The use by the public of very high grade encryption of messages was debated in 1999 and a report published by the Labour Government called “Encryption and Law Enforcement”.  The Blair Government had the difficult task of balancing the risks to law enforcement with the needs of business and ecommerce. It all pre-dates electronic social networking and it is not easy to see how this liberalised encryption policy can now be reversed.

This leaves the role of television to be examined. What has been remarkable is the complete absence of any scrutiny of the “old” technology (television) in the public debate on the role of technology in the English Riots. Yet undoubtedly it was television that led to the copycat riots in other parts of London and in English cities hundreds of miles away. Arguably television news reporting of the initial riots crossed a line between reporting past events and driving future events. Put another way TV turned a £10m local disaster in Tottenham to a £200m disaster across England as a whole and strained police resources to almost breaking point.

There was one particular news clip sequence coming out of the Tottenham riots that warrants discussion. The images appeared to show a number of people looting a high street shop in relaxed almost party atmosphere whilst a line of riot police simply looked on. The juxtaposition of the animated looters and a passive line of police sent out a very simple message that everyone got instantly…rioting and looting was now OK…you are free to damage and steal on the high street…and you will get away with it.  (It was also the clip sequence that probably did more damage to the public confidence in the police than all the other video news footage put together).

This news clip raises a number of questions: was the news clip itself overly inflammatory, did the endless repetition of the clip exaggerate the situation and did the lack of juxtaposition of video footage showing the police more actively arresting people at other locations lead to an unbalanced picture being presented?  The answer is probably yes to all of these questions to a greater or lesser extent.

What is now evident is that the old media (TV) role in large scale public disturbances is to propagate “the trigger” over large distances. It is akin to the role of a high wind in turning small local forest fires into major conflagrations affecting thousands of square miles. The same mechanism was evident in the Arab Spring in transmitting street protests from Tunisia to Egypt.

This leads onto the question of what can (or should) be done about it? Pleas for more responsible TV journalism is a waste of time. That genie escaped the bottle decades ago. We now have competitive 24 hour news channels fighting to gain our attention minute by minute.  Their mission is to make things more interesting and capture our imaginations. It is not a natural thing to ask highly motivated professional people to do a less effective job.

This brings us to highly sensitive issue of censorship. Free speech and a free society requires a robust defence against censorship. It is why most people have  instinctively shied away from challenging the role TV has played in fanning the public disorders – the cure looks more unpalatable than the disease.  We are left only with a hope that Broadcasters might make more of an effort to balance their real time reporting…but we should not hold our breath.

Technology advances seldom deliver a 100% up-side. Trying to get the balance between discouraging the darker uses and maximising the public benefit can be every bit as complex as the technologies themselves.  The up-side of Facebook and Twitter was well demonstrated after the riots in the coming together of communities in the clearing-up after the riots. Television also played a positive role. Nothing could demonstrate the enormous constructive power of a 30 second video clip on national TV news than the words of Tariq Jahan broadcast from outside his home the night his son and two friends were murdered. It stopped an appalling situation of criminality from degenerating into a full scale race riot.

Prof Jones  claimed an ‘over-rigid’ application of BBC editorial guidelines on impartiality has led to the BBC giving equal prominence to fringe scientific option and mainstream science opinion. The safety of the MMR vaccine and GM crops were given as examples of the damage that can be caused with this approach by the media.

Yet we know that at least some the public empathy with fringe opinions stem from a fear of the unknown and this is fuelled by some spectacular failures by scientists to get things right in the past. I am old enough to remember films of the new materials marvel called asbestos. I have lived in the time when DDT was going to eradicate malaria and the District Nurse was showering DDT powder on the hair of local children found with lice. Then there was the thalidomide tragedy.

Moving from particular examples to whole countries getting it wrong I was truly shocked when the collapse of communism revealed how the Communist Block, with its total control of the media, had successfully hid the most environmentally cavalier way in which science based industries had been operating – with the full support of the State mainstream scientific opinion.  In sharp contrast “the fringe opinions” in the West, led by authors like Rachel Carson, provoked huge public debate and led to tough environmental regulations…which gave the West more progress at a fraction of the environmental damage. Had Dr Jones had his way Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring would not have even got a mention in a BBC book review?

Prof Jones warns the BBC to take special care distinguishing well-established fact from opinion, and communicating this distinction to audiences. This is disingenuous. There are considerably more things we don’t know than know when massively complex scientific applications are moved at speed from the laboratory into wide deployment in a massively more complex inter-connected world. Progress in the application of science is always a calculated risk that works on the presumption that something is safe if nothing unsafe has (yet) been uncovered.

This is not to argue for the world of applied science to operate in any other way. We simply could not reap the benefits of science if the burden of proof were to be reversed. Yet its implications are profound on the bond of trust between the public and the scientific community. This is where Prof Jones is wrong to present this as an issue of scientific facts (the things we know). What the public fear (with some justification) are the all the things scientists do not know (the unknown unknowns). There may be examples of some fringe group or other coming out with complete nonsense in the face of rock solid scientific facts. These are not the cases that sway the general public. Where the public have the potential to become alarmed (and susceptible to media presentation) nearly always fall into a grey area where the real nature of the science debate comes down to risk and benefit. The debates that get particularly heated are usually where consumers are being given no choice to opt out.

If the scientific world is to carry the public along this remarkable (accelerating) journey of applying science then a public platform has to be given to the maverick scientists and the fringe lobby groups. Each plays a different but essential role. The maverick scientist is there to shake up complacent assumptions by mainstream science. The fringe groups represent a political backlash to the applications of science. These applications of science are often driven by global multinational giants who fund a high percentage of applied science and employ many of the scientists who influence mainstream science opinion.  Under these circumstances should the BBC really be giving less prominance to “fringe opion”?

There has to be the public debates where scientists step up and argue their case. It may not be a debate of equals in terms of academic qualifications and scientific experience. However it is a debate of equal stake holders…those driving the science and those being asked to accept the results being applied to their everyday lives.

Where the BBC have an essential but difficult job to do in applied science is helping the public understand “risk” and creating a sense of proportion between risks of doing things or not doing them and across different risks. It is also helping scientists step out of their jargon filled world to put their case in ways understandable to the public. This is not about science it is about the politics of science? Good politics in open societies is about having the debates and not suppressing them.

It is interesting how the BBC reported on Prof Jones’ recommendations and pointedly did not seek the balancing views of any maverick scientists?   The science itself may be complex…perhaps at time too much so for journalists…but the fundamental issues of free speech, open debate, impartiality and balance are well within the BBC skill sets. The BBC needs to avoid being seduced by scientists, no matter how eminent, trying to make life for themselves more comfortable.

In the space of a mere 3 days following the 4^th July the huge Murdoch reputational power in the UK lay in tatters.

Many commentators have latched onto the “tipping point” model to explain this rapid turn of events. A slow build-up of public concern…then a few more public revelations…then a tipping point. My hypothesis is that the mechanism had more the character of an explosion than a tipping point. The explosion came about through a combination of combustible material piling-up, a fortuitous wind blowing public consciousness in a particular direction and… a single spark.  Any one of these elements alone would not have led to the News International reputation calamity but the combination was as lethal as it was unpredictable in its timing. Let us take each of these elements in turn.

For several decades there has been a large swath of middle England uneasy about the undue influence of the Murdoch press over the UK democratic process…but fragmented with no point of focus. More recently has been the build up a long list of celebrities, political and other public figures agitating for action on the suspected wider reach of the phone hacking practice…but not leading to any police action  The Liberal Democrats, sore with how News International always seemed intent on swaying public opinion away from their party were itching for redress….but the Vince Cable indiscretion muffed their best chance for this. The Labour Party saw an opportunity with the Andy Coulson link to keep taking a pop shot at the Prime Minister’s judgement….but none of it was sticking. Finally Jeremy Hunt’s decision process on whether to approve the News International bid for 100% ownership of BSkyB had united the entire non-Murdoch media in common cause to try and scupper the bid….but they were being out manouvred. Even the heroic efforts by the Guardian Newspaper to expose the cover-up going on were made to look like fringe rants… doomed to eventually run out of steam…and probably would have.

Why does a largely indifferent general public to all these concerns, blitzed over several years  with the various wrong-doings of the News of the World, suddenly become receptive to a mere half a dozen words more?  On the 23^rd June the trial of Levi Bellfield finished. There followed a storm of public outrage at the way the defence lawyer had treated the Dowler family. There was not a fair minded person in the UK that did not share the distress of the Dowler family. The winds were now blowing public consciousness in a very particular direction.

Eleven days later the Guardian Newspaper reported that Millie Dowler’s voice mail had been hacked and the hacker had deleted voice mails to make space for new messages.  Just one button pressed too many. Collective public memories can be short…but not that short.  Within hours the absolutely identical thought flashed across the mind of every single person in the country…this was wrong…it was despicable…it was criminal!

That was the single spark.

News International probably had 8 hours to analyse what was going on, build a counter-strategy and get moving on it before the evening‘s TV news bulletins. It took News International three days to deliver their counter-response. By then it was already too late… quite aside from the obvious flaws in the strategy. David Cameron and the Government had probably 2 days to sort out their options and come out fighting on the front foot. It took them 4 days. Ed Milliband came out of the blocks within 2 days…as a result… reaped a political dividend…in spite of having his own News International baggage. Here lays the lesson for all large organisations. It is not just doing the right thing but doing it fast.

Today’s’ communications technologies have the power and scope to amplify and propagate public outrage or passion with incredible speed and gathering momentum. Within hours of the Guardian Newspaper leading on the Milli Dowler phone hack…every broadcasting media outlet became saturated with thought leaders pointing the finger at the News of the World. Behind the scenes the Internet provided the fast back and side links…exponentially channelling the outrage of millions of people through FaceBook, Twitter and on-line campaigns. Mumsnet was particularly effective in channelling this outrage in the direction of large corporations who regularly advertised in News of the World. The Ford Motor car company led the stampede of advertisers declaring that they would not advertise in the News of the World until the issues contaminating the News of the World brand were cleared up.  The brand damage was savage and within a few days was irreparable.

It is impossible to overstate the long term consequences for the UK (most of them good) of these mis-calculations by News International and David Cameron. The Murdoch reputation fear factor…has shattered. It has gone. It will not come back. The impact on News International in the UK will largely be all bad…which is sad for those parts of the organisation that have been doing a very fair job and making a huge positive national contribution.

It is to be hoped that most large corporations do not have any skeletons rattling around in the cupboard of the sort News International has had. But reputational assaults can come from all sorts of surprise directions. The consequences can be to knock billions off the value of company shares in a matter of hours and do brand damage that could take years to repair. What can companies do to insure against this sort of reputational car wreck? A good start is to ask themselves some pertinent questions.

How many companies keep track of the various combustible material that might be stacking up around their particular neck of the woods? How many regularly follow public chat room comments about their companies or know how to tap into face-book and twitter campaigns at short notice? Do they have a social media strategy? How many companies have bright strategy thinkers on tap that can do an analysis and knock up radical costed optional responses…in less than 90 minutes?  How many have a contingent plan that can connect the handful of key company decision takers together in under an hour…where ever  they may be in the world?  Do companies even know if one of them moves out of mobile coverage?

Welcome to the new world of modern communications technology.

The IET challenge is both inciteful and timely. The Apple i-phone has totally transformed the direction and speed of travel of the global mobile phone industry. The rise in data traffic that the i-phone (and other smart phones) have generated has taken mobile network operators (and just about everyone else) completely by surprise. In fact the commendable fast reaction by the MNO’s has been so intensive that it has not allowed them time to really assess and digest the long term consequences. This matters to the country. Whilst mobile phones come and go every 12-18 months the networks on which they run take 10 years or more to put in place. Without the government setting the necessary long term ambitions for the next generation of mobile networks …taking into account the emerging smart phone phenomena…the UK may well finish up with some seriously underperforming mobile networks 7-10  years from now…and/or mobile data prices up in the stratosphere for any sort of decent mobile data access speeds.

Why the IET warning is particularly timely is that it takes the best part of 3-4 years to put a new communications framework in place and bed it down. So the IET claim that the current mobile regulatory framework is now a barrier to progress needs urgent examination, challenge and debate. It is a matter of public record that the UK has fallen seriously behind a number of other European countries in the roll-out of the new LTE network…by 3 years or more. This has largely arisen from Ofcom’s efforts to sustain a 5 player mobile network market through micro-managing radio spectrum holdings. To most independent observers Ofcom appear to be winning most of the battles but losing the war of sustaining a vigorous mobile network wholesale market. Certainly mobile network competition alone is failing to redress a number of mobile coverage issues and the IET are warning that the new mobile technologies will exacerbate coverage issues for consumers to a much greater extent. Some urgency is also merited by the fact that the window of opportunity to use the spectrum auctions for any change of policy direction is fast running out.

The IET challenge on mobile network competition boils down to the proposition that it may be overdue to accept the economic realities that some network consolidation is inevitable over the next 5 years and equip Ofcom with the duties and powers to regulate an inevitably less competitive network wholesale market.  Comparing the huge rise in demand for mobile data capacity with the much more subdued rise in mobile data revenues certainly signals that something quite fundamental is going to change in the market sooner or later.

Another strength of the IET argument is that they have not leapt straight into a catalogue of pet regulatory changes. Instead they suggest the logical starting point is to first decide what sort of mobile infrastructure the UK wants to finish up with 10 years from now. Only then will it become clear the sort of regulatory framework that is needed to best deliver this.

A first pass at this challenging question throws up a number of fundamental policy choices to be made:

a) capacity constrained or rich urban coverage …

b) <10Mb/s or >50 Mb/s access speeds …

c) network or services choice

d) “pro long term investment” or “pro short term price” focussed regulation

To which could be added a fifth issue:

e) Enhancing rural broadband mobile coverage or not…

The IET go on to present a particular technology road map and long term vision. Others may well criticise particular aspect of this vision…but if the UK is to have a really high quality debate the onus needs to be on the critics to come up with a better set of ambitions.

The IET stress that their approach  is not about more regulations but the right regulations. This might look no more than a mantra. Where the IET give it real substance is proposing a handy tool of the government (or Ofcom) “catalysing change” – an approach that sits between leaving things to the uncertainly of market forces and the stiffling risks of over-regulation. It is not a new tool but one already proven to give outstanding results when it was used to get the GSM technology off the ground (the GSM MoU).

This government (and the last) have showed a good grasp of the importance of the fixed broadband Internet to the future competitiveness of the UK. The importance of the mobile broadband infrastructure has yet to get the same attention. Yet it is “mobile” that is driving the next global “computer” revolution and countries will need the best mobile infrastructures in place to reap the benefits from this huge wave of innovation that will feed into many parts of the global digital economy over the next 10 years.