Major ISPs Challenge UK's Digital Economy Act 107
Techmeology writes "TalkTalk and BT, two of the UK's largest ISPs, seek to legally challenge the UK's Digital Economy Act, which was rushed through parliament during its last days prior to the election. TalkTalk and BT argue that the DEA infringes human rights and places large ISPs (with over 400,000 customers) at a disadvantage. They also believe the DEA could conflict with existing European Legislation such as the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive, and the E-Commerce Directive — the latter stating that ISPs are not responsible for the actions of their customers. The Act, which saw twenty thousand letters sent to MPs in protest, contains measures to see websites suspected of distributing illegal material blocked, and Internet users disconnected or reported to copyright holders."
Re:Free Wi-Fi illegal (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is good... (Score:4, Interesting)
Trouble is that worldwide, politicians are relatively old people who know absolutely nothing about computers, the internet and whatever. They are often too old to have grown up with it. They have no time to learn about this new technology. They are one of the few people who do nearly all their talking and negotiating face-to-face. They still use paper copies of everything they do.
So, I don't think it's surprising that the laws regarding the digital world completely suck and are nearly 100% dictated by the large industry and companies, and are in no way protecting the general public.
Things may change - I just hope that it's not too late.
And therefore, I cheer at any delay - a delay is a victory, because the longer we wait, the bigger the chance that our politicians actually understand the matter at hand.
Re:Wonders will never cease! (Score:3, Interesting)
I just contact their twitter team @BTCare [twitter.com]. They deal with any problems in minutes, and for the three problems I have had in the last month, they called me within 10 minutes, called the following morning to ask if it has been fixed. I once moaned on Twitter that I wanted to leave BT Broadband, they called me and gave me a mac code.
Re:Wonders will never cease! (Score:3, Interesting)
First, it's an 0845 number. If you don't have a landline, this gets expensive - it's 10p/minute from most mobiles, and they get paid for keeping you on hold so there is absolutely no incentive for them as a company to deal with you promptly.
Secondly, any call to them will invariably require you to be transferred to several different departments. Each will ask you the same set of security questions. Quite why they can't set an 'already authenticated' flag when transferring you internally, I have no idea, but it wastes about a minute for each person you talk to. You then have to restate the reason for your call, because they don't seem to communicate.
It took me 45 minutes on the phone to them to get them to turn off my existing cable connection and enable the new one on the day that I moved house. Then another half an hour when it didn't work to get them to go through pointless troubleshooting things before they sent an engineer out. Fortunately, he was competent, found the place outside where the connectors had corroded, replaced them, swapped my ancient cable modem out for a new one, and then I had working Internet.
On the plus side, once the connection was installed in my last house, I never actually needed to call them, and could get the advertised speed whenever I tried saturating the line. So far it seems the same in my new house, but I've only been in a week so we'll see how stable the connection is...
Re:con-lib coalition = no opposition in parliament (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wonders will never cease! (Score:3, Interesting)