{"id":275,"date":"2010-04-08T15:17:17","date_gmt":"2010-04-08T15:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/?p=275"},"modified":"2010-04-08T15:17:17","modified_gmt":"2010-04-08T15:17:17","slug":"digital-economy-bills-passage-shows-gap-between-politics-and-politicians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/?p=275","title":{"rendered":"Digital Economy Bill&#8217;s passage shows gap between politics and politicians"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.publications.parliament.uk\/pa\/cm200910\/cmbills\/089\/10089.i-iii.html\">Digital Economy Bill<\/a> passed last night.\u00a0 As thousands watched on the BBC, most MPs skipped the debate, which was over in two hours.\u00a0 And despite<a href=\"http:\/\/www.openrightsgroup.org\/campaigns\/disconnection\"> 20,000 letters<\/a> being sent and nearly 25,000 tweets encouraging MPs to submit this bill to rigorous debate, only 227 of the 647 MPs voted (see a great stats <a href=\"http:\/\/debillitated.heroku.com\/\">mashup<\/a> here).\u00a0 The bill was washed into the <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/democracylive\/hi\/house_of_lords\/newsid_8167000\/8167412.stm\">House of Lords<\/a> this afternoon.<\/p>\n<p>This situation exposes the rift between politics and politicians.\u00a0 The bill was broadly debated and discussed by internet researchers, lawyers, advocates &#8211; even the British Library had a consultation on proposals to make providers of free WiFi networks liable for copyright infringements undertaken on their networks.\u00a0 Deliberative democracy was in full force.\u00a0 But the politicians fell down on the job &#8211; with, perhaps, the exception of MP <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/tom_watson\">Tom Watson<\/a>, who has become a minor Internet celebrity for consulting his constituents&#8217; remarks on his Twitter feed during the debate.<\/p>\n<p>This could well be the political crisis that pushes for democratic reform in the UK.\u00a0 At the very least, as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.skeptobot.com\/2010\/04\/digital-economy-bill-passed-internet.html\">several<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/eu.techcrunch.com\/2010\/04\/08\/doublethink-the-digital-economy-bill-against-the-digital-economy\/\">commentators<\/a> point out, it demonstrates that social media is transforming politics, and also that digital rights issue impact more people than just the tech community: poorly thought out legislation on disconnection could impact public institutions like the British Library, as well as small businesses.\u00a0 As the election campaign starts again, let&#8217;s hope that politicians can get back in touch with politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Digital Economy Bill passed last night.\u00a0 As thousands watched on the BBC, most MPs skipped the debate, which was over in two hours.\u00a0 And despite 20,000 letters being sent and nearly 25,000 tweets encouraging MPs to submit this bill to rigorous debate, only 227 of the 647 MPs voted (see a great stats mashup [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[19,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oii","category-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pUfdR-4r","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions\/277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}