It takes time to get a handle on the full Digital Britain report - and I think the key problem is that, despite asserting it provides a vision for the future, it fails to describe it - a central task for great leaders.
Free online, a hard copy will cost you £34.55 for 245 pages - around 0.15p a page. Maybe stats like that would have helped the message. A broadband connection available for all tax-paying citizens makes the Government-side of bureaucracy cheaper, and pushes more work at us, in simple form-filling - whether we are architects, accountants, builders, doctors, dentists, farmers, fishermen, etc. And this is a Government still drooling about selling spectrum.
The Steering Board of 11 plus the good Lord Carter get 83 "points" in the executive summary (roughly 7 hobby horses each) - and the balance between opportunity, creativity etc and further complex regulation sticks firmly with the control freaks.
The report estimates the volume of content available online will grow - 10x to 100x. And, I suspect the make-up of the report team suggests they can't imagine why anyone would be happy with just Freeview in that sort of world. But media consumption amongst most of us is narrow. Lord Carter probably read every national newspaper yesterday - or had someone fillet them for him; for Analogue UK, it's The Sun or a crumpled Metro for those who bother.
Broadband gives everyone the opportunity to be a broadcaster/publisher. The web means that content is international. The mistake of the regulators on Digital Britain is to think that they can exercise the same control and "shaping" that they've painfully deployed on terrestrial tv, in a world of IPTV.
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