The Digital Britain Grassy Knoll

Today was the day of the Digital Britain Summit, the idea being that panels of luminaries were to enlighten us in our thinking about the British Digital SuperHighway. I couldn't go, so listened in for part of the afternoon on the Video livestream (when it was up it was excellent, it struggled earlier in the day, and it also has a superb liveblog at that link) and dipped in every so often to the Twitterstream.

As far as being a Summit, it was more a grassy knoll, as there was a very little presented to take us to new heights of understanding. I was intending to write a longer post initially, but in reality most of what was said has been said and done before:

- The "on-stage" day was a procession of the existing power players arguing in various degrees that their pole position/role on the greasy pyramid should be protected, by regulation if needs be.

- The "off-stage" day on the Twitterstream was good in parts, but also unfortunately heavily trafficked by power player wannabees arguing the Old Guard should all get out the way, NOW!, or muppets regurgitating the Californian Pseudobabble that passes as considered thinking in too much of the New Media space!

- Too many of the "questions" followed SXSW malpractice of "Pimp yo'self then launch into a long winded diatribe of your own" so there was little insight there. Guy Kawasaki's SXSW model of $20 to ask a question (or say your piece in 30 seconds then sit down) needs to be enforced.

All in all, glad I wasn't there - except for the networking, of course (Or as some wag* put it, you could tell the real Digital Britons as they were the ones not attending physically )

Things that stood out for me as key for the next round of this report were :

- How shall it be executed - Lord Carter came very close to calling for a more government regulated model (as opposed to market force aka large company oligopoly model) as we've seen in Asia, and as France, Scandinavia and now Australia have shifted to. He was largely alone up there on this, and demurred from saying it outright....

- How will it be funded - Gordon Brown clearly wanted us to have a Digital Future in his keynote - but as all the money has been given away to prop up the banks, how will it be paid for? This was never directly addressed, but the Consumer's pocket seemed to be the unspoken assumption on the day. Maybe we need Broadband Bonds, like there were once Railway Bonds?

- Who gets what access - Round and Round the Universal Service Obligation we went again, especially access for The Digital Poor, with no one prepared to point out the unpalatable and un-PC elements about the cost vs benefits of doing this. Everyone knows its practically impossible of course, but it seems everyone wants someone else to be lumbered with having to address the issue (so they can snipe while secretly being relieved that their taxes aren't disappearing down a bottomless pit ).

My take on the process so far is that the risk that the whole Digital Britain thing becomes a corporate stitch up is still quite high, and there is every risk they will thus build the wrong things for the wrong reasons (Think red flags in front of early automobiles, to redact the Digital Highway example). I think Carter understands this, but there are some very vested interests on and around the Digital Britain advisory board.

For The People, Stephen Fry was one of the few people onstage who was (i) powerful enough to have an impact on institutional thinking and (ii) actually understands how the whole new media system works. I would like to believe that The People could collectively find The Wisdom to put a coherent competing strategy together, but my experience of today and previous public pow-wows on the topic is that they can't. There is just too much noise from New Mogul wannabees, muppets, empty vessels etc to get anything coherent going - passion is all very well, but not when one needs to get productive.

And, as we noted before after the first report, the endgame has some inescapable but not universally popular outcomes:

(i) Market Forces won't do the infrastructure buildout, it will need a Deus ex Machina and that is visible hand of the Government in some form

(ii) The consumer won't pay, but its an excellent use of bailout money. I suggest the banks all get strong armed into buying Broadband Bonds with the money the taxpayers gave them.

(iii) 100% access at full service levels is impossible and probably not needed - Telcos rolled out phone boxes, we have Libraries, etc - all these are interim technologies for the digital dispossessed until prices fall.

But it dos need a wider input than the current report.

So - how to get The Vox Populi productively engaged - Amplified is a start for information gathering, but it is a conversation mechanism and not a structure for designing a considered response. To my mind one needs something like the existing Digital Britain Report structure, but with other more representative players in it. I'd be happy for Lord Carter to chair both, in fact, but certainly the members would need to be drawn from a broader cross section.


*that was me, actually - to wind up all those who had got up early to go