A leading British think tank suggests that less adult content and online piracy might mean more widespread adoption of broadband in a new paper it calls a manifesto for broadband, "Modernising with Purpose."
Citing a 2-year-old survey, the Institute for Public Policy Research said there's little reason now to encourage more broadband use, despite massive British government interest and investment in it, so long as the most popular reasons to get broadband are peer-to-peer music downloading and access to adult content.
"Given that the majority of the former is still thought to be illegal, while the latter speaks for itself, this raises questions as to whether policy makers ought to be celebrating this technology to the extent that they have done," wrote the report's author, William Davies.
"In fairness to broadband users, they may not have a ‘reason’ for signing up for broadband any more than one has a ‘reason’ to own a bicycle, hence the survey is skewed by a few obviously data-rich activities," he continued. "But we are entitled to ask what precisely will be sent through these pipes over which so much fuss is made."
The survey in question, conducted in 2003 by broadband and telephony provider Homecall, said 33 percent of those they polled said they signed up for broadband to download music and 25 percent signed up for better results in adult Internet entertainment and services.
Davies said the critical question involving broadband adoption isn't its speed but whether activities like downloading and porn aren't blocking more "productive" usage of broadband and, indeed, the Internet itself. And he added that neither government nor industry can actually have much influence over content choices in a medium which, he said, has more in common with the telephone than television.
"There is no reason why computers should be voluntarily adopted for productive purposes, any more than any other technology should . . . only a small minority of people are exploiting the technology to the full, while a large number engage with it only as a necessary means of gaining employment and performing specific tasks . . . [L]egal broadband content isn’t being produced to encourage uptake of the technology," Davies wrote.
