There’s a new Digital Economy Act enabled in the UK recently. Known as the Digital Economy Act 2017, the British government has incorporated certain changes to the Act implemented last in 2010. Amongst restricting porn for a certain age group and capping mobile phone bills, there are certain other revisions as well. You will find below some of the points that can affect the UK internet consumer massively.
Age checks on porn sites
The UK government has made it mandatory for all the porn websites to host an age-check filter. The "age-verification regulator" will have the power to fine websites up to £250,000, or up to 5 percent of their turnover.
It will also be able to order ISPs to block websites that fail to comply and tell other providers to process payments or facilitate advertising on these sites to withdraw their services, effectively starving the domains of revenue. The changes will ensure that under-18 teenagers don’t have access to pornographic material.
Faster broadband for everyone
The new Act has made it a right to have access to faster internet connections with speeds of at least 10Mbps. Rural areas will be able to request faster internet connections from Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In the future, the limit for the minimum speeds could be raised to 30Mbps when the infrastructure is ready.
Mandatory bill caps for mobile contracts
Service providers will have to provide some kind of cap to mobile bills that are about to extend their billing cycle. The system should warn the user beforehand to let him/her decide whether they want to revise their usage pattern to avoid incurring extra costs or continue the services as they liked. If customers continue to receive service after they've hit their cap, then the carrier is expected to pick up the rest of the bill.
Crackdown on Pirates
Via an amendment to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the jail term for piracy has been raised from two to ten years. The government wants to attack the root cause of piracy – the pirates, not the average user who is exposed to the pirated content.
They are also planning to ask the search engines to hide or remove links to pirated content’s page from the search results.
(With inputs from Engadget)
