Anarchists and Thatcher unite over RIP
PrintThe bill comes with a £46 billion price tag
Posted in Music and Media, 25th June 2000 12:00 GMT
Free whitepaper – Total cost of ownership of Dell, HP and IBM blade solutions
The government's Web monitoring bill may cost British industry £46 billion, a report warned yesterday.
The British Chamber of Commerce revealed details of a report on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Bill, which claimed the government had "substantially underestimated the cost of compliance of ISPs".
It put the total cost to ISPs at £640 million over the next five years around six times higher than the governement's prediction. Worse still, the full financial cost to the country - taking into account RIP's implementation and fears over businesses scarpering overseas to avoid the clampdown - was put at £46 billion over five years.
Meanwhile, the London School of Economics and the Institute of Directors have also chorused their disapproval of the Bill over the last week. They have become strange bedfellows with human rights organisations and ISPs, all trying to force the government to abandon or amend its proposals.
The protestors are now pinning their hopes on allies in the House of Lords to defeat the bill.
RIP's committee stage kicked off yesterday afternoon after a heated debate on the state of feral pigeons in Trafalger Square. It is expected to run for several weeks, with ex-Iron Lady Baroness Thatcher, who is generally believed to be a supporter of the bill, expected to be among those calling for amendments. ®
Enabling the Agile Data Center
Managing desktop software for fun and profit
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers?
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Fedora 12 polishes Linux for netbooks
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter