The British Government Wants To Take Away Your ‘Privileges’ To Access The Internet

A meeting has been held this week at the House of Commons in the UK to debate the Intellectual Property Bill, which ended with a lot of fingers being pointed at Google and its tolerance towards illegal websites that are displayed on its search engine.

The Prime Minister’s staff is reportedly looking to shove more laws upon file sharers, including removing internet access privileges to offenders that repeat such actions and naming them ‘persistent offenders’. Now let’s just stop there and think about it for a second. Remove your privileges to access the internet? The last time I heard of such severe actions was in the communist era. ‘The Internet’ is not something that you can take away from anybody on this Earth. Even Pope Francis considered it a ‘gift from God’ earlier this week, along with pointing out that people without access to it are ‘in danger of being left behind’.

Of course, such actions are more aimed at people who attempt to make a profit out of content downloaded illegally, and their decision to raise the penalty of imprisonment to 10 years might be a good idea. However, the most interesting statement comes from Helen Goodman (UK MP) which noted that it seems ignorant to distinguish between the teenager downloading music for a mobile device and organized copyright piracy groups.

It seems that the government are more focused on users and not the actual websites and servers, not to mention Google, which was yet to cooperate in removing the links to illegal websites from its searches. Or is it that their incompetence is reflecting upon the weaker, which is the end-user that browses the internet? Type ‘torrent’ in any search engine and watch the miracle unfold, dozens of torrent websites appear. Of course most are blocked by your ISP (if that is the case) but others are not. And what if a 13-year-old accesses one of these websites and downloads the so-called ‘torrents’? Is the government going to throw his or her parents in jail, or ship him or her to a correction facility, even if they do not know what they are doing?

Thank you TweakTown and TorrentFreak for providing us with this information