We’ve seen recently just how muddled a regulatory body Ofcom seems to be. There was the nonsensical claim that rural households in Britain are as well connected as their urban neighbours, swiftly refuted by a ThinkBroadband.com survey - and anyone who’s ever been outside a major city.
There was the bottling of speed sanctions on ISPs in favour of a laughable broadband code, essentially giving ISPs carte blanche to continue attracting punters’ cash with fantasy headline speeds.
Then there’s the eight weeks Ofcom still expects disputing customers to wait until their case will even be looked at. Not to mention the no-win situation Ofcom’s been manoeuvred into by BT.
But for final damning evidence of Ofcom’s ineffectiveness, I point you away from the world of IT and towards this excellent, and deeply unsettling, New Scientist article. It explains (far more eloquently than I could here) how Ofcom has essentially given permission for documentary makers to pretty much make things up, on the basis that it’s only news programmes which need be presented with “due accuracy”.
If they won’t crack down on something as huge as that, what hope for an end to “up to” speeds?
Tags: Ofcom
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July 23rd, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Funny to think that when Ofcom was set up, right-wing think tanks were warning that the Government were creating a behemoth that was going to censor everyone and snoop on our neighbours. Now it turns out to be the mouse that wouldn’t roar. Personally I prefer the bumbling and incompetence to an agency that could easily abuse its’ power.
July 23rd, 2008 at 6:25 pm
I would suggest looking at the New Scientist article again, this time noting the banner at the top stating “Opinion”
Read the comments below and follow some of the links, you may find that the ‘facts’ and ‘lies’ as stated in the article are not so clear cut