Ireland embraces "three strikes"

During my coffee-making haze earlier this morning, Peter Bazalgette was on Today [Scroll down to 7.32 to listen] pointing out politely that you'll never stop people pirating stuff.

Presumably Irish ISP Eircom hadn't had a chance to hear this before signing up for a Three Strikes policy.

During the Bazalgette piece, Ed Stourton summarised the position of the Digital Britain report as seeing access to broadband as being on a par with access to power and water: an essential service for the way we live now. It's impossible to see how you could square a belief that broadband is an essential service with arbitrary removal of that service on the whim of a record company. Is any company - in Britain, or Ireland, or elsewhere - really going to deny entire households access to the network simply to please Sony or Warners? The suspicion has to be that adopting the policy is designed to shut the record industry up, rather than shut file sharers out.