The entire British broadband infrastructure has buckled under to the international music industry and will will join with them to police file-sharing, the British press is reporting. They apparently did this to stave off the threat of legislation, which means that by their calculations the music industry had the British Parliament in its pocket.

This is the most outlandish development yet in the music industry’s insane, debilitating, destructive, petulant and useless campaign against its customers around the world:

As part of the memorandum of understanding—signed by BT, Virgin, Carphone Warehouse, Orange, Tiscali and BSkyB—a pilot three-step process will be used to identify repeat offenders.

The first step is a letter, “intended to be educational” to an internet user about the “account abuse”, the second a suspension of the account until the customers agrees in writing not to offend again, and the final step is cancelling an account.

While it’s unlikely the US would ever adopt such measures, the step shows that the industry will adopt whatever it can get away with overseas. The moves are pointless because the sheer volume of the file-sharing is impossible to stop; it’s dangerous because there’s no way to distinguish between legitimate and non-legitimate content, and policing will inevitably ensnare the innocent or disrupt their service; it promises an escalating, unwinnable arms race of technology to get around any measures the industry takes; it will leave some thousands of hapless casualties, just as the US drug war has; and for Britons it establishes a precedent where what should be a neutral information channel can be monitored for illegal activity

Slashdot discussion here.

The Guardian also has a rough transcript of a conference call on the subject with the president of British Phonographic Industry, the equivalent of the RIAA. Here’s his triumphant statement:

All major ISPs in the UK now recognise that they have responsibility to deal with illegal file sharing on their networks.

The trouble with this—and why presumably it won’t happen over here—is that it puts the ISPs in the position of policing the content of the internet traffic.