I was at the NESTA hosted Digital Britain debate this morning. The format was unimaginative; Jonathan Kestenbaum – NESTA CEO – gave the intros and moderated, Lord Carter – Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting – had the floor to himself for 15 minutes and then Neil Berkett, Virgin Media CEO and Peter Bazalgette, former Endemol big man, joined in and took some audience responses. And a single twitter question.
The full podcast of the event is here so feel free to make up your own mind on proceedings.

Just a couple of thoughts to round out the day.
Carter and Berkett both took a standard government/regulator line and private sector line respectively. Bazelgette took a more thoughtful approach and added some genuine insight, particularly in the area of content. More of this please Peter.

Both Nico MacDonald and Charlie Leadbeater sought to bring from the floor end-users into the debate but didn’t get very far. That was a real shame as it’s a glaring omission from the interim report. Hopefully one that will be rectified by the time the final missive is assembled.

Burkett’s 100Mbps Virgin deal will continue to be nothing but a fat pipe dream to millions, so let’s not get distracted by ISPs’ continued fluffy marketing claims.

The concept of a digital dividend was raised and alluded to at length. This struck me as a dangerous concept. A divided is a payout on shares when times for a company are good. A means by which to reward the shareholders. In this context it sounds like Carter and company are suggesting that by merely building infrastructure and bringing in human capital we’ll reap rewards. This is patently ridiculous. We still need the original content, the services and the entrepreneurial activity to sit on top of the infrastructure to turn investment into reward. A Digital Britain is not an end in itself. There’s no easy dividend coming out of any of these initatives and this language to my mind is going to do nobody any good.

Other interesting bits and bytes: the BBC to become an open platform in ten years, 50Mbps broadband for all within the several and a what-if there was government funding for local public micro-content creators. If that happens we’ll all be reaping the Digital dividend.

Anyway, go watch the video. Or even better, download and read the report. And of course check out the twitter back channel that took place during the discussion.

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I’m reminded by this post from @anomymoustom that a robust look at privacy is a huge omission from the interim report. But then it’s been a huge omission from any legislation the the current UK government have been responsible for over the past 12 years. So no surprises there.