While the new superfast networks will only cover towns and cities, in tandem with the universal 2Mb broadband this is starting to look like a properly Digital Britain. The 50p tax is set to bring in £150m-£175m a year, for which BT and Virgin will bid to pay for extending their networks. We can expect some noisy opposition to it – comments sections from the Mail to the Guardian are ringing with the wonky arguments that only comments sections allow – but the reality is that the vast majority of Britons, and all British business, recognises the need for fast broadband.

The paper has prompted another high-profile appointee to the public sector in the form of Martha Lane-Fox, the founder of lastminute.com. She’s been tasked with helping those struggling to get online – grants will be given to schoolchildren whose parents can’t afford internet bills, starting later this year. How these taxes and grants will fare under a potential Tory government is uncertain – they’ve scored some political points, unsurprisingly, by attacking the plans as unnecessary taxation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Cameron, with his love for all things new media, secretly agrees with the proposals… 

After this point, the paper gets rather less certain. It’s top-slicing of the licence fee is contingent upon consultation over the next few months – expect vociferous lobbying from the BBC, who have totally rejected the proposals. The opposition to the top-slicing potentially jeopardises another part of the paper, the proposed partial merger of Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide, that would bring much-needed extra revenue to 4. Dawn Airey, head of Channel 5 who were also angling for a Channel 4 merger, predictably attacked the proposal: “We fail to see why our proposal which offered financial security and enhanced PSB was rejected out of hand. Instead, a political fudge is being proposed”. 

Even more uncertain is the fight against internet piracy. The paper’s recommendations – that ISPs reduce piracy by 70% – are also subject to consultation, and people on all sides, from the ISPs to content producers to copyright holders, are unhappy with one or another aspect of them. The various consultations means that the 70% rule might not come in for three years, and the various punishments – letters, bandwidth throttling – seem like pretty light slaps on the wrist. Lets face it – the number of illegal downloaders adds up to a lot of votes, tech-savvy votes who favour will have been curried with the fibre-optic news. Labour doesn’t want to piss them off.

So a report then that’s contingent on ongoing consultation and the whims of the next government. It’s nevertheless encouraging to see that, in the politically risky taxation of broadband, we have a government who is more devoted than ever before to dragging Britain into line with the rest of the world when it comes to a nationwide infrastructure.

Anywhere in the Caribbean is beautiful in December. But there’s something special about Jamaica as Christmas approaches. The air from the mountains sweeps down to the sea and brings a cooling wind known as the Christmas breeze. And since the island has just emerged from the rainy season, there is a lushness not seen at other times of year.

I always try to spend as much of the month here as I can. Apparently, Richard Branson feels the same way. En route to Necker, he stopped by for breakfast one recent morning, and I happily made the drive from Kingston to Montego Bay to meet him.

He’s clever, no doubt; one of those folks who was probably just born with a knack for business. The regular bloke image doesn’t seem contrived. If anything, in person, he is even more unassuming than the image he cultivates for his brand.

On a terrace overlooking the sea, we drank Blue Mountain coffee and talked of the global crisis. The conversation ranged over many issues, but one strand seemed to weave itself through each branch of the conversation: the challenges of entrepreneurship in difficult times.

I reckon he’s earned the right to opine on that topic. He started what would become his Virgin empire in the 1970s. A government then that had tried something like a “Cool Britannia” campaign would have been laughed out of the international hall. Britain was decaying, everyone knew it, and the real question was whether she would turn in on herself in doing it.

In short: not the time to launch a business based on cool. But the secret of his success – and it’s not really much of a secret – is that he can spot the opportunity in a decline. When it comes to recessions, Richard Branson departs from the script; he sees good times ahead. As businesses fold, assets become cheap. Dynamic new firms then have a chance to expand their operations.

It’s not a vision for everyone, of course. For the dynamic firms feast on the corpses of the less competitive ones, a re-generation the economist Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction‘. The result is an economy in which the strong survive, but the weak are left to – well, not everyone gets to have his own island in the Caribbean.

So it’s hardly surprising that Mr. Branson has little time for bailouts. He judged that if a financial sector is healthy, the rest of the economy can adjust to difficult times. Thus, he said, governments did the right thing in bailing out the banks: no matter how odious their behaviour had been during the boom days, it would be cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face to let them collapse during this bust they helped create.

Nonetheless, when it came to, say, car-makers or airlines, he felt that consumers would suffer if the government kept running to the rescue.

Those who cannot hack the heat should leave the entrepreneurial kitchen. That was the gist of his message. The government should use its scarce resources to protect the weakest people in its society, but not the weakest businesses.

What is the best way to look after the weakest people? In part, at least, by allowing a competitive market to determine who prospers in business, and who doesn’t. For all the difficulties of the moment, Richard Branson remains convinced that when the most dynamic firms can thrive, the most people will end up with jobs.

His faith, and optimism, is unshaken. Capitalism is going through a rough spell, he said. But he insisted it has worked for a thousand years, and should be allowed to work for a thousand more.  

Norman Lamont, the former Tory chancellor so memorably characterised as a complete ignoramus on ITV’s Spitting Image, was yesterday announced as a non-executive director of the advertising technology firm Phorm, following a boardroom dispute that has seen three US-based directors ousted from the company.

Lamont, who is presumably enjoying the current financial crisis on account of it making Black Wednesday – which happened on his watch – look like a gentil tea party, has been drafted in by Phorm to help slime the wheels of their ongoing campaign to persuade the government that their company’s working practise doesn’t actually constitute a Big Brother-style snooping service, where users’ private web habits are recorded and monitored for the purposes of big business clients (which, funnily enough, is pretty much an exact description of what they do). In his company’s press announcement, Kent Ertugrul, Phorm’s CEO and a former seller of joyrides on Russian fighter jets, was fairly explicit about Lamont’s role:

“I welcome Lord Lamont, Kip [Meek, former executive at Ofcom], Stefan [Allesch-Taylor, co-founder of the Fairfax investment bank] and Stephen [Partridge-Hicks, MD of Gordian Knot, an investment management company] to the Board. They bring extensive experience on government, business, regulatory matters and financial markets.”

Phorm, which offers brands a targeted advertising system based on “deep packet inspection” of web browsers’ behavioural habits, needs all the help it can get, as it has come in for heavy criticism from privacy campaigners and most sane thinking citizens. One of these is Sir Tim Berners Lee, the man who founded the world wide web, who told the BBC in March, “I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that’s not going to get to my insurance company and I’m going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5%.” Apart from the legal issue of privacy infringement, Berners Lee also pointed out that there’s also the question of Phorm’s collection of cookie data from web browsers, which is arguably theft; “If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I’m getting in return.”

ABOVE – HOW PHORM'S ADWARE SERVICE WORKS

In mid-September, the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform concluded that Phorm’s activities did not contravene EU laws on data protection. However, the government advised that any service would have to be “opt-in” to satisfy British law – i.e. sites using Phorm services would need to present customers with an option to exercise choice about whether they’d like to be involved.

‘Opt-in’ is a slippery term though: would anyone apart from a hardened simpleton knowingly sign up to a service that exposes their private Internet data (i.e. every site you visit and all your transactions) to multinational corporations, for free? It’s not exactly an easy sell, so presumably the questions will be massaged to some degree, assuming they are immediately visible at all. And what constitutes ‘opting-in’? Subscribing to BT or Virgin services? So far, several media companies who initially expressed an interest in Phorm’s services have backed out – including the Guardian (who stated “… our decision was in no small part down to the conversations we had internally about how this product sits with the values of our company”),  the FT, and the BBC – after their consumers expressed deep-seated anxieties, but surely not all other companies will be so scrupulous. 

The government’s Information Commisioner Office (ICO) has claimed it will closely monitor Phorm’s activities to make sure they comply with data protection laws, and the Crown Prosecution Service is currently investigating whether secret BT tests of Phorm’s adware system on customers in 2006 and 2007 breached wiretapping laws. 

Still, with Lamont’s help Phorm are hoping to achieve their stated ambition of turning their data pimping gaze on over 70% of Britain’s broadband users.