Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications
 
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Broadsheet duo(13 October 1999)

The first leading item in The Times on 12 October was devoted to what we campaign for. The item is too long to be quoted in full but the final paragraph gives its flavour:

It is important that the Government move swiftly to remove impediments to e-commerce and encourage the rebalancing of costs, so that unmetered local calls, coupled with realistic rental charges, are among customers' options. There are already a few gleams of light. One is a Cabinet Office report on e-commerce, published last month, which recommended that telecoms operators should be encouraged to offer a wider range of tariff structures. This is a good start, though it does not yet justify Tony Blair's inflated claim that Britain now has "a strategy to make the UK the world's best environment for electronic commerce". Another is a publicity offensive by the Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications - a powerful lobby of industry influences. This group, which has had talks with BT and will meet the Government next week, has made some political progress; its ideas clearly have ministerial goodwill. Actions will have to be matched to words, however, for these faint gleams to become a new commercial dawn for Britain.
Simultaneously, the Times launched its own campaign, under the not-very-promising title of Free The Net.

This has had expected and unexpected consequences:

  • a large number of contacts from the media;
  • sixty emails in one day to the Moderator - about ten times the normal amount;
  • so much feedback to The Times' online discussion forum it wilted and had to be reconfigured by its managers.
The Guardian mentioned the issue, in passing but with a similar approach to The Times, in a leader largely devoted to Marconi and wireless. Two of the five United Kingdom broadsheet newspapers in one day?

We remember our first contact with The Times many months ago. The journalist joked that his (necessarily modest) article was 'not a leading article, but it's a start' ...

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