So, if this went into effect, then if the government didn’t like a website — say, DU that criticized it — then everyone in the UK could be cut off from accessing DU. Censorship control to information is the first step to totalitarianism. Orwell, a Brit, would have understood.

The UK government wants to cut out users rights to access Internet content, applications and services. Some of the information used to justify the change has been cut and pasted from the Wikipedia.

Amendments to the Telecoms Package circulated in Brussels by the UK government, seek to cross out users’ rights to access and distribute Internet content and services. And they want to replace it with a ‘principle’ that users can be told not only the conditions for access, but also the conditions for the use of applications and services.
[…]
The proposed amendments cut out completely any users’ rights to do with content – whether accessing or distributing – which would appear to be in breach of the European Charter of Fundamental rights, Article 10. The Charter states that everyone has the right “to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” In the digital age, the Internet, and the associated applications and services provided by the World Wide Web, is the means by which people exercise that right.
[…]
La Quadrature du Net comments that these amendments will obligate national telecommunications regulators to enforce a new business model, which is more like a cable television model and quite different from the Internet service provider model. At the same time, they remove the obligation from telecommunications regulators to guarantee users’ rights to access and distribute Internet content services and applications.

The amendments, if carried, would reverse the principle of end-to-end connectivity which has underpinned not only the Internet, but also European telecommunications policy, to date.

Such a reversal would lead to a fragmentation of the internal market for communications and for e-commerce. If for example, the UK wants to limit users to just a few websites (as is rumoured lie behind the amendments), then it is not only restricting the subscriber who is paying for the service. The effect will be that it renders invisible the millions of other websites that are not on the ‘just a few’ list. By default, this reduces the size of the market that is available to those millions of invisible websites. It also threatens the business models of Internet giants such as Google.

Found by Brother Uncle Don