Digital Britain: Government report trails e-commerce

The Digital Britain white paper published yesterday didn’t come up with much new, but it did highlight how far behind the e-commerce industry the Government is in its thinking.

While politicians are still mulling over how they can get all households online with a decent internet connection, the many retailers in the room at another event yesterday - Google’s Ecommerce Summit - showed how the UK is leading the world when it comes to delivering the sites and propositions internet users want to access.

One proposal in the report is the need for universal access to at least a 2Mb per second internet connection. Prime Minister Gordon Brown commented on this aspect of the report yesterday saying that there is a role for targeted strategic investment by government to complement that which the private sector is already making in upgrading and extending the infrastructure that supports internet access.

Writing in The Times, Brown said: “Broadband is at a tipping point - high speed internet access will soon be essential for everyone.”

But just think about how advanced many e-commerce sites are already. Can you imagine trying to load Amazon or Asos on a low bandwidth  - even dial-up - connection? The tipping point as far as ecommerce businesses are concerned was reached long ago.

Now they are talking about viral marketing, video, interactive sites, web chat and a host of other things that will bring shopping on the internet to life and mark them out from competitors competing purely on price.

But this is all bandwidth-hungry stuff, so what retailers should be asking for now is not commitments, but hard and fast plans. It has been mooted that it could take several more years to get every household onto even 2Mb per second connections. And the super-fast 10Mb per second connections Brown boasts of are even further down the line.

That is too long. The Government talks of wanting to nurture the digital economy, but its lame commitments to the necessary infrastructure is lagging what retailers are ready to deliver.