So after the epic journey of the Committee Stage, the Digital Economy Bill moved into Report Stage on 1 March. This is pretty much the same, but generally much shorter, since most of the probing and amending has already been done, but any remaining issues can be dealt with. Another difference I've noticed: clauses don't have to be agreed to - unlike in Committee - only amendments, so I won't write every clause getting passed this time.

Clause 1 : General Duties of OFCOM. The Tories were still not happy at all with Clause 1, and particularly the point making Ofcom "promote appropriate levels of investment in electronic communications networks". The Tories 'cleared the bar' and put their amendment to remove that bit to a vote. They lost, of course, but the government then put forth their own amendment removing the words "appropriate levels of". That made the Tories a bit happier.

In debating this point, Lord Mitchell popped up with this odd contribution: "I learnt something new this weekend. I came across a new word: exabyte. I have never heard that before. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or a billion billion bytes - it is a pretty big number. In 2005, mankind created 150 exabytes; in 2010, 1,200 were created. So, over five years the total amount of data created on earth went up by a factor of 10, and I suspect the rate of increase is going to continue on an exponential basis. If we were standing here in two or three years perhaps we would need another word for a thousand exabytes. I do not know whether there is such a word; maybe there is". Mercy me. Oh, and there is a word: zettabyte.

A few amendments from the government were accepted, and Baroness Buscombe aired a concern regarding impartiality on newspaper websites (though she's the chair of the useless PCC, so I'm not sure if it matters), before the Earl of Erroll came out with a wonderful technical piece about BT.

"Let us say that you have got a fault on a line which has not been unbundled: in other words, it is still in BT's ownership. You are paying BT Retail for the line, and you are paying an ISP to provide you with broadband over that line. It gets a service from BT Wholesale, which runs what is called the backhaul from the exchange onto the main internet. Openreach is responsible for maintaining and fixing any faults on the line. There are four service entities involved, and there may be more. There are Chinese walls between these, and there is a lot of buck-passing. Let us say that your broadband is not working. You are meant to ring up your ISP, and tell it so. It is then allowed to test the line, and it may well use BT Retail stuff to do that, or it may be Openreach. Do not hold me to the exact detail of who owns which bit. BT Retail's universal service obligation only covers voice over copper, not the maintenance of broadband connections. So it will probably pass that test, but it is still not adequate for broadband, so it comes back and reports that the line is not faulty, but you know, empirically, that it is.

"What do you do next? This is a challenge, because you cannot talk to BT Wholesale. The other thing that could be happening is that either BT Wholesale, or your ISP, could be throttling back your internet connection and reducing the speed on it because it has a lot of traffic, or they could be doing what they call traffic shaping, which is allowing only certain types of traffic through at full speed. This is done through a digital line management unit, which is connected to your digital subscriber line access management unit in the exchange. These are technical things, but they will not tell you if they are doing them. There is no way of finding out, so you are stuck. I have discovered, because my line fell to under half its speed over a four-year period, that, when this sort of thing happens, if you can pester people persistently over a six-month period, and you know something about it, and eventually your line fails completely, there are some excellent engineers at Openreach who can and will come and sort it out. My line is now nearly treble the speed it was a couple of months ago, so they can do it. There is not a real problem with the lines. The trouble is the underinvestment".

He makes a good case. Sadly, the government thought that consumers were covered fine. The Earl of Erroll still disagreed. Although "you can complain to Otelo or CISAS about BT Retail or your ISP, who are your communication service providers, but the challenge is that you cannot talk to the very people who are responsible for doing something about it, who are Openreach or BT Wholesale". An outsider is needed to get this working properly, and "Ofcom is the only organisation that can do this".

Clause 2 : OFCOM reports on infrastructure, internet domain names etc. There was a lot of confusion here. After Lord Howard of Rising introduced an amendment, Lord Young of Norwood Green immediately started on it. This caused Lord Clement-Jones to intervene and ask if he's responding to the amendment, or speaking about a new amendment. On hearing that he planned both, Lord Clement-Jones reminded the House that "it is not possible on Report for other speakers to take part in the debate on an amendment after the Minister has responded". Well, there's another technical point that I (and I assume others) didn't know. So, Lord Clement-Jones gave his response, Lord Howard came up to withdraw, and was told that Lord Young hadn't actually responded. Eventually, Lord Howard meekly asked "I hope I am allowed to speak now. This nice piece of paper says a Member can speak when the Minister speaks early in order to assist the House in debate - that is obviously what he was doing". All's well that ends well.

Lord Whitty came out to suggest an amendment to encourage helping people in rural areas with their communications networks (specifically internet). It was very popular: Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer hoped the government could "rural-proof" the Bill, and said that with banks and post offices closing, the internet is increasingly vital; the Earl of Erroll suggested "trying strategically to repopulate the Highlands" by improving infrastructure there; Lord Puttnam, speaking about his current home of Ireland, said that there, "counterintuitively, it was more important to have good, high-speed broadband access in rural areas than in city centres".

Did the government take it? Of course not: the clause is good enough already. Lord Whitty was disappointed, and I'm sure others were, too.

Baroness Young of Old Scone popped up with her one and only appearance to talk at length about climate change. The subject was already covered by the Climate Change Bill, but communications networks were clearly not mentioned, which is why they've been brought up here. The government assured the Baroness that they were thinking about this, but not just with climate change - there are many dangers to worry about with communications networks, and climate change is but one. She was "pleased that the Minister is saying that the triennial reports on resilience that Ofcom must provide will include the future long-term impacts of climate change, not just the immediate short-term definition of what an emergency is", and I suppose climate change is not the same as preparing for earthquakes or what have you.

Clause 3 : OFCOM reports on media content wasn't even mentioned. Blimey.