ReadWriteWeb

Today, the UK government finally released its long-awaited Digital Britain report, which, among other things, confirms the government's intention to provide broadband access at 2Mbps to every household in the UK by 2012. According to the report, about 11% of all households in the UK cannot currently get broadband service at this speed. The British government plans to deliver this 'Universal Service Commitment' through a mix of existing technologies and expects to provide £200 million in public funding for this project.

According to a recent study by Burst Media, a majority of web users are aware of the fact that a lot of websites and ISPs track, collect, and share information about their online activities. Over 80% of all respondents indicated that they were concerned about online privacy in general, but interestingly, only about half of all respondents under 24 thought that websites collect non-personally identifiable information.

A number of ISPs have lately started to clamp down on peer-to-peer networks and are actively restricting heavy usage of 'unlimited' connections. For users, however, there is very little transparency in this process and it can be very hard to figure out if an ISP is actually actively throttling a connection or preventing certain applications from working properly. In reaction to this, Google, together with the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute and the PlanetLab Consortium announced the Measurement Lab, an open platform for researchers and a set of tools for users that can be used to examine the state of your broadband connection.