Just round the corner from my flat in Belsize Park is an impressive former church which I occasionally see Japanese tourists taking photos of. I discovered a while ago that it had been the recording studio where Pink Floyd recorded “Dark Side of the Moon”.

This week I found out that it is apparently still in use as a studio, and that is where there was a meeting of such music industry and internet policy luminaries as Lily Allen and that bloke out of Radiohead.

Their conclusions were one step ahead of the government at least, in that they poo-pooed the idea of having the internet accounts of file sharing ‘perpetrators’ blocked, although the idea of ’squeezing’ them is perhaps sillier. However the nature of their and the government’s debate on the subject shows how flawed our approach is to policy and the internet.

The application of these restrictions is impractical and a burden which service providers are hardly keen on. This isn’t the government being supportive of companies which are supposed to provide the critical infrastructure for our new digital economy.

Inevitably any attempt to do this will result in accidentally targeting the wrong people (my brother in law’s work at the Institut d’Astrophysique de PARIS was nearly shut down by a similar scheme which detected his lab was sending large deep space recordings over the internet)

Anyway anyone who is more than a casual computer user and file sharer will find ways around whatever monitoring is put in place.

The more fundamental problem is the focus on attempting to prop up a failed business model and ignore the real challenges ahead. It’s a con that artists are the ones will suffer if we don’t do this, it’s the record company industry which has been ripping off consumers and artists for decades who will suffer, and if they have to cut down on ‘flowers for the model’ it means that money is actually more likely to go to artists or be recycled into other areas of the economy.

Instead we should be giving support to attempts to monetise these inevitable developments. The fact that it is major labels who hold the biggest stakes in Spotify shows that despite their protestations they at least can see which way the wind is blowing.

This hang up on the music industry and it’s prime place in the recent Goverment Digital strategy report also shows completely the wrong approach to supporting the digital industries that might actually get us out of the multi billion £ hole we are in the UK. All it does is introduce extra tax, quangos and legislation of no benefit whatsoever to industry in the broad sense or the individual. Nevermind the worrying continuing encroachment of state sponsored snooping.

There is no focus on doing things that might actually encourage innovative businesses in UK and make the most of the great intellectual capital we have in this country. If these do happen here rather than over the Atlantic then it will be inspite of all the structural barriers that exist here in comparison.