Elton John reckons the Internet should be switched off for 5 years to force people to make music the old fashioned way and to get them out of the house to do real things rather than sitting at home writing wretched blogs (Tell me about that. Ed).

Could we live without the Internet? No more blogs to be read, no more music and films to be copied and downloaded, no more social networking, no more online chat, no more email, no more web, I could go on with this list for another 10 minutes. Jeez without the web it would be a killer. How would I find out what was on TV that night? How would I lookup something without Wikipedia, how would I find the telephone numbers of plumbers from Yell, soccer results, check bank balances and move money between accounts, pay VAT, pay car tax.

I find it hard work going on holiday without access to it, so I have bought a laptop solely for travelling. Turning off the Internet would no doubt stop a helluva lot of piracy, though no doubt some would trot out the old ’force it underground’ stuff. Who would stand to gain the most from the Internet being switched off? The music and film business’s for a start. In fact they’d probably also want the PC (read Personal Copier) thrown on the scrapheap too, but that’s not going to happen.

Just as well I suppose that it would be virtually impossible to switch the Internet off even if we wanted to. I can see some kind of regulation of TCP/IP ports in the future, whereby some are jammed shut until they can be regulated and made more safe.