How long have you been involved with the internet? I've been involved with it for about five years now. It's changed immensely in that time. When I first got involved in 95 I was with Leisure Product and we were the first leisure site to achieve over a million hits in a year. We thought that was great but now we talk about a million hits a day! So I think people's expectations have grown about 350-fold.
Are you happy with the way the net's progressing? If you're actually using it for email, and a lot of people do use it predominantly for email, it's doing a really good job. A lot of people are using it as a more flexible, more usable, fax machine and having a whale of a time with it. But people who use it for leisure tend to be looking for bigger downloads and faster, more reliable connections.
What is the role of the modern ISP? It's to provide a fast, reliable and always available service. Everything else is frills. To draw an analogy, it's like saying 'I'd love to go to the Caribbean but I haven't got any holiday left'. It's daydreaming. It doesn't matter how good everything else is, if you can't get on there in the first place then you'll never see it.
How do you feel about ISP's being more accountable for content? We've always made ourselves accountable for content. Because some of the markets that we serve are schools and families, we have always had SuperNanny as a mirror portal. So we've always been able to say to parents that if they keep the password safe then we'll keep the children safe.
Does the prosecution of Demon for content on their servers set a worrying precedent? We do everything that we can practically do to provide access, security and safety. Beyond that, there's actually very little we can do. There's no use shooting for something that's unattainable. The thing about the internet is that 100% safety 100% of the time and 100% control of 100% of events is never possible.
How do you feel about more regulation of the net? It is actually a very dangerous route to go down because it is all but impossible to impose a regulation. It's that old thing about the only bad laws are the laws you can't enforce! I fail to see how anybody is going to be able to properly and fully enforce regulation on the net.
Any favourite places on the net? You'll find me anywhere DSL technology is being talked about or tested. I book my hotels at www.hotel-assist.com and my trains at www.trainline.co.uk. One that I love is World Gallery which lets you view, frame and order prints online which are delivered within 48 hours. I like Dog Pile and I also really like UK2.
Any favourite gadgets? A favourite toy is a website, Treeway, which allows you to build your own website. It has a number of Flash animations you can choose from and allows you to be your own DJ on your website.
