With Peter Mandelson announcing this week (as everyone expected) that he’s going to introduce a proposal to kick file sharers off the internet under a “three strikes” plan, it’s been amusing watching defenders of this idea try and fail to answer the question “how will this make people buy more stuff.” Over and over again people explain to us why it’ll decrease file sharing (something I actually doubt for a variety of reasons that I’ll explore later), but no one has explained how it will make more people buy stuff.

But, perhaps an even bigger question is whether or not it will ever actually get implemented in the UK. TalkTalk, the ISP that has been fighting the proposal for a while (and even gave a nice demonstration to show why IP addresses are not accurate in figuring out who’s responsible for online activity) is now saying that it will take legal action to block such a proposal from being put in place, saying that it’s a violation of human rights to kick people offline based on accusations, rather than due process.

On top of that, the idea is already incredibly unpopular with the majority of people in the UK… and (most importantly) there’s an election coming up soon in the UK. Backing a massively disliked proposal to kick people off the internet based on accusations using weak evidence… probably isn’t a savvy political move at this moment. Given all of that, I’m wondering if the plan ever really moves forward in the UK, or if it just makes a lot of noise so that Mandelson and his colleagues can tell the entertainment industry how they tried, to make sure the political donations keep coming in.

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