Whether or not you will welcome the Digital Britain report released today depends on how you already use the internet.

If you are out in the sticks and don’t have a connection, it’s now coming to your home. Around 1.7m rural homes will benefit from this legal requirement.

If you’re already so web-savvy that you’ve been illegally downloading albums and movies for years, this will go some way to stopping you.

Lord Carter’s report recommends legislation obligating internet service providers (ISPs) “to notify alleged infringers of rights… that their conduct is unlawful”.

Which means that if you use peer-to-peer programmes to download illegally, you might get a letter in the post from your ISP asking you to stop.

Why hasn’t this been possible before? ISPs have never been obligated to keep track of what you have been doing online. Even if there is wrongdoing, there wasn’t necessarily any recorded evidence of what infringers had been downloading. This is about to change.

The copyright holders - music and film companies - can already work out which computers are downloading music illegally. But they do not know who or where they are. They can only see an IP address, the digital signature from a PC, not the actual home address.

But even if you get a letter, it doesn’t look like ISPs can then turn off the internet connection. But it is a warning worth listening to. If someone keeps downloading illegally, the next letter will be a court summons.

ISPs eventually have to hand over your identity to copyright holders, meaning they finally know who they can take in front of a judge.

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