Despite the ongoing debate raging over web freedom, the UK's culture minister Ed Vaizey has expressed his belief that international laws are inevitable.

When asked how the war against file sharing is going at Intellect's Consumer Electronics Conference, he said, "It will be interesting to have this conversation in ten years' time – I think we'll see more uniform rules across national boundaries and a shift in business models; the big thing will be a more universal structure to deal with piracy.

"The music industry has a bit further to go, I suspect. I think people [the music and film industries] are doing their best to change but I don't know if they fully understand the fundamental change that needs to happen yet."

Tough

He responded to the news broken by the Guardian this weekend that the USA is seeking to extradite website owners under suspicion of infringing US copyrights even if the content, owner and servers are all based outside the US, saying that the country has been 'very tough'.

"We constantly hear news of voluntary agreements with the USA – and that will be a real gamechanger and I'm in favour of that. And the more legitimate sites there are online, that will allow users to get easier legal access to those files, which will help," he said.

The vision of an international collaboration to tackle piracy goes some way against the hopes of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google execs, who have all spoken of support for an unregulated web in order to foster innovation and creative freedoms.

However, his viewpoint echoes that of Thomas Hammarberg, head of human rights at the Council of Europe, who believes that the UN should take the lead on policing the global internet.

Ed Vaizey, the UK's Minister for Culture, has responded to widespread criticism of the government's 'closed-door' meetings over web censorship and site blocking.

Speaking at Intellect's Consumer Electronics Conference in London, Vaizey described accusations that the government failed to invite consumer groups to meetings discussing proposals for policing piracy on the web as "conspiracy theories".

He told delegates, "We've been accused of having a light touch as far as internet freedoms go and a heavy hand with old media; I think we need to find a balance somewhere in the middle."

Industry-led

He went, "It's clear that the issues are of inappropriate content and protecting user data.

"With the site blocking proposals, copyright owners put forward a proposal and we simply facilitated a discussion around that proposal, including inviting consumer-focused groups, despite the popular conspiracy theory that we did not.

"No one will disagree that stopping piracy is a good thing. The copyright holders said to us, 'We want to use the law, but we want discussion with ISPs beforehand to make the legal process quicker.'

"These are industry proposals, it's not something the government is leading. But we do want to protect content and our industry and it's clear that business models will have to change."