The first question is simply: why? What's wrong with the existing copyright laws, and the powers that they offer, that Lord Mandelson think they need tweaking so that anyone can be given powers to hunt down someone thought to be infringing copyright, and new powers have to be given so that certain acts are deemed to be illicit?

If you're not up to speed, Lord Mandelson wants sweeping new powers, which involve changing the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act of 1988.

Let's pause for a moment and look at the single part of the letter to Harriet Harman where he actually cites some particular problems. He talks about "cyberlockers" – online digital storage – which he acknowledges have perfectly legal uses, but which he says are also used by people to share files illegally.

Well, he's right. This is true. You may recall Apple's "iTools" service – which is what its online cloud service was called when it was launched in January 2000 for free (20 whole megabytes of storage!) and before it was made paid-for in July 2002 and rebranded as ".Mac".

Part of the reason for shifting to paid-for, I learnt from an Apple employee (who for obvious reasons must remain nameless), was that Apple discovered rather quickly that if you offer people free storage on the web, then while lots of people will use it for good, honest reasons, a small percentage will use it for bad ones.

Chasing the people who were storing warez such as cracked copies of Photoshop on the iTools servers became a cat-and-mouse game where there were rather more mice than cats. That was part of why Apple turned it into a paid-for service.

However, at no point did the US government step in and try to close Apple down. Nor did it find it necessary to create new laws nor offences to criminalise the warez-storers (who were perfectly aware that what they were doing wasn't legal), nor did it find any need to give Apple new powers to stop its service being abused.

So the question over this proposal is: what isn't working at present in our laws that means we need changes to strengthen copyright and delegate powers to "any person as may be specified with or for the purposes of facilitating prevention of reduction of online infringement of copyright"?

It's especially ironic during a week when Gordon Brown and Tim Berners-Lee pledged to loosen the ties of copyright on government-collected map data, as the government recognised that public data ought to belong to the public.

The particular objection that Mandelson seems to have to "cyberlockers" (can't we just say "cloud storage"?) is that someone can share a private URL with someone else, and nobody on the outside is any the wiser that the file exchange has taken place. In its way, it's like a very slow peer-to-peer system; certainly there's no real way that it threatens to become anything like the volume of file-sharing, because sending people URLs and getting them to download stuff puts noticeable load on the servers of the storage company. If it's anything like Apple, it's going to notice the demand. Believe me, every company that offers cloud storage knows about the warez problem: they run all sorts of tests against uploaded files, and even files that traverse their networks: thus I discovered, for example, while cleaning out the Free Our Data site from a hacker attack, that I couldn't email a hacker control panel I'd discovered to someone who was helping: Google analysed the file and blocked it from passing over its servers.

Yet it seems to be that aspect of the invisibility of the URLs that's really troubling the people who are lobbying Mandelson (because this is obviously not something he's discovered from surfing the net; I do, a lot, and I've not seen anyone complaining about the Evil of Cyberlocker Copyright Infringement). Search engines aren't allowed into those "cyberlockers" to index their content; it's as private as robots.txt can make it.

Yet in my subsequent conversation with Stephen Timms, the minister who is now the financial secretary to the Treasury but oversaw much of the drafting of the digital economy bill while at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, I didn't get any clear answer to what part of the existing Copyright Act doesn't work against cyberlockers. Is there some concern that hackerz are going to put cracked copied of Photoshop onto Amazon's S3 and run it as a web app? If they can manage that, they deserve to be hired by a Microsoft-killer, not hunted down by what BoingBoing is calling "The Pirate-Finder General".

All in all, I'm left severely puzzled by the consultation process that hasn't gone on here. The DBIS says it has had its public consultation on the Digital Britain plans. So where, and when, did this cyberlocker business come from? It's said to be a last-minute insertion by Mandelson into the bill, published earlier today. Who came to him with it?

And finally, Timms says that any suggestion of changing the copyright act would first go through a "very, very public consultation". Is that like the "big debates" that we hear so much about from the government? Fat lot of good they've done for things like the status of cannabis. While I think we can all agree that cracking software isn't ethical, legal, or moral, neither is taking on powers that could be used in entirely unpredictable ways.

And I still come back to the self-correcting nature of the internet, and businesses. What's been killing file-sharing? Not the action of record labels or ISPs; it's been the action of businesses like Spotify and We7, offering better models for access to music of guaranteed quality. What's been stopping cracked software being uploaded to online storage sites? The self-interest of the companies owning the sites, which know that the crackers will use above-average amounts of bandwidth and storage (indeed, that's almost the metric for finding cracked stuff on one of those sites: investigate the busiest, most demanding users).

We could do with similar action to cut out botnets and spam, but there aren't any big-money lobbyists coming to Mandelson pleading loss of business through those. Perhaps if the banks were forced to bear all the costs of online fraud, they'd suddenly discover an interest in handing out properly secure systems – such as Linux systems on memory sticks which you'd be obliged to boot into if you wanted online banking via a PC.

But for now, the logic behind this government's desire to take on more powers than it can demonstrate any need for is worrying. As Tony Hirst of the Open University observed on Twitter, we haven't needed to alter the law on murder, despite the invention of electricity and other means of carrying out the act: it's still illegal in itself. The mechanisms of copyright infringement are irrelevant to the act. So what is it exactly that Lord Mandelson actually wants?