…he’s gone off on his fifth holiday in as many months.First there was Cornwall back in spring.Then there was a mini-break to Granada.Then there was Ibiza.Then there was Tuscany, where the millionaire eventually remembered to tip the waitress.And this week he’s gone back to Cornwall.From whence he has returned to London, briefly, to discuss the end-game in Libya before going back to his beach.I’d love to say all this gallivanting is doing the nation a disservice, but I’ve racked my brains and can’t think of anything much that would be improved by this man giving it his close attention.I can’t say I’m completely relaxed about having a Prime Minister paid £142,500 a year to do very little of any worth. I can’t help thinking he’s an Earth version of Zaphod Beeblebrox, the Douglas Adams character who was made President of the Universe purely to distract attention from the people who were really in charge.But I suppose him being utterly disengaged – from the electorate, the nation’s wants and needs, the nuclear button – can only be better than having someone so dim he can’t open a bottle of wine without an embolism actually making decisions on our behalf.
t’Internet
Arf, arf, honk.
Even Ed can see the irony of this photo.
Dupe process
Yesterday Ofcom pleased its political masters by repealing laws passed by Parliament. It may have repealed a dodgy law, but that’s beside the point: it’s not how our system is supposed to work. No matter how dodgy a law may be, it is not a quango’s job to repeal it. It’s the job of legislators. And a powerful regulator should be independent, and not heel to its political masters – although anyone who followed the history of the regulator will permit themselves a hollow cackle at that principle.
Ofcom repealed Sections 17 and 18 of the Digital Economy Act by expressing no more than an opinion: the justification to support that opinion is absent from its report. Ofcom could have set out its case in terms of explaining the legal framework, for example, but it didn’t. It could have argued the costs and benefits of each approach to web-blocking – but it didn’t, it hadn’t even attempted to do that kind of empirical research.
Instead, on page 43, we learn that: “It is our current belief that the blocking of discrete URLs, or web addresses, is not practical or desirable as a primary approach.” What’s practical is not defined, what’s “desirable” is well beyond Ofcom’s remit.
Imagine the uproar if a quango had interposed itself to block significant primary legislation: Britain’s entry into the Common Market for example, or the minimum wage. All are quite complicated issues, after all. The blame isn’t entirely Ofcom’s; the regulator was permitted to do this because ministers wanted to find a way to bury the Sections without Parliament formally repealing them. Again, this is dishonest, and not the way laws are made or unmade. Ed Vaizey has been trying to get industry to agree to self-regulation which would allow him to announce their imminent repeal (most likely in the next Communications Act).
The Conservatives came to power vowing to abolish Ofcom, and declaring war on what they saw as Leftish academic poseurs, and business-hostile bureaucrats. They now seem to be at the mercy of all three. How on Earth did that happen?
I may have found someone who loathes Google even more than I loathe Google
I love Google Maps. Like Google Search. Use Gmail.
But, increasingly, I’ve grown nervous about the vast scope Google has over the Internet. Users have virtually no place on the world wide web, no safe haven, no single moment, from Google’s reach.
They are a for-profit megacorp that holds more information about me, my family, and you and your family than any government — and they sell that information, every second of every day to the highest bidder.
They have typically between 75%-99% of the search market in countries around the world and doctor results to put selected results, typically the ones that most directly benefit Google, up at the top. While spending millions and millions of dollars lobbying governments around the world to shield them from monopoly laws, content and publishing laws, privacy laws, no-track regulations and more.
I am disgusted by Google and the way they seek to equalize all content. All content is not equal, this is a intellectual fallacy. Or, possibly, an anti-intellectual one. Google compounds this by taking all content they can access, and scrapes what they can’t, and then wraps their ads around it — to make money off everyone else’s content. Don’t like it? Just have Google bypass you. Of course, screen scraping proves they won’t bypass you if they really want your content. If they don’t want it — meaning, can’t make any real money off it — they’re more than happy to use their monopoly power to make you invisible. Sort of like if the government didn’t like what you’ve been saying about them and decides not to give your business a postal address.
I also have come to dislike much of Google because they very quickly went from big company that sells my personal information to strangers, which makes me nervous, to a company that innovates at nothing yet spends *billions* of dollars from one business to enter new markets and destroy existing businesses.
If you have a monopoly business and generate monopoly profits and take those monopoly profits to another industry and *gave away* what your competitors (must) charge for, which led you to quickly capture the *dominant* maret share, would you…
…whine like a bitch?
Because Google does. And has.
Larry, Sergey, you are pussies.
You have deluded yourself into thinking you have earned a level of success where having billions and billions and being able to use those billions to always get what you want, whether through buying up or destroying is your *right*. Probably why Google hasn’t innovated a single fucking thing in over a decade.
Everything — every single fucking thing — since Bill Clinton has been a copy, a steal, a buy-out — or a take down.
Sexy People – Albert, 1983
How to call out Gideon without using the word ‘cunt’
I love this woman:
I’m no economist but a blind man can see that we’re in the shit. Everything – and I mean everything – Gideon has done, from more tax on North Sea oil to cancelling defence contracts which provide the only jobs available in some parts of the country, has been a disaster. He won’t cut VAT, which would get spending up, and the only job he’s created was for Coulson – a decision which has so far cost 500 jobs, closed a £160m newspaper and may even bring down the Government.
I had expected so much more of a 2:1 history graduate and career politician with the face of an 18th Century French aristocrat whose defining achievement in life, at the age of 40, is that he changed his name because it didn’t sound Prime Ministerial enough.
I had expected he’d screw things up over several years, rather than just the one. Now, can anyone explain why he’s still in a job?
…even if she is a journalist.
We’re all in this together
To the Commons, where David Lammy asks PBD if the informality of his relationship with Rebekah Wade-Mitchell-Brooks was appropriate.
“I’ve never held a slumber party or seen her in her pyjamas,” wisecracks PBD in response. (Because cheap gags is precisely what’s needed at the moment.)
Wonder if everyone else in the Commons today can say the same, though…?
What people want to know this week
Which politico might be feeling a bit nervy this week as old rumours which linked him VERY closely to the News International CEO are circulating around disgruntled hacks in Wapping?
Killer
Wrong on many levels but very, very funny.
We will all be waiting when the bulldozers come
Q: Who lives in a – truly amazing – house like this?
(And no, Gilles Toucas, I haven’t forgotten about you, either, don’t you worry. Cock.)