Google

Friday

Freddy Gray

The Olympian smugness of the anti-Sochi gay protests

Now look, as Tony Blair would say, homophobia is bad. Very bad. But does that mean we have to turn the Sochi Winter Olympics into a sort of global gay pride event, simply because Russia has passed a not very pleasant law against teaching children about homosexuality? Apparently it does. Every right-thinking hack on earth, it seems, has expressed their disgust at Putin’s bigotry. Politicians are also desperate to let on, though they can’t say so publicly, that they really don’t approve of Russia. And Progressive media companies are using the opening of the Games today to show off their moral superiority to those backward Russians. Google has turned its logo into a rainbow. The

Monday

Sebastian Payne

Hypocrisy alert: big tech firms complain of data intrusion

It’s time to reform government surveillance, so say the internet’s tech giants. Following the stream of NSA spying revelations from The Guardian; AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo have joined forces to urge Barack Obama and the US Congress to tighten the laws regarding spying on individuals. In an open letter released today, they state: ‘We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But this summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide. The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined

Monday

David Blackburn

David Cameron’s crackdown on child porn is not over yet

Parliament returns from a three day break today, but the headlines this morning are dominated by the international crackdown on online images of child abuse on the ‘dark internet’. Technology companies have made significant progress since July, when David Cameron urged them to do more to eradicate these ‘depraved and disgusting’ images. For example, 200 employees of Google have been targeting 100,000 search terms in order to locate pictures of child pornography. YouTube engineers have found a way to identify videos created by and for paedophiles, and Google and Microsoft have been collaborating to identify pictures of child pornography. This announcement has come before a meeting in Downing Street about joint

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Hugo Rifkind: What is Facebook? 

I’d never noticed that there aren’t any tits on Facebook. The place always seems brimming with right tits to me. But no. According to this week’s mumbling bien-pensant scandal, the world’s largest social network has decided to allow newsy videos of murder and beheading and all the rest, but still not tits, and this is an outrage. Strangely enough, it’s mainly regarded as an outrage by the sort of people who are normally to be found slamming publications such as men’s mags and the Sun because they minimise the proper news and have tits all over the place. Honestly. Anybody would think these people just like to be cross, or

Thursday

The Spectator

Google is part of the free press. So hands off, Prime Minister

It is not quite clear what Google did to David Cameron, but the Prime Minister seems to be exacting some sort of revenge. First, he wanted them to keep records of their customers’ emails just in case his officials wanted to snoop later. Now he wants the British government to be the first in the free world to censor internet search results. The causes he invokes are undoubtedly popular ones: confronting terrorists, for example, and thwarting pornographers. But it is precisely in moments of populist outrage that liberties are sacrificed — and only later do we realise what we have lost. The digital age is bewildering for governments, especially those

Monday

Sebastian Payne

Porn, porn everywhere. But will David Cameron’s proposals actually work?

Has the Prime Minister been too naïve in cooking up plans to tackle unadulterated online access to porn? Today’s Daily Mail is totally ecstatic at the proposals, but fails to take into account how difficult regulating the Internet can be. Unless David Cameron decides to go for the totalitarian Great Firewall of China approach — which filters every tiny piece of traffic, known as packets — the proposals will have a similar effect to alcohol prohibition. Porngraphy will go even deeper underground; into the encrypted untraceable bowels of the web which are nigh impossible to infiltrate. Some of Cameron’s proposals are not entirely useless. Opt-in filters for Internet providers will work much like Google SafeSearch already

Thursday

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum’s diary: Spies, terrorists and an undercover ham sandwich

I am trying very hard to understand why everyone is shocked — shocked! — by news that the US government helps itself to the massive data flows generated by Google, Facebook and Twitter. I have always assumed that something placed into an internet database is no more secret than something written in a letter. We all know that those pop-up advertisements — so amazingly compatible with what we searched for on Facebook ten minutes ago — aren’t there by accident. But if we aren’t bothered when ruthlessly efficient multinational corporations troll through our data in order to earn billions for their teenage CEOs, why are we bothered when the comparatively

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Google isn’t really evil, but our tax system is a muddle that breeds avoidance

‘You are a company that says you “do no evil”,’ Margaret Hodge told Google’s Matt Brittin a fortnight ago, ‘I think that you do do evil.’ It was a soundbite of the kind we’ve come to expect from grandstanding select committee chairmen. Since then — I won’t labour the point — we’ve seen an example in Woolwich of what evil really looks like. But Mrs Hodge’s no doubt scripted jibe was enough to set off an argument that has been rumbling incoherently around Westminster ever since. Was it, as she also accused, ‘devious, calculated and… unethical’ of Google to book in low-tax Ireland the advertising deals sold to UK clients

Thursday

The Spectator

Good on you, Google – in praise of tax avoiders

Anyone who googled ‘tax avoidance’ this week will have been confronted (between adverts for accountancy firms) with endless stories about Google’s own tax avoidance schemes. If the company’s reputational management team was striving to stem the flood of bad publicity, it was not succeeding. Salvation for -Google arrived only when Apple’s tax avoidance became the big story instead. That is what the internet has created: a sometimes frightening, uncontrollable world in which information flows from place to place almost instantly and (mostly) unimpeded. Few would deny, however that the internet has had a benign and enriching influence on our lives overall. Government officials often become bogged down in discussions to

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — Osborne’s property bubble, the ongoing Tory wars and Google’s taxing issue

Will George Osborne’s manipulation of the property market cause catastrophe? In this week’s Spectator cover feature, Merryn Somerset Webb argues the Chancellor’s recycling of cheap debt through his Help To Buy and Funding for Lending schemes will jack up house prices and increase demand to a dangerous point. Norman Lamont agrees in his diary this week, suggesting that ‘some day this bubble will meet a pin’. On the latest View from 22 podcast, Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman discuss the monetary and political implications of the Chancellor’s housing motives. Why is the government so keen to increase home ownership? Are ministers willing to relax their stance on planning regulations? And what does

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

I’d rather be selling Tumblr than buying it

I haven’t used Yahoo as a general search engine since an American friend introduced me to the miracle that was Google in November 2000, but I do use Yahoo Finance for share price data, and the clunky BT Yahoo email service. All this points me to one conclusion: Yahoo is as middle-aged as I am, and the decision by hot new ex-Google chief executive Marissa Mayer to seek brand rejuvenation by buying the unprofitable blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion may not end well. It’s like me deciding to get one of those big, wavy ‘tribal’ tattoos on my neck: it might get me laid, but more likely it will

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Cameron leaves the goal open for Clegg and Miliband on tax avoidance

It’s fashionable to say Downing Street isn’t very good at strategy. So fashionable, in fact, that sometimes journalists worry they’re being unfair to the Tory leadership. But today we saw yet another example of the Prime Minister leaving an open goal for not just the opposition party but also his own Coalition partners to score. On Monday, Google’s Eric Schmidt visited Downing Street for the regular Business Advisory Group meeting. He was allowed to leave by the back door, and the Prime Minister’s aides were adamant that David Cameron wouldn’t ‘confront’ the Google boss on his company’s tax arrangements. All he planned to do was to take the group through

Thursday

Toby Young

How can I write like that about my family? Easy. My wife isn’t reading

People often ask how I get away with writing about my wife so often. Doesn’t Caroline mind being cast as the matronly foil to my errant schoolboy? I’d love to say that she perches on my shoulder, chortling with pleasure as she vets every word, but the truth is she never bothers to read any of my stuff. That’s how I get away with it. The same is also true of my children, which is just as well considering the things I write about them. In last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph, for instance, I wrote a 1,600-word essay about why men with demanding jobs are less likely to complain about their

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Who’s afraid of a snooper’s charter? Ask Google

Forgive me, but let’s go straight in. Readers of a sensitive disposition look away, but there’s a serious reason for the exercise I suggest that those with access to Google might like to attempt. There’s a thing called the AdWords Keyword Tool. You can find it at adwords.google.co.uk/-keywordtool. It is provided by Google for the benefit of online advertisers keen to select words or phrases they can use in order to catch as many Google searchers as possible in their net. So it will tell you how many people in the last month included in their search terms (say) ‘anti-wrinkle cream’: 22,200. But it is invaluable, too, to anyone curious

Friday

David Blackburn

Interview with a writer: Evgeny Morozov

Evgeny Morozov is an iconoclast. He believes that technology, if abused or misused, has the potential to make society less free. His latest book, To Save Everything , Click Here, builds on his acclaimed polemic The Net Delusion (about which he spoke to the Spectator last year) to challenge those who suggest that technology is the solution to all of life’s problems. Morozov describes how the technology of perfection is not necessarily compatible with democratic institutions and processes that are imperfect by definition. He reveals how ‘technological fixes’, particularly when coupled with market forces, threaten to close public debate and curtail personal choice; thereby moulding individuals into an efficient, homogenised

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

George Osborne urged to drop Google boss as business adviser

Starbucks had a go at David Cameron on Sunday for his ‘cheap shots’ at the coffee chain’s tax arrangements in the UK. The company felt it was being unfairly singled out in comments about companies legally avoiding tax needing to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’. So what about other firms known to be avoiding tax? Coffee House has learned that the former Lib Dem Treasury spokesman Lord Oakeshott is writing a rather scathing pair of letters to David Cameron and George Osborne about the government’s dealings with Google, which paid only £6 million in corporation tax in the UK in 2012 by funnelling £6 billion worth of transactions through

David Blackburn

Google maps North Korea

Google has mapped North Korea. The Washington Post has useful selection of before and after images. Compare the images for North Korea with a map of the county in which you live and you will get a sense of North Korea’s poverty. Britain is debating the merits of cutting the rail journey time between London and Brum by 10 minutes; North Korea has only the most basic road infrastructure. Small wonder, then, that the North Korean economy is so parlous that the Kims have accommodated a nascent form of capitalism in order to stave off mass starvation; an important point among many made by Victor Cha in The Impossible State, published last

Monday

Isabel Hardman

MPs criticise ‘voluntary’ tax arrangements for Starbucks and other big companies

Danny Alexander might be glad that a PR panic before the Public Accounts Committee published its report into HMRC and the ability of multinational companies to avoid paying their share of corporation tax means he could be able to visit a Starbucks again in the near future. But his remarks on Radio 4 this morning show what a mess our tax system has got into. As PAC chair Margaret Hodge observed on Radio 5Live, there is now ‘a danger that corporation tax is becoming a voluntary tax’, and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury’s remarks did little to diminish that impression. Alexander said: ‘I think what I’d say is, look,

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Annals of Odd Complaint: Moaning that Google Does Exactly What You Say You Want It To Do – Spectator Blogs

Via Tim Worstall, here’s Jeanette Winterson: A fiery Jeanette Winterson has called for the hundreds of millions of pounds of profit which Amazon, Starbucks and Google were last week accused of diverting from the UK to be used to save Britain’s beleaguered public libraries. In an impassioned speech at the British Library this evening, the award-winning author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit said: “Libraries cost about a billion a year to run right now. Make it two billion and charge Google, Amazon and Starbucks all that back tax on their profits here. Or if they want to go on paying fancy lawyers to legally avoid their moral duties,

Tuesday

Paul Ormerod

Who will rule the 21st century?

This is a nice big question to ponder on the holiday beach or in the rented villa. A vast amount has already been written on the rise of China and whether the US will be replaced as the global superpower. And where exactly does Europe fit into all this? It is easy to make a case for American weakness. The twin deficits of the balance of payments and the massive public sector gap between expenditure and income, the increasingly divided and embittered nature of policy discourse in the country, growing cultural fragmentation. The image of a divided nation appears to be supported by what has happened to the choice of