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Sir Simon’s lost it

Search engines are like cars on motorways with no requirement for brakes, emission controls or seatbelts. The failure to regulate, let alone properly tax, these massive corporations is the grossest lapse of modern government.

Whut? He wants to regulate search engines? Stop them indexing stuff?

13 thoughts on “Sir Simon’s lost it”

  1. Regulate means putting links he approves of at the top of other people’s search results.

    No idea who this is, but it’s a fair bet things like climate change denial and Donald Trump would be pushed to the bottom of the results.

  2. What’s he going to tax? Revenue is generated by ads – which are already taxed.

    Or are we really into Charles Stross territory where the government calculates the value of something you did for free and then demands you pay tax on that cash value because its not fair to the kiddies and old people that you’re giving away labor when you should be charging for it, paying tax on it so they can be subsidized?

  3. Simon says eh?

    It’s fairly clear that the underlying intent is to shut down anything but “approved” content. Given The Guardian’s utterly appalling track record on grooming the content of comments on their web presence – “fuck off” seems remarkably mild.

  4. He never had it.

    More authoritarian statist bollocks by a pompous cunt who thinks he knows better than you, despite documentary evidence of him being hopelessly wrong about everything all the time.

  5. I believe the character in ‘The Story of O’ was named ‘Sir Stephen.’ (Hate admitting knowing that!)

  6. “He wants to regulate search engines?”

    If someone would make one that actually works, no regulation would be needed. I have been asking for years for one that just gives you what you ask for.

    I just did a search for – regulate search engines – and got 166,000,000 results. Placed in quotes, I got 32 million. It appears there is no market for one that returns a few hundred.

    The search that cracks me up is when you enter gibberish, you always get some results, the first one being someone who says they have it for sale.

  7. Bloke in Costa Rica

    Glyn Palmer: you could always say you Googled it.

    Simon Jenkins is like Will Hutton, Mongbat and Murphy: unerringly, preternaturally wrong. He’s not even stopped-clock wrong. He’s like a clock that displays the time using quaternions.

  8. Jenkins may be wrong and similar to Murphy in that respect, but cannot be considered to be a cvnt like Murphy.

    jenkins is also displaying increasing signs of mental impairment recently, like Murphy. if not in such an extreme way.

  9. Like Matthew Parris in the Cameron years, Simon Jenkins often sounds like a willing conduit for briefings from the liberal establishment. Government prepares to publish a green paper, and someone in Whitehall discreetly tells columnist about it and suggests he might like to cover it….So an article appears by an ‘opinion former’, and the ‘consultation’ is skewed before its started.

  10. Should someone let him know that search engines are already regulated? And moreso they are regulated by the best regulators out there!

    If the search engine is crap, does a bad job, puts the wrong links up to a search then people stop using it. If it works well then they don’t. Further there is a market in search engine: if you don’t like Google then try Bing; that isn’t to your taste then what about DuckDuckGo? We can also tell that the regulation works by the numbers of people using Ask and Yahoo!

    So the regulation is already in place; problem solved.

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