Category Google

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A turning point: is professional creativity under threat?

Feb 8, 13 12:06 PM

There has been a lot going on, and I have been keeping my thoughts to myself. For the most part, it’s a bit depressing.

The UK government (PDF link) is still seeking to change the law so that new exceptions (aka appropriations) to copyright can be introduced whimsically by politicians without bothering to trouble parliament for a discussion first.

The wrong-headedness of this is obvious to anyone who understands how copyright works, and thank goodness it is being challenged legally by Thomson Reuters and others.

Then the French threw in the towel in their Google challenge. Having started the fight, perhaps unwisely, on a point of principle, they have given it up, utterly feebly, thanks to Google waving a cheque around. Not even a big cheque (about 14 hours of revenue for Google, I reckon – and given that they said the original proposal was a “threat to their very existence” that’s a bargain by anyone’s reckoning).

They have ended up in a situation even worse than the status quo they were challenging. The money won’t last long but the legacy of a crippled business model will continue indefinitely. They would have been much better off simply withdrawing their content.

Now, extraordinarily, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that copyright itself is illegal. Well, sort of. They seem to be saying that in many cases it is trumped by human rights law. A sort of general exception to copyright, bigger and broader than any dreamed up by even the most moronic and wilful governments.

It all seems to be getting a bit out of hand. What started as a ridiculous demonisation of copyright by people with a vested interest in being able to use other people’s stuff for free (and, in the process, grow to be among the biggest and richest companies in the world) has gone through the phase of being taken seriously by craven, populist and dim-witted politicians into a sort of orthodoxy which pervades legislative and judicial thinkers.

It’s important for everyone to step back, when they’re thinking about copyright, and consider what it’s really all about. It’s not about media corporations, monopolies, ripping off consumers, interfering with freedom of expression or otherwise damaging the cultural or economic interests of society and individuals.

At its heart, it’s about enabling people with the talent, energy and motivation to make a living from being creative.

If their work – your work maybe – effectively becomes common property as soon as its created, it’s going to make professional creativity – already in decline in many sectors – an even more perilous and penniless career choice.

We’re not there yet. Creative work isn’t quite common property. But the ability to control it, commercially and otherwise, is being chipped away at.

The UK government wants to be able to give people a right to use your stuff, whether you like it or not, whenever they feel like it.

The ECHR says that sharing your work can sometimes amount to a human right, more important than any rights you might have.

The French government, having actually stood up for its creative sector and pointed the finger at the legality and fairness of what Google do, threw their concerns aside in return for a trivial sum of money and a fleeting moment of ego-puffery for their president.

It’s not clear where the counterbalancing opportunity is going to come from. Creativity in all its forms has been one of the most revered and important facets of our society, and its most accomplished practitioners have earned respect and wealth in proportion to their achievements, and it has spawned a huge cultural and economic sector driven by the simple connection of popular success to reward.

Thanks to governments, courts and huge industrial opponents, the reward is going to be harder to come by in the future. What impact will that have on the creativity?

 

(updated 10th February 2013)

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Permission to know what is going on, sir?

Dec 12, 12 1:41 PM

Google have released a new thingy, which allows people to save web content to their Google Drive (Google’s cloud-based storage thing), and do various things to it like add comments and annotations.

Nothing much unusual about that, and there are lots of similar things out there like the formerly discussed bo.lt. Not to mention every computer in the world, which copies and stores all the web content which comes its way.

The fact that is is so ordinary highlights one of the challenges of the internet for the future. The idea that keeping and changing copies of content you happen to come across should be controversial. It’s not allowed by the law, after all. To the extent that it happens as a consequence of browsing, it is the result of a technical design decision decades ago rather than a natural and inevitable consequence of digitisation.

In fact, digitisation could just as easily do the opposite. Rather than requiring multiple copies to exist, digitisation holds out the possibility of a single copy of something being accessible to everyone. To read a book, for example, you don’t need to hold your own copy in your hand any more. Everyone can read the same copy.

Of course, if we imagine the internet without the constant, prolific and uncontrolled copying which is embedded within its technical protocols, it’s a very different place. Fundamentally, creators would know what was happening to their content, because they would have some control over the master copy. Creative success would be better rewarded and so the internet economy would truly be a creative economy. The protocols and marketplaces of the internet would have sprung up around the idea of permission rather than presumption, and huge new opportunities would have arisen as a consequence.

Contrast that with what we have. Google’s product, and many others, work on the assumption that permission is entirely unnecessary. Making copies, changing work, sharing it with others is all just fine.

The usual circular justification for this (“it’s fine because everyone does it, it’s how the internet works, if it wasn’t fine the internet wouldn’t work”), itself absurd, doesn’t really cover it. After all, copyright hasn’t been abolished yet, and this activity isn’t embedded in the bandwidth-compensating early internet protocols which still underpin things like web browsing (and subsequently protected by various laws, new and old, or generous interpretations of them).

Permission is still, in law, required to make a copy of something. Permission can be denied, perhaps because the proposed copying is damaging, or insufficiently rewarding, or just because someone decides to say “no”.

That concept doesn’t seem to feature in Google’s product. It doesn’t say how a site owner can prevent people copying their content in this way, and I’m guessing that is because they can’t. Doubtless a tortuous DMCA takedown process can be used by anyone who discovers a copy they don’t like (complete with intimidating – and copyright infringing – report to Chilling Effects if the complaint goes to Google) but no ability to prevent it happening in the first place.

The idea of permission seems to just be absent from increasing parts of the internet.

Permission for search engines to create massive, permanent and complete databases of all the content they come across isn’t needed, they say. Part of their justification is that while they might keep huge databases, they only show “snippets” to users, which makes it OK. Oh, but the content owner can’t decide on what snippet is shown either.

The need for permission to be obtained before content is copied for things like bo.lt and this new Drive thingy isn’t needed either. Well, it is in law, but not in practice. Finding and removing copies, wildly impractical and expensive, also requires considerable formalities and the promise of punishment by publishing your complaint, as if exercising your legal rights is somehow wrong.

And now the cloud is creating a new category of permissiveness, things done in private or for small audiences. It’s OK to create a service which facilitates illegal copying because it’s the equivalent of something which would otherwise have happened behind closed doors. As if the law stops at your front door.

This is all a bit scary, it means control is getting ever looser at the same time as the ability of technology to tame the chaos is increasing.

Why shouldn’t a creator want to know who has made copies of their work and why? Is it unreasonable to want to make sure corrections, changes or withdrawal of content actually takes effect? Why shouldn’t someone be able to refuse permission for a use they don’t like or which conflicts with something else they’re doing? Or keep something exclusive to themselves?

And, obviously, what’s wrong with wanting to make money from your work and wanting to stop people stealing it or other people making money.

It’s notable, as I have observed before, that the companies making the most money from content on the internet are those who invest the least in its creation. This seems to be getting worse, not better, even as the technical capabilities to reverse it increase.

The creation of new services, which are entirely detached from the technical baggage of the past, which actually and actively exacerbate this catastrophic trend shows, not for the first time, the contempt with which technology companies view content and creators. Offering users a convenience, without any consideration for reasonableness or the law, isn’t “disruptive” or “user-focussed”, regardless of whether users would be doing it anyway without your help. It’s amoral, self-interested and just wrong.

The internet’s potential to elevate creativity and creative success to the very pinnacle of our culture and economy is still there, but it is still under sustained attack constantly. A permission-driven internet is an opportunity, not a threat.

How much longer we’ll be able to cling to the idea that it can happen, though, is questionable.

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The French fancy making life hard for Google, but are they kidding themselves?

Nov 1, 12 10:52 PM

After the revelation that withdrawing from Google News seems to do little (if any) damage to publishers, Eric Schmidt has been in France trying to persuade the President not to allow news publishers to charge Google for including their content on Google News.

Google says such a move would “threaten the very existence” of Google. A feeble protest, and an overblown threat. As if anyone thinks such a thing could kill Google; but even if it could why should anyone care? If Google isn’t smart enough to know how to innovate their way past challenges then maybe their days are numbered anyway.

Google also say that if the French persist with this they will just stop including French content in Google News. Based on the Brazilian experience that’s not much of a threat, since the French publishers probably wouldn’t feel much impact at all.

More intriguing is why the publishers don’t just withdraw their content rather than ask their government to get involved. They can do it any time they like; nobody forces them to be included in any Google search.

It might sound like a wizzard wheeze to get the law changed to force payment but there’s a flipside. If such a condition is imposed by law rather than negotiation, it could end up making Google’s access to their content a right, as long as payment is made.

I think control should stay with publishers, they should set terms and prices, the government should provide the framework within which they do so and then stand well back.

As soon as government start interfering, treating different categories of content differently, setting prices or terms or anything else bad things happen. The market, such as it is, gets locked in to a particular way of working and it destroys future innovation and competition. And this market hasn’t even got started yet, we shouldn’t force old age on it quite yet.

I know French (and German, and other) newspaper industries are desperate for revenues, and easy quick ways of getting them are attractive, but this sort of thing is a last resort. Traditionally they are reserved for when everything else has failed.

There are a few things to try first. Here are some suggestions for beleaguered newspapers trying to work out how to deal with search.

Be brave.

Withdraw your content from Google News. Maybe even from Google search (leave enough behind so people searching for your title can find it). And other search engines too. Since you get so little money from those sources, you’ll be risking little. And you can turn it back on easily enough.

If a search engine offers to make it worth your while to include your content in their product, negotiate with them. Do a deal which works for you – payment, helping sell subscriptions, ad share, whatever.

Tell your readers about it, why your content is in one place and not another. Point out the gap in the results they get from the search engines which don’t want to do a deal.

If none of them want to pay you, use them to deliver what you need, not what they need. Put enough stuff in them to attract the attention you need, and no more. Experiment with the best way to do that, and constantly refine your approach. Use other channels and relationships to attract users. Ask your users to pay, and work hard to make sure your product is worth paying for. Spend your SEO budget on other kinds of marketing, or just save it.

Just do something. Stand up for yourselves and the value of what you do.

Make a market.

Stop being so impotent and stop asking governments to load the dice in your favour.

The law you need is already there; just start using it.

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No to Google News: common sense or suicide? – An update

Oct 26, 12 5:17 PM

Well that didn’t take long.

Apparently the Brazilian boycott of Google News has cost them just 5% of their traffic. They think that’s “a price worth paying”. I’d say so too. I don’t know how their revenues stack up but I would be surprised if the financial cost was much greater than zero.

As Techcrunch says, the source (the Brazilian newspaper association) isn’t exactly unbiased but if this number is correct then “Google could be in trouble”.

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Saying no to Google News: common sense or suicide?

Oct 22, 12 11:35 AM

Brazilian newspapers have, en masse, withdrawn their content from Google News.

The response, not least from Google itself, is the usual mix of unhelpful and self-interested grandstanding. Google’s comparison of themselves to a cab driver bringing customers to a restaurant is particularly absurd, since most restaurants want customers who can pay, and aren’t interested in being flooded with people who can’t or won’t.

For me, the best thing about this move is it will create some real evidence which can be used in place of all the posturing and crystal-ball gazing which normally accompanies any discussion of the merits or otherwise of having content in Google search results.

The bald facts are pretty stark for most newspapers.

If they’re ad-funded, the majority of their revenue is generated by a relatively small proportion of their users. More traffic does not mean more money, necessarily.

Traffic from Google, or Google News, is of varying value and in many cases a large proportion of it is close to zero value to the newspaper. It neither delivers a significant direct income from ad sales, because of excess inventory, nor does the user go on to become a loyal and frequent visitor. Often, users are satisfied with the content they see on Google News and don’t visit at all. Even when they do, their next move is straight back out of the site again – so called “drive by” visitors.

Last time I looked at actual logs it was clear that the visitors most likely to become loyal were ones who used your actual newspaper title in their search terms. In other words having your home page in search engines was enough to target the most attractive potential visitors.

So if your goal is to focus on those users who might become loyal and frequent, high-value, visitors (the actual paying restaurant customers, in Google’s analogy), you might want to experiment with trying to control who comes and who exploits your content. In the real world it is called marketing, knowing your customer, having a strategy for targeting the people you’re most interested in. Withdrawing from Google News, given that so little revenue accrues from it, is a low risk thing to do and will potentially deliver much valuable data to help separate fact from speculation.

If, into the bargain, Google values your content enough to really want it, then maybe they will sit down and discuss a deal. If not, nobody has lost anything, and once you have learned enough you can decide if, how and when to put some or all of your content back into search.

I look forward to seeing what happens, and am pleased to see someone actually do something instead of just endlessly talking about it.

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The Times and Google: what changed?

Oct 9, 12 3:44 PM

Quite a lot has been written recently about The Times allowing Google to index some of its content. Some of the coverage has suggested this is a capitulation by The Times which had previously taken allowed very little indexing.

I think they’re missing the point. The most interesting part of this story is that The Times “will begin showing articles’ first two sentences to search engines” (according to Paid Content).

This is a big change of stance by Google. Back when I was involved in the ACAP project they resolutely refused to contemplate anything which would allow a site owner to determine what part of an article might be visible in search results (the so-called snippet). Nothing in the robots.txt protocol gave site owners the ability to specify their preferences to this level of detail and, although ACAP did, Google refused to engage with it.

So the story here is not about The Times capitulating, mainly because they clearly have not. The story is that Google have met them in the middle and agreed on a way of indexing which is agreeable to both of them.

This is exactly the sort of thing which ACAP was meant to achieve, and if Google have softened their rigid approach to the way they’re prepared to operate, it is only a good thing.

For The Times it means they can use Google to help, not hinder, their business strategy. For Google it means their users see a large and visible gap in search results being filled.

I think that’s what you call a good outcome.

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The internet wants to be open, but some internets are more open than others

Apr 18, 12 10:29 AM

Sergey Brin of Google had a discussion with The Guardian and talked about his vision for the future of the internet, alongside his concerns about threats to that vision.

It’s an incredible insight into his (and Google’s) world view, which seems to be from a truly unique perspective. There is nobody else who sits astride the internet like Google and it seems that from the top, the sense of entitlement to be the masters of all they survey is strong.

Take this quote, from towards the end of the piece:

If we could wave a magic wand and not be subject to US law, that would be great. If we could be in some magical jurisdiction that everyone in the world trusted, that would be great … We’re doing it as well as can be done

I’m not sure what this “magical jurisdiction” would be but it doesn’t sound like Sergey wants it to be based on US law, and there’s no sign that Google has any greater love for any other existing jurisdiction. I wonder if he’s thinking that perhaps it should be a Google-defined jurisdiction? After all, Google is fond of saying that the trust of users is their key asset – they presumably consider themselves to be highly trusted. I wonder if the magic wand is in development somewhere deep in their bowels? Perhaps one of their robotic cars can wave it when the time comes! Google can declare independence from the world…

But why should we trust them? There’s almost nothing they do which you can’t find fierce critics to match their army of adoring fans. Without deconstructing them all, surely the point is this: whenever a single entity (be it a government, company or individual) has complete control over any marketplace, territory or network, bad things tend to happen. Accountability, checks-and-balances, the rule of law, democratically enacted, are all ways of trying to ensure that power does not achieve its natural tendency to corrupt.

Google asks us to just trust it. And many people do.

Another quote:

There’s a lot to be lost,” he said. “For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can’t search it.

The phrasing is interesting. Is is really true that because data in apps is not crawlable it is “lost”? I use apps all the time, and the data appears to be available to me. I don’t think the fact that it’s not available to Google means it’s “lost” (except I suppose to Google). Defining something that is not visible to Google as “lost” suggests not just that Google considers that it should be able to see and keep everything that exists online, but also that they have an omniscient role that should not be subject to the normal rules of business or law. Like people being able to choose who they deal with and on what terms. Or being able to choose who copies and keeps their copyright works.

The “lost” app data could, of course, easily be made available to Google if the owner chose. Brin’s complaint seems to be that Google can’t access it without the owner deciding it’s OK – there is a technical obstacle which can’t simply be ignored. Yet all they have to do, surely, is persuade the owners to willingly open the door: hardly a controversial challenge in the world of business. It’s called doing a deal, isn’t it?

Here’s what he had to say in relation to Facebook

You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive.. The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation.

Another telling insight. Too many rules stifle innovation. Rules are bad.

Hard to agree with even as a utopian ideal (utopia isn’t usually synonymous with anarchy), but even less so when you consider the reality of dealing with Google. I have visited various Google offices at various times and have always been asked to sign in using their “NDA machine” at reception. Everyone has to do it. You have to sign an NDA simply to walk into their offices. The first rule of Google is you can’t talk about Google. Hardly the most open environment – they are the only company I have ever visited which insists on this.

Of course, Google is no stranger to rules either. They set their own rules and don’t offer room for discussion or adjustment. When they crawl websites, for example, they copy and keep everything they find, indefinitely. They have an ambition to copy and keep all the information on the internet, and eventually the world. Their own private, closed, internet. This is a rule you have to play by.

Even if you ban crawling on some or all of your site using robots.txt, they crawl it anyway but just exclude the content from search results (this was explained to me by a senior Google engineer a few years ago and as far as I know it has not changed). If you want to set some of your own rules, using something like ACAP or just by negotiating with them, good luck: they refuse to implement things like ACAP and rarely negotiate.

“You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive”

Here’s an interesting story. A while ago, Google refused to include content in their search results if clicking on the link would lead a user to a paywall. They said it was damaging to the user experience if they couldn’t read the content they had found with Google (another Google rule: users must be able to click on links they find and see the content without any barriers or restrictions). However it also meant users couldn’t find content they knew they wanted, for example from some high-profile newspapers like the FT and Wall Street Journal.

So Google introduced a programme called “First Click Free“. It set some rules (more rules!) for content owners to get their content included in Google search even if it was “restricted” behind a paywall. It doesn’t just set rules for how to allow Google’s crawlers to access the content without filling in a registration form, but also the conditions you have to fulfill – primarily that anybody clicking a link to “restricted” content from Google search needs to be allowed to view it immediately, without registration or payment.

This is a Google rule which you have to play by, unless you are willing to be excluded from all their search results. Not only is it technically demanding, it also fails to take account of different business models and the need for businesses to be flexible.

Unfortunately it was also wide open to abuse. Many people quickly realised they could read anything on paid sites just by typing the headline into a Google search.

Eventually Google made some changes. Here’s how they announced them:

we’ve decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day 

They have “decided to allow” publishers to have a slightly amended business model. Publishers need permission from Google to implement a Google-defined business model (or suffer the huge impact of being excluded from search), and now they are allowed to vary it slightly.

For a company which objects to the idea of having to play by someone else’s rules, they’re not too bothered about imposing some of their own.

Which brings me back to trust. If Google want a world in which they have access to scan, store and use all “data” from everywhere, where they don’t have to play by the “restrictive” rules or laws (like copyright) set by others – even their own government – don’t they need to start thinking about their demand for openness both ways round? Rather than rejecting rules which don’t suit them (such as “US law”) shouldn’t they try to get them changed; argue and win their case or accept defeat graciously? Shouldn’t they stop imposing rules on those whose rules they reject, ignore or decry?

Google is a very closed company. Little they do internally is regarded by them as being “open”, and they build huge and onerous barriers to protect their IP, secrets and data. Even finding out what Google know about you, or what copies of your content they have, is virtually impossible; changing or deleting it even harder.

They ask us to trust them. We would be unwise to do so, any more than we trust any monopolies or closed regimes which define their own rules. It wouldn’t matter so much but for their huge dominance, influence and reach. They have, it is said, personal data on more than a billion people all of whom are expected to trust them unquestioningly.

Surely the first step to earning, rather than simply assuming, that trust is that they need to start behaving towards others in the way they demand others treat them.

Openness cuts both ways, Sergey. How about starting by practicing what you preach and opening Google up fully?

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Breaking the Internet, one absurd claim at a time

Mar 15, 12 5:10 PM

I’m not much of a geek, so I can’t pretend to understand the technical minutae of the internet intimately.

But one thing I do know is that it was designed to be fault-tolerant, decentralised and robust. The basic technology was developed by the US Defense Department, some say to survive nuclear war but certainly to survive dodgy connections, and it seems to have worked.

While we all have our frustrations with the internet sometimes, and whole countries have been affected by interference from their governments, I have never heard of the whole internet breaking down. Even as bits of it fail, the rest carries on regardless.

The internet, by design, is hard to break.

Which means it’s hard to imagine something which would “Break the Internet”.

Yet that phrase, “Break the Internet” is one I have heard with increasing frequency. It is used as a dire threat, a prediction of doom, the ultimate and unimaginably awful unintended consequence of a terrible and naïve mistake.

Often, it is used as a way of explaining to policymakers, who by-and-large are even less geeky than me, why they should not do something they have proposed.

I first heard it when I was involved with the ACAP project. ACAP is a simple way of making content permissions machine-readable, thereby solving the problem of how automated services like Google are supposed to comply with terms of use.

We were on a trip to the USA to introduce ACAP to various industry and government people. It was going down well, in Europe as well as the USA. It was seen as a way of solving a sticky problem without having to legislate and avoided lots of awkward issues like DRM.

Google, who had initially been keen on ACAP and even delegated one of the search engineers to a committee defining its technical development, had turned against it. Presumably, although they never said this, they realised that if they were aware of terms of use they might have to comply with them.

Public statements were made by the likes of Eric Schmidt saying that there were technical problems with ACAP (even though Google had helped design the technical aspects of it) but implying that once they were solved Google would support ACAP. In fact they never engaged with ACAP to try to solve the supposed technical issues, nor explained what they were.

Anyway, the first time I heard the phrase “Break the Internet” was on that US trip. We had visited Google, and privately, on the way to dinner, I was told that the distinguished engineers were saying internally that ACAP would “ Break the Internet”. So however polite they were being, the engineers did not support it and there was little chance of getting much progress.

Obviously such a dire consequence would be cataclysmic, and nobody could knowingly support something which would lead to it.

But we were surprised because we couldn’t think of how ACAP could possibly do such a thing. How ANYTHING could do such a thing? My conversation was an informal one with a non-technical person (a lesser species at Google) and he was unable to explain what it meant – but it sounded bad.

We asked more technical people at Google but they were unable or unwilling to explain. Silence was the stern reply, and the dialogue pretty much dried up after that.

However we did hear the phrase “Break the Internet” again. This time it came from government officials, who told us that while they liked the idea of ACAP they had been told that it would “Break the Internet”.

We asked if this warning had come with an explanation, they said no. When we suggested that it would be a good idea to set up a meeting to discuss this with whoever had said it so that, once we had established the problem, we could fix it they agreed. ACAP after all, was about the end not the means. But the meetings never happened.

I reached the conclusion that ACAP was not some terrible time-bomb ticking under the internet. Quite clearly it couldn’t break anything at all (not least because technically it didn’t really do anything more than a copyright notice in a book – all it did was make licences machine-readable).

What it MIGHT have broken, or at least changed a little bit, is one aspect of Google’s business rationale. The bit which justifies them accessing any website, and using content by default for their various search products, without asking first, without paying any attention to restrictions or conditions which those sites might have specified in their terms of use and without paying money or offering anything other than traffic in return.

But the damage was done. Every politician and policy-maker wanted to be friends with the internet and with Google. All of them wanted to appear progressive and technically ept. None of them wanted to go down in history as the person who unwittingly “Broke the Internet”, and none of them were geeky enough to ask even the simplest questions to explore the substance of this ludicrous claim, or willing to facilitate a conversation which might lead to an answer.

So, even though they liked the idea of ACAP they were scared of supporting it in case something bad happened. Google’s rivals didn’t want to implement it if Google did not. The well intentioned and in my mind quite benign effort which ACAP represented became controversial and demonised.

The politicians and official, I get the impression, just looked the other way, and hoped that in time everyone would learn to just be friends.

Something rather good was lost, temporarily at least, as the result of a silly catchphrase – “Break the Internet”.

Anyway… it turned out that the absurd, hyperbolic and completely false assertion, in private, that ACAP would “Break the Internet” worked so well that the phrase caught on.

Taking advantage of the fact that many people seem to regard Google and everyone who works for it as some sort of super-species of superior intelligence and insight, unattainable by normal humans, the phrase came out in relation to other “threats” to Google’s (and others’) interests.

Recently David Drummond, Google’s chief lawyer, told an audience at Davos that the European proposals on privacy, specifically the “right to be forgotten” would – yes – “Break the Internet”. Again, clearly absurd, but seemingly taken seriously by those without the confidence to challenge it.

In relation to PIPA and SOPA there were numerous articles and blog posts making, spookily, the same prediction. These pieces of legislation, designed to reduce copyright piracy and help media organisations survive, would “Break the Internet”.

We can all chuckle at this, but it’s not funny. However little this claim stands up to scrutiny, those it is made to rarely if ever have the confidence to challenge it. It’s preposterousness is exceeded only by its effectiveness. It is a crazy, disingenuous, self-interested, untruthful and alarmingly potent claim.

So I want to challenge it, and other equally absurd claims like “the end of free speech” which runs a close second when it comes to silly predictions, and I want to show it up for the dishonest and false allegation it invariably is.

I want to appeal to everybody, especially policymakers and their staff, to not just disregard it but positively reject it as you would any other obviously ridiculous claim. Put it to the test, probe and enquire, find out what is really meant and if you discover that the reality doesn’t live up to the claim then you should deprecate not just the claim but all the evidence or claims put forward by that source.

Demand honesty, demand rigour, demand truth and punish those who would seek to deceive you by ignoring them.


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