Tax Google and Facebook for a job subsidy scheme? Sigh As British politicians are urged to target Facebook and Google with a new tax and pour the profits into a scheme for funding public interest journalism, it’s worth taking a close look at the vested interests demanding this course of action. At a Society of Editors conference held last week, former Minister of Fun* John …
"to implement a large-scale government IT contract"
Madness I say, it'll over run and won't be fit for purpose before it's outsourced and over budget. Unrelated but does anyone know how the customs system is coming along or the universal benefits computer system or even the farming subsidy one?
I find the use of the above phrase worrying.
Who defines whether a news organisation is "legitimate"? The state? What criteria needs to be fulfilled? If it's circulation numbers, how does a new publication enter the market? If it's by accuracy of content, who decides what is fake news? Or is it by patronage, if the owner is a political donor and the content doesn't try to hard to uncover uncomfortable truths about the establishment?
Which of these orgsnisations are "legitimate"?
The Times
The Guardian
The Daily Mail
The Sun
Brietbart
Skwawkbox
The Onion
In fact, when did El Reg become "legitimate"...
Perhaps you just get Google and Facebook to build the system to hold and disseminate the court records - it's pretty close to their core business and it can't be worse than earlier attempts at applying IT to the justice system.
And then you find a way of taxing their core business effectively for everyone's positive benefit, not as some sort of punishment for having a profitable business model or giving voice to the wrong sort of people.
Over here in the USA, the PACER system is used by the Federal court system, which handles major cases involving interstate commerce, it is true, but has no original jurisdiction in the kind of routine criminal and civil matters that are handled by State court systems. Only appeals go from State to Federal court, and then only if constitutional issues are involved.
Once again the rest of the world show how they do not get systems that are different from theirs.
We don't have many areas that can have a successful market for local news. The same problem we have with government, that the country is just physically small enough that government suffers from the delusion that centralisation can be successful. Without local news though, you can't really have effective local democracy. Admittedly that also requires voters to give an effective damn about local news, local democracy and bother to vote and stuff.
It's a real chicken-and-egg situation. If councils don't have power, people won't vote. But if you devolve them power when people aren't voting, you get corruption and stupid decisions. And if nobody's interested, no-one's reading the local press, so there's no scrutiny.
We had reasonably representative local government 100 years ago. You could get from being a leader of say Birmingham council to being a senior national politician in one step back then. Because the role had a profile. Maybe city mayors will make a difference here?
it's a really dull subject - and that's the problem. Because nobody will take it seriously. But it actually matters quite a lot. Otherwise local government just becomes a playground for non-serious politicians to push their pet projects, in a lot of cases in safe seats with little risk of getting turfed out by voters.
That's why you need More Democracy (tm).
Make the school board, fire station, police and transit all democratic.
Then you get the thrilling experience of separate labour and conservative campaigns for election to the park board.
The city engineering is still unfairly decided by an unfair guild system which insists on privileged knowledge, so the unwashed masses don't get to vote on how thick the bridge cables are - but it's only a matter of time.
The problem is, most people are united in demanding *less* democracy. Our local Labour party regularly bombards the local press with letters and fills their leaflets demanding the abolition of district and parish councils, and worryingly, a lot of the public agree with them.
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