2012 ended on a discordant note for the Internet. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is the forum at which governments propose regulations and standards for telecoms. Many member states of the ITU regard the Internet as something which should be…

Nate Silver is a clever man. Using “quants” he correctly predicted the outcome of the US presidential race in every single state bar none. Interest in “business analytics” that uses algorithms that detect trends and key relationships in vast amounts…

A recent report by the US Senate warned that entry of telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei into the US market would be a Trojan horse for China’s spy network. For good technical reasons telecoms has always been viewed by governments and…

No one wants to risk using a drug that is not fully tried and tested and accredited by the relevant health standards body. The fact that many people do just that is telling. Of course, the major reason for doing…

Regulatory capture was a concept developed by economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago, but it was already a well observed phenomenon in the USA where powerful industrial and commercial interests exercised undue influence over the agencies and the…

It used to be the case that a dental patient wanting a crown for a tooth needed to sit through an uncomfortable process of having a damp polymer stuck over their tooth and waiting for it to dry before the…

On May 7th hundreds of millions of viewers around the world watched the exciting climax to the English Premier League football championship match between home team and clear favourites Manchester City and QPR who were fighting to avoid relegation. If…

2012 is scheduled as the year Facebook goes public. It has been well advertised that Facebook does not need the money and the Inland Revenue is also pretty indifferent as to whether the taxes are paid by a private individual…

The IT world is getting faster all the time. Telcos are upgrading to high speed broadband NGNs; the processing power of ever smaller chips in ever smaller devices continues exponential growth; and apps and services rely upon ever faster searches…

On 18 January 2012 the Internet went on strike. Wikipedia and a whole host of Internet sites went dark for a day in protest again SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). The sponsors of these two…

Sir, Lawrence Summers and Samuel Brittan, in the “Capitalism in Crisis” series, complement each other in important ways. Prof Summers (“Current woes call for smart reinvention not destruction”, January 9) manages to reduce a modern capitalism economy to two sectors,…

Early in 2011 it was revealed that China was going ahead with an experiment to set up an Internet Special Administrative Region (SAR) similar in concept to the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) of the 1980s that started the process of…