I have just send a complaint – or “negative feedback” as the website wishes to call it – to the Crown Prosecution Service in South Yorkshire for its prosecution of Paul Chambers for making a (stupid) joke on Twitter. I reproduce it below:

If you also wish to complain, you can do so at: http://www.cps.gov.uk/contact/feedback_and_complaints/index.html

No doubt you have received numerous complaints about the prosecution of Paul Chambers for a joke he made on Twitter regarding Robin Hood airport.

I would like to add my name to that list.

This was a severely misguided prosecution and raises serious questions about the CPS’ ability to manage cases.

I understand you feel obliged to investigate complaints, even when the complainants feel similarly obliged to lodge a complaint for any form of threat made against them.

But as soon as it became clear that this was never taken seriously as a threat and if you had applied some basic commonsense, you would given the person in question a warning.

But to proceed to prosecution on a clearly light-hearted comment on a social network site beggars belief.

If Paul Chambers does appeal – and I hope he finds a lawyer that will allow him to do just that – it is inevitable that the CPS will not only lose this prosecution but be undermined in the eyes of the public.

I sincerely hope this case is being reviewed high up in your chain of command, and I hope that whoever makes the call recognises the ridiculous and insidious nature of this prosecution and issues a formal apology to Mr Chambers.

I also hope this sparks a review of your systems for deciding whether to go ahead with a prosecution. And I hope the whole CPS is also given some basic training on modern social media so you don’t make similar mistakes in future.

Yours sincerely

Kieren McCarthy

Internet thinker and political operator David Weinberger has posed an interesting question: how do we design a question-and-answer format for politicians that is truly democratic?

Weinberger’s blog post was noted by Andrew McLaughlin on his Facebook page – Andrew is the White House Deputy CTO and the man more than any other that could make a democratic Q&A system a reality.

And so I figured I’d have a stab at designing something since this is an area where I have a fair amount of knowledge and experience both as a journalist and as ICANN’s general manager of public participation. Here then is a rundown of a system that I think would broadly work:

Let’s start with some assumptions about what this system would need to do and how it would work. It would have to:

1. Be online – the Internet’s gift for communication and computers’ ability to parse information is the only reason we are even considering a fully democratic Q&A.
2. Be open and scalable, with limited need to register to use the service. Otherwise it will never get off the ground
3. Be resistant to efforts to fix the results – which would be inevitable in a political environment – on both sides
4. Produce useful results that could be built upon – otherwise, what’s the point?
5. Be manageable from the staff perspective – get the balance right between resources expended and useful results or the process will eventually be dropped as a “useful experiment”

This the idea I have come up with, presented from the perspective of the user, which I’ll then dig into.

To: kieren@kierenmccarthy.com
From: democracy@whitehouse.gov

Subject: An answer to your question

Thankyou for your recent question to the White House about the Economy.

A response has now been posted on the White House website, where you will also be able to see responses to other questions on the same subject and from people in your state.

If you are interested in learning more about this aspect of the economy, we have also provided links to those individuals in the administration that have day-to-day responsibility for these areas, and you will be able to follow them as they work through the issues.

To see the response to your questions, please click on the link below:

http://whitehouse.gov/qa/economy/2010/02/08/answers.html#3

Thank you,

The White House

You click the link:

Monday 8 February 2008

Q&A: ECONOMY

Click on the plus [+] sign to expand the question box to provide the answer

[+] Q1: Why does America have such a large deficit?

[+] Q2: What does it mean that China owns a huge number of US Treasury bills?

[-] Q3: What are you doing to get the country out of recession?

We are doing a number of things.

Firstly, there was the Stimulus Package that was approved in February 2009. That package provided $787 billion in funds to get the economy back on track. Roughly one third each was spent on the following three things: tax cuts and benefits; education and healthcare; and federal contracts, grants and loans.

You can follow how all of this money is being spent online at: http://www.recovery.gov/.

Secondly, the President announced a freeze on federal budgets for three years so we spend less as a government. This is not a simple task and will require significant assistance from Congress to make it happen.

If you are interested in following debates on the subject of the Federal Budget Freeze, please go to: http://whitehouse.gov/qa/economy/budget-freeze.html.

Thirdly, we are working on a Jobs Bill that will be designed specifically with the aim of creating more jobs and getting people back into jobs. The Bill was passed in the House of Representatives in December 2009. It will now pass to the Senate through the normal procedures before appearing before the President to sign.

We hope this process will be completed in the first half of 2010. To follow progress of this Bill, please go to: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/bills/jobs.html.

To find out more:

One of the President’s main economic advisers is Cecilia Rouse. She often contributes to the White House’s economy blog at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/issues/Economy

You can find out more about Cecilia and other members of the Council of Economic Advisors at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cea/about/members.

[+] Q4: How do decisions get made over the economy?

Sign up here to be emailed with a link to future questions.
Or ask another question yourself at: http://whitehouse.gov/qa/ask.html
You can also find this service on Facebook and Twitter.

The most popular ten questions asked about the Economy can be found at: http://whitehouse.gov/qa/economy/top-ten.html

So that’s the user experience. You’ll note that the answer above is answered by an anonymous, albeit friendly, third party, rather than by the President of the United States himself.

That is because of a number of aspects that I think would have to form part of any realistic system. Some of these below, along with what I think would be likely wrong approaches and assumptions in making such a system.

1. The bulk of the Q&A system would be done by and presented by staff. The reality is that the President is too busy and that if you only answers questions through one person, you are creating a system that will always disappoint the majority of the users.

You could have a rule of thumb for actual Presidential responses: minimum of three responses. One to cover events of the day (read: political fight); one a broader, larger topic (try to get above party politics); and one lighthearted to stop process from being dull.

2. Keep responses short. Under 250 words each time. Nothing is gained and much is lost with longer responses.

3. Always provide a link for further information on each separate topic. And if a suitable page doesn’t exist, it points to the fact that one needs to be built.

4. Avoid the sexy. Day-to-day governing is pretty dry and time-consuming. The key is to keep it light and short. Chasing the sexy aspects in the hope that will make it interesting will create a skewed system that worries more about perception than information, ultimately undermining the idea of a democratic Q&A. One example of the sexy is: the inevitable drive to find the perfect person to ask the perfect question. Say, a good-looking widowed black army mother who has lost her health insurance but will be saved through a clause in a new Bill going through Congress.

5. Don’t diss journalism. Both Weinberger and McLaughlin have a critical view of journalists. This is a very common habit among people on the inside of organizations trying to get things done, and it’s because journalists don’t care about difficult things are, and they don’t care about the hard work put in – they just want to know the end result and then get it out to people who care even less than the journalists.

Why is taking a critical view a bad idea? Because the process of journalism, for all its flaws, is the end product of a long history of the struggle for providing information. You shouldn’t seek to *replace* or reach over journalism. You should understand that it is the edifice shaped by years of weather. Understand it and then seek to shape it. So to design a democratic process without embracing and building on the current process is a surefire way to fail.

So while a particularly irritating habit of political journalism at the moment is to be “balanced” to the extent that bad ideas are propagated, and back-and-forth criticism takes the place of rational analysis, you can expect the exact same pressures to exert themselves on a democratic Q&A.

Likewise, chasing headlines, rather than providing a more in-depth perspective, is exactly what will entice people into a democratic Q&A system. Very few people are interested in all the work that goes into something – unless they are an intrinsic part of that process.

The ultimate success of this theoretical democratic Q&A would be to see the broader media report on its results.

Pragmatics

So the five assumptions:

1. Be online
2. Be open and scalable
3. Be resistant to efforts to fix the results
4. Produce useful results
5. Be manageable from the staff perspective

You allow people to send in questions in as many ways as possible. Online, Facebook, Twitter and possibly an iPhone app.

What you need to do is get people to tag questions themselves. And limit questions to a workable length (140-200 characters). That way you can break up the questions and provide their analysis to different people – cutting down on the overall time taken and reducing the gap between question and expert.

People typically overdo categories online. Any more than five and people start getting lost. That doesn’t mean though that you can’t have five options within five (although you would probably need to make the second five optional).

So, using the question above: “What are you doing to get the country out of recession?”

In a browser you would type this questions and then be prodded to put it into one of the five categories: Economy / Healthcare and Education / Security / Technology / Other. Under Economy, you are presented with a further five options: Budget / Jobs / Legislation / Recovery / Taxes.

The same menu and sub-menus can be repeated (and changed) across all platforms and also be used in the presentation of responses.

So, for example, using Twitter, a questioner would send to @whitehouseqa: “What are you doing to get the country out of recession? #economy #recovery”

You also get people to provide their email address or Facebook name or Twitter name to allow for responses and interaction.

And you get them to say which state they are from – which enables you to reflect back to people what people in their state are asking, and also helps provides a breakdown of issues by state, flagging up what may be regional issues.

Analysis

Now, here’s the crucial part – how do you process all this information?

My thoughts: you work on a weekly basis and expect a week turnaround. You have one person dedicated to each of the five main areas. They triage the questions as they come in: delete nonsense; add secondary subject tags; attach internal tags (answered previously; repeat question; current; broad; light-hearted).

Then you have a different person working on each sub-category. They should be able to discern the threads of questions coming in – and start clumping them together e.g. What are you doing to get the country out of recession? would be the accumulation of 20 questions all broadly asking the same thing: where is the stimulus money?; what are you doing about unemployment?; I’ve lost my job – what are you doing to fix the economy?

If you have an ID for each question, you can start putting the questions into different boxes, or appending different tags (like how Google does with Gmail).

Then the sub-category person can present a number of headline summarizing questions, with the actual questions asked produced underneath and then send them back up to the main category editor who goes through, makes edits where needed and sends them back down.

The sub-category editor then starts approaching people within government to get answers. Over time, they should start building a pretty good compendium of people who can answer questions on the basis of who gives the best answers; clearest answers; fastest answers. That way you factor in human intelligence at the right level – and at a sufficiently low level that the fears and perceptions of political minds don’t touch the process at the crucial information-gathering point.

You would need 30 people in this process – five of them more senior. But not dedicated staff, an add-on to existing staff or interns. Why would they do it? Because they get to speak to everyone in their area, across government – an enormously valuable opportunity to network and get to know people.

The experts – from wherever they are in government – could be encouraged to produce in-depth answers and post them elsewhere (on their own blog for example) knowing that the question is going to be highlighted in a formal White House Q&A. That way you start building a depth of information on giving subjects, allowing people to dig in deeper themselves, but without putting all the editing and decision-making on the shoulders on a few people.

The sub-category editor then sends up the information to the category editor, and then when it is all compiled, the category editors send the results to someone high up in the chain, who can then pick through the result to see which questions could be given specific Presidential attention i.e. a personal address.

All the other questions still get answered, and all the information is built up, but extra attention is then given at the top to a few hand-picked questions.

If there is sufficient effort put into answering a particular question by a number of experts across government, then the ability to adjust the question itself would be limited. Likewise, the category and sub-category editors would have an incentive to make the questions themselves as fair and straight as possible as they would be sending them out to lots of people. The idea is that this process would limit the ability for the Q&A to be bent significantly at the top, so limiting political interference.

Response

And then – the absolutely crucial part of the whole system – feedback to those that asked the questions.

They need to know that their question was read, and they need to be given an answer. The likelihood is that their exact question will not receive an exact answer, but if you have intelligent editors in the process, they should be content with the broader response.

If someone isn’t happy, then could ask the same question again. With luck, the editors would see if the same sort of questions kept coming in week after week and would be in a position to work on an answer.

What would be very important in feedback to the question-asker is that the response is written in plain language, free of jargon. And that links are given to further resources. The answer should assist people in finding out more information; the assumption should be in every case that the person has a right to ask the question and that they have a genuine interest in the answer.

And the last piece of the jigsaw is to allow people to give feedback on the feedback. Allow people to rate the usefulness of the answer they received – and then have that overall feedback summed together and sent to category editors so they can evaluate their sub-category editors.

You also allow people that have sent in questions and received answers to login and rate questions and answers – using those votes to produce a top ten of all questions and of category questions. Since you are asking people to rate questions that have been through the process, there is limited usefulness in people gaming the system.

Over time, this whole approach should help build valuable and threaded information about the process of government and the work being put in to solve various issues.

It uses Internet technology; it contains almost no barriers to entry; it is scalable; it is broadly resistant to fixing and gaming; it should produce useful results (so long as category editors strive to be clear and straightforward); and it spreads the work so should prove manageable.

So there you go – my idea for the democratic Q&A system.

In October, there was outrage when UK libel lawyers Carter-Ruck prevented a newspaper from repeating questions asked in Parliament. The issue was regarding the lawyers’ client, Trafigura, which several media outlets including The Guardian and the BBC reported had dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, leading to many deaths and other health issues.

Trafigura took a very aggressive stance, using the UK’s outdated libel laws to gag the media, and questions in Parliament. When the Guardian reported that it had been served with a “super-injunction” that didn’t allow it to name Trafigura, or Carter-Ruck, *or* the fact that they had taken out an injunction on them, the Internet took up the case and plastered the details everywhere. Twitter in particular came into play.

That moment was hailed as a victory of the Internet over efforts to clamp down on free speech and comment, but Trafigura and Carter-Ruck simply bided their time and have again launched into an aggressive clampdown, this time removing an article from the BBC website that covered its Newsnight investigation.

And so, people on the Internet are again picking up the baton and posting the information online, including a video of the Newsnight programme that covered Trafigura and its toxic waste dumping scandal. It is posted above. Presumably, Trafigura will now direct Carter-Ruck to take action against YouTube, at which point I am sure this will take another turn around the roundabout. Hopefully until Trafigura’s learns a valuable lesson.

I would encourage any bloggers or twitterers out there to disseminate this information.

Delighted to wake up this morning to find out that people acted on appalling press gagging regarding Trafigura and had used their collective voices to flip things over.

Much of the credit is going to Twitter so it is fitting that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger twittered himself about the “victory” when Carter-Ruck solicitors backed down at the last minute (just an hour before a court hearing questioning the Draconian court order restricting the newspaper from reporting questions asked in Parliament). Soon after, Rusbridger thanked those that had used Twitter to bring attention to the issue and for their great support.

I could go on and on about Twitter – everyone else has – but while this is a very interesting development in modern communication, ultimately the only thing that Twitter brings to the game is speed. I had never heard of Trafigura before yesterday, and this morning, when I went to type it in the company’s name to find out what had happened overnight, I found myself hard-pushed to remember its name – it was traffic-something.

This whole episode was certainly a victory for freedom of speech but it is but one fight is a very much larger war that it is up to journalists and politicians to tackle over a longer timeframe than 24 hours on Twitter. No one will remember Trafigura in even a month’s time. But in a month’s time there will be nothing to stop a firm like Carter-Ruck from doing exactly the same thing all over again on a story that doesn’t garner as much attention.

As the Guardian’s technology editor Charles Arthur also twittered – if the Parliament website didn’t exist and didn’t post the MPs questions, no one would have been any the wiser that this whole thing happened.

The cost of silencing a country? £100,000

The fact remains that a single company was able to silence the entire UK media and prevent it even talking about events in Parliament for a sum of money – the amount it paid to Carter-Ruck. How much does it costs to gag the two pillars of democracy? That’s hard to pin down because it was part of a much bigger campaign but I would guesstimate £100,000 – focused in the right place and with skilled practitioners of course.

This should never have been possible. No gagging order should ever have been approved. The Guardian shouldn’t need to go to court to argue against it. And it shouldn’t take hundreds of thousands of outraged citizens collectively shouting to pressure a company to withdrawing an order. This is a systemic problem and it needs to be fixed.

I see the Liberal Democrats are calling for a debate on this issue – press freedom and libel laws. But will they get the support they need from Twitter-citizens in order to make that debate happen and then to force changes on a legal system very, very resistant to change? I doubt it – I’ve not seen more than a handful of people tackling this wider point or asking people to email their MPs to keep the pressure up (answer: go to They Work For You).

Very few people are in this for the long-haul: they appear when outraged, then don’t stop until people back down, and then they expect the professionals to get on with making sure it doesn’t happen again.

So what are the ways in which this issue can be dealt with? I see several:

• Forcing the High Court to review flaws in its system

This path has already been flagged by the MP at the centre of the recent argument. Along with the main question about Trafigura, Paul Farrelly also asked: “To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what mechanisms HM Court Service uses to draw up rosters of duty judges for the purpose of considering time of the essence applications for the issuing of injunctions by the High Court.”

To prevent these sorts of orders in future you have to look at how they are approved. This gagging order should never have been approved. And it is NOT sufficient that someone can go to court to get it overturned. This idea of approval and then appeal makes sense to the legal profession but it does not work in reality. It is being gamed to the detriment of society.

The legal profession really needs to face up to the fact that the last 10 years of court actions against journalism has not improved the situation; it has made it worse. I would like to see some legal journalists starting to pressure lawyers and judges into debating this and overhauling libel laws in the face of the modern world.

• Parliamentary debates

Everyone likes to beat up on politicians but they remain the people’s representatives and they are the people who write and rewrite laws. This is a difficult subject – which means that unless there is a groundswell of support, and several champions of the cause – it will eventually be dropped by MPs.

But if it becomes a topic of public focus, if votes start coming into the equation, and if there are enough MPs who see and understand it is their duty to have these debates and to make real change for the betterment of the country, then you could see real change.

• Press make libel laws an issue

The press itself needs to organise and work together and make this an issue in the public’s eye. If there is one thing that newspapers in particular and really good at it is taking an issue and running with it.

It needs to be broken down into understandable chunks, people need to be kept engaged, informed of milestones and action points, and there has to be constant effort and resources put behind finding more permanent solutions than Twitter-victories.

Newspapers are currently so enamoured with Twitter and blogging but I wonder how many of them have any understanding of how to harness that power. Do they have any idea how to engage those people that came to their support today? Do they know how to build a campaign with people, rather than just inform people of their campaign?

I’m not sure they do. I might have to see what I can do about that.

If you don’t use Twitter, that headline will look like gibberish, but basically one company that produces very short URLs has given up and publicly conceded defeat to a more popular service.

What’s annoying is that I have been happily using the loser – tr.im – and been enjoying the stats it produces. No more – the stats are gone and the ultimate display of the risk of fast-paced information becoming dead information, the short links will stopped working at the end of the year.

Here’s what is on Tr.im website at the moment: “tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

“Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward. However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

“We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

“There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

“We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.”

Interesting that even in these heady hype days of Twitter than no one would pay for Tr.im. Ah well, like the note says, now I’m shifting to bit.ly. I wonder how long it will be able to provide the service before desperately seeking funds.

So everyone and their dog knows about Twitter. Now the problem is they have started using it – and you can see it through the pretty drastic impact on third-parties the past two weeks or so.

Services you use to make Twitter more manageable keep getting knocked offline. A few months ago Twitter itself was suffering from the attention and keep falling offline. It was at an inflexion point – it had grown so much that it needed an influx of money to build the system to deal with the demand. And that’s when the likes of Google started offering to buy it – leading Twitter’s owners to (somewhat stupidly to my mind) outright reject any suggestion of selling their company.

Twitter got some money and hired consultants – one of whom I know – to help them deal with demand. They shifted to the same style of server spread and backup that Google and Facebook use.

That wave has passed but now the third-parties are having the same problem. Tr.im – which allows you to stick in a long URL and get a short one out (which is ideal for those 140-character-only tweets) – has been falling offline repeatedly in the past fortnight. It’s got so bad that I’m ready to shift to a different company. And today Splitweet – which allows you to post to multiple Twitter accounts – also went offline. It popped up an hour or so later saying it was under a denial of service attack. As of writing this I still can’t use its service.

The same is happening with other third-parties. SocialToo is running slow. And Twitterfeed keeps timing out while I’m trying to create an account with it because I can’t use Splitweet.

All this means that, after Twitter itself hit the wall and pushed through, that the third-parties feeding off this service’s success are also about to hit that wall. They are going to need money to maintain their (free) service. Who is going to stump up that money? And to which service? Should be interesting to see which services people think will be able to provide a return on investment, and which will fall by the wayside.

Twitter has just hit a crucial milestone for becoming a long-term viability rather than an Internet flash-in-the-plan: it has started generating its own sub-market.

Part of Twitter’s beauty is the fact that it restricts posts to 140 characters, forcing you to have to be economic with your words and making it easier to quickly digest others posts. The problem with the domain name system is that it produces long Web addresses (URLs) so if you want to point people to a certain webpage, you lose almost all the room you have just posting the URL, leaving little or no room for an explanation of why people should click on the link.

URL shortening applications have been around for years but they tended to be used only for ridiculously long web addresses that could often break in emails and IM messages. Twitter has given them a new lease of life.

And this was made clear this morning when the usual URL shortening site that I use – Tiny URL at http://www.tiny.cc - stopped working properly due to demand. The website wouldn’t load. More crucially someone Twittered me to tell me that an earlier link I had posted was now pointing somewhere completely different.

So I had a look about and found a new service: Trim, found at http://tr.im/. This has several advantages over Tiny URL. For one, it produces shorter URLs – the name of the game. But also it lets you lets you create an account, plus post directly into Twitter, and it provides stats on how many times the link has been clicked on.

Trim or Tweak?

Unbelievably, while I was testing out Trim, I received an email in my inbox which was a press release pointing to another URL shortening service that has just launched – TweaK, which announces itself as “a revolutionary new URL shortening service” and can be found at http://www.tweak.tk.

What’s interesting about this is that TweaK is working with the actual dot-tk registry and so uses new tk domains i.e. http://something.tk rather than http://url-service.xx/shorturl. The .tk registry is set aside for Tokelau – a tiny island north-east of Australia. ICANN redelegated .tk to the government of Tokelau in January 2006.

Anyway, TweaK appears to offer the same service as Trim – account, direct posting to Twitter etc. So I suppose the best test is how tiny can it make those URLs.

A URL shortening showdown

So let’s go:

http://kierenmccarthy.com/ becomes:

Hang on – TweaK isn’t shortening the URL, it is trying to give me a free .tk domain address. Bit annoying. Maybe it needs a longer URL and not just a domain name. Let’s try:

http://kierenmccarthy.com/2009/01/22/nominet-board-fights-roll-on/

Becomes:

http://tr.im/k2d1 and

http://j9bwe.tk

TweaK wins by two characters.

Here a Google Maps link to where I am currently sitting: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=4676+Admiralty+Way,+ca,+90292&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=36.915634,90.615234&ie=UTF8&ll=33.980485,-118.440042&spn=0.009448,0.022123&t=h&z=16&iwloc=A

http://tr.im/k2dN and

http://ejl1c.tk

Yep, same result – 15 characters for TweaK, but 17 for Trim. That said, TweaK is a bit clunky at the moment. And slow. Trim definitely has usability. So, despite the extra two characters, I’m going with Trim for the moment.

Anyway, back to my initial point – if companies are building these sorts of services then I think Twitter is pretty much here to stay.

I have long said that Google is going to become the new Microsoft. People forget that Microsoft was once also a poster-child, before its control over the majority of the world’s operating systems turned it into a monster.

The fact is that Google has a dangerous amount of power and it is only a matter of time before that level of power corrupts. The company has gone beyond providing neat, market-changing products for free and has started to dictate what is allowed online through the rules it creates. Again, it is only a matter of time before those rules start being bent in favour of the corporation, rather than the improvement of its products or an improved end-user experience.

So, my first quick example of where Google has a dangerous amount of power. This site – kierenmccarthy.com and my other main site kierenmccarthy.co.uk – have this morning completely disappeared from Google. Last night my sites existed, this morning, they do not.

Why? Is it because I am a cyber-criminal, or because I am posting copyrighted or illicit material? No, it is because I decide to redirect some links from my .co.uk site to my .com site. I was trying to build up awareness of the dotcom site and make it more professional and then turn the .co.uk site into a more personal site. So I have copied the exact same content from my .co.uk site to the .com site and then added in a redirect. I have done this for approximately 20 pages.

And that was enough for Google to completely delist both sites and as a result visitors have plummeted – because a huge number of online users use Google to find material online.

Hijacking

So I do a bit of research and it turns out that redirects are increasingly used by domain hijackers. They hack into the account of a popular domain and then redirect traffic to one of their sites – which they cover in ads (probably using Google Adsense) and then make a profit from.

So Google has instituted some kind of procedure – it is unclear what exactly because it won’t tell you – that attempts to identify this sort of behaviour and then acts (without notice) immediately by cutting all ties. No doubt this is all intended to be in the service of the average Internet user.

Except – and here is the big problem – Google isn’t responding to complaints about where this approach doesn’t work. In fact, from various webmaster pages I have found online, this problem has been going on for at least nine months and no one has heard anything from Google.

Now, even a cursory look at my websites would make it clear that my redirects are entirely legitimate. Except of course, because there are millions of websites out there, Google would have to have several dedicated people just working on this one tiny aspect of the workings of the domain name system in order to fix the problem. Instead what it does is cut you off, and then allow its automated systems to revisit the site at a later date (estimates for this particular breach of Google Rules is 90 days) to see if anything has changed.

Getting away with it

Now Google is not going to dedicate hundreds of employees to doing these administrative tasks because:
a) It doesn’t have to
b) It can claim it is protecting the majority of Internet users
c) It is a for-profit company and there is no financial come back on it

What will happen is that these problems will get bigger, people will sue Google, Google will build a crack team of lawyers and spend more each year knocking down any lawsuits and – if the lawsuits on one particular aspect get too big or too expensive – it will make small changes to its systems.

At some point – the crucial turning point in it becoming the inevitable monster it will become – Google will decide that, despite the risk of lawsuits, it is in the corporation’s wider interests to not make a change that directly impinges Internet users. And after it does that a few times, eventually the US government and the European Union will take it to court – exactly as has happened with Microsoft.

In the meantime however, I am penalised for an entirely legitimate action that has nothing whatsoever to do with Google. I have had no choice but to adjust my behaviour, change what I want to do online in order to fit in with Google Rules. I have killed the redirects – and now I have to see how long it will be before the majority of Internet users are able to see my websites again.

Update: Approximately eight hours after I posted this article about nine hours after I killed my redirects, this website has again been listed in Google.

The redirects were only in place from 10pm to 7am yesterday. So now I’m uncertain about whether to experiment with this a bit and see what the process is.

I’m also pondering whether this blog post itself captured attention or whether it was purely automated. Views and experiences welcome.

The site is currently being populated with information so expect to find it out-of-date and jumpy at the moment. Please come back soon when it should be a veritable feast of journalistic delights.

For those interested in Internet things – and in this case the sexy side of the Internet, Facebook and all that stuff – there is an interesting conference due to start in two hours in Ottawa, Canada.

I know because I’m here and I’m on of two official bloggers. See can see the full agenda here, and the front page to the blog, which I will be updating all day can be found here.

The conference is basically bringing together experts from across the world to discuss what these latest Web2.0 technologies – which the OECD has placed under the banner “the participative web” – mean, what impact they will, what we should do and not do about the societal, business and political changes they invoke and so on. The reason why this is important is because the OECD is one of the full bodies in the world that the world’s most powerful governments listen to.

So check it out. Reply to my blog posts – if they’re pertinent I’ll read em out in the meeting.