Google

All good things must come to an end, including summer holidays and bull markets. The bull run in US shares that began in the aftermath of the financial crisis in March 2009 has now officially passed the previous record of 3,452 more-up-than-down days from October 1990 to March 2000. This time round, the S&P500 index of US stocks has risen by more than 300 per cent — and that rise has continued throughout Donald Trump’s reign, despite his trade war threats and other follies. But it has not been reflected in major European markets, which have drifted sideways, and has been increasingly sustained by a small number of top tech stocks that have outperformed everything else on the planet.

Those twice-weekly sales emails from Foxtons that the recent GDPR clean-up has failed to stop have lately been spattered with the words ‘recent price reduction’ in big red capitals. Hence no surprise that the glossy estate agent and bellwether of London residential property has just reported a first-half loss of £2.8 million, compared to £3.8 million profit in the first half of last year and reflecting a sharp drop in sales revenues. Chief executive Nic Budden says his marketplace ‘is undergoing a sustained period of very low activity levels’.

I was worried that going to the autonomous vehicle exhibition in Stuttgart would be tantamount to an atheist walking into St Peter’s while the Pope was conducting a mass. There is something religious about the fervour with which adherents to the driverless credo practise their faith and promise us a new kingdom. Their proselytising has indeed convinced many. Politicians are making outlandish statements, such as Jesse Norman’s two weeks ago, that ‘Our entire use of roads is to be revolutionised by autonomous vehicles’, and pouring large sums — a promised £180 million so far — into bizarre research projects such as the development of strange robot cars slower than a Reliant Robin and allowed only on pavements in Milton Keynes.

From the outside it all looked haphazard and frenzied. A campaign that was skidding from scandal to crisis on its way to total defeat. That’s not how it felt inside the ‘Project Alamo’ offices in San Antonio, Texas where Trump’s digital division — led by Brad Parscale, who’d worked previously with Trump’s estate division setting up websites — was running one of the most sophisticated data-led election campaigns ever. Once Trump’s nomination was secured, the Republican Party heavyweights moved in, and so did seconded staff from Facebook and Google, there to help their well-paying clients best use their platforms to reach voters.

The giants of the internet have long said that they are not publishers but mere platforms — or couriers — of the new information age. Companies such as Google and Facebook insist that they’re the digital equivalent of the vans, newsagents and paperboys who distribute what other people publish. So they ought not to be held responsible for it. In the early years of the internet, their argument made sense. Most news and comment came from newspapers and magazines (like this one). But then social media arrived and restraint vanished. Military-grade email encryption has emerged as standard, giving security to those who don’t want their email hacked, but also cover to criminal networks.

Scams are nothing new. From the Nigerian Prince who needs our help transferring money to the glut of fake goods sold as genuine articles, scams are here to stay. But forget the cheap Louis Vuitton knock-offs – the new battleground is UK savers. UK savers are perfect targets. They have money readily available (at times tens of thousands of pounds) and are desperate to beat the paltry 1% that most big banks are touting. Over the last few years, savers chasing the best available rates have also become used to a lot of new names popping up in best buy tables. These new savings-focused banks include Charter Savings Bank and even Al Rayan Bank, neither of which are household names. Combined, these factors have helped to make savers deeply vulnerable targets.

People who feel unkindly disposed towards economic migrants are chemically imbalanced, according to a study from the University of Bonn. More specifically, they are deficient in oxytocin, a neuropeptide hormone sometimes known as the ‘cuddle drug’ because of its ability to turn normal human beings into simpering halfwits. Psychologists ran a series of studies in which Germans were asked how much money they would like to give to, say, Tariq and Mohammed, who have just arrived here from Syria. ‘Nothing at all, unless they intend to spend it on a ticket home’ is of course the correct response, and indeed many Germans initially concurred with this. However, after they were bunged some oxytocin they were handing out the dosh willy-nilly. Remarkable.

Earlier this week, a technology website published an internal memo written by an employee of Google called James Damore criticising the company’s efforts to diversify its workforce. This is where-angels-fear-to-tread territory. The America technology sector has come under heavy fire for a number of years for failing to hire and promote enough women and Google is currently being investigated by the US Department of Labour for allegedly under-paying its female employees. But what makes this memo particularly controversial is that Damore takes Google to task for discriminating in favour of women. He begins by saying he is pro-diversity and accepts that one of the reasons women don’t constitute 50 per cent of the workforce in the tech industry is because of sexism.

Home In preparation for the vote on the Queen’s Speech, the Government, after weeks of negotiations, bought the support of the Democratic Unionist Party in the House of Commons by promising to spend a billion or two pounds in Northern Ireland on broadband and other good things. In reply to expostulations from the Opposition, Nigel Dodds, the parliamentary leader of the DUP, told the Commons: ‘We might publish all the correspondence and conversations we had in 2010 with Labour front-benchers, and in 2015 with Labour front-benchers, and indeed also the Scottish National party, because some of the faux outrage we have heard is hypocrisy.

Google’s profits have soared in recent years. Now the company has been slapped with a fine to match, with the European Commission ordering the company to pay out £2.1bn, having ruled Google favoured its own shopping services in customers' searches. Despite the huge fine, there’s little sympathy for the company’s plight in today’s newspapers: The Sun has a surprise in store for readers today - an editorial praising the European Union. The paper backs the European Commission’s fine as both ‘long overdue and richly deserved’.

In his new book Move Fast and Break Things, the American academic Jonathan Taplin makes a decent case that, democratically speaking, the internet has gone awry. Tools and freedoms which originally promised to allow individuals to challenge the powerful, he argues, are instead exploited by the powerful to dodge the demands of society. He’s writing about copy-right and tax, mainly. But he could have been writing about political advertising. On the radio last weekend, my friend and colleague Lord Finkelstein (I don’t actually call him Lord Finkelstein) was talking about the skills of Sir Lynton Crosby, the Tory election mastermind. ‘Lots of election campaigns are taking place where you can’t see them.

Amber Rudd has vowed to ‘call time’ on tech companies who are giving terrorists ‘a place to hide’. The Home Secretary's comments come after it emerged that Westminster attacker Khalid Masood was sending encrypted message on WhatsApp in the lead-up to the attack; Rudd is ‘right to read them the Riot Act’, says the Sun, which ups the criticism of WhatsApp in its editorial this morning. The paper says that if tech companies don’t start behaving then ‘there will be no alternative’ but for the Government to bring in new legislation to force them to co-operate with the security services.

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said that on 29 March she would send a letter to Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, triggering the process of the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union. A summit of EU leaders was convened for 29 April, with the aim of briefing its negotiator, Michel Barnier. Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, elicited the support of the Scottish Parliament for her policy of seeking a second referendum on Scottish independence ‘within a short time of’ Brexit. Mrs May had dismissed her request, saying: ‘Now is not the time.’ Ms Sturgeon said an independent Scotland would seek membership of the EU and use sterling as a ‘starting point’.