The case of Google bullying the New America Foundation into sacking the Internet regulation team has gone a million miles around Twitter and the world by now, but I thought I’d share something from the vault, the TYReserve if you will. This POLITICO piece, with its attendant technical appendix, was always meant to be followed…
Read More TYRchive! on Google’s European lobbying blitzReading the Institute for Government’s report on Universal Credit, I was struck by two related things. First of all, the project was powered forward by people who didn’t bear any responsibility for its implementation. Whenever it ran into people who needed to care about how it would work, it hit opposition. Lord Freud’s original skunkworks…
Read More Universal Credit: the history of an IT project failureOver at the Pol, I’ve been trying to answer the question: how long until robots take Brussels lobbyists’ expense accounts? Software. It’s eating the world, they say. You may already have guessed that this is a reprise of Project Lobster, and you’d be right. The inputs are the European Transparency Register, which lists lobbyists and…
Read More Eurolobster: a technical appendixThe main response to the nomination of Lord Hill for European commissioner was widely described as incomprehension. This was literally true; nobody understood who he was. But they didn’t fail to understand because Hill is so obscure, but rather because they were ignorant. Martin Schulz, for example, made a fool of himself as follows: “I…
Read More HillIt’s not that Google has become the US’s second biggest spender lobbying – the US telcos, a notoriously ferocious lobby, are the biggest and their behaviour imposes it. It’s this: In May 2012, the law school at George Mason University hosted a forum billed as a “vibrant discussion” about Internet search competition. Many of the…
Read More Oh, Google.A thing called “Refined Practice” has made some charts of the first eight months of the lobbying data, here. I have two points. Point the first, their charts are force-directed bubbles, but they don’t use any network analysis, so once the force-directed algo converges, you get a succession of bubbles of varying sizes in a…
Read More RefinedSo Andy Coulson, famously, was subject to a background check by Control Risks before joining Downing St. There was some doubt as to whether he had actually gone through the positive vetting process. Supposedly he had, and he was cleared to see “Strap 1” material. But then it turned out in fact the DVA hadn’t…
Read More We didn’t let Coulson see anything sensitive except for the SIGINTOK, so Lynton Crosby is all better now so long as conditions. What are these conditions? After all, they define the limits of acceptable behaviour in our society. It looks like he’s not allowed, or won’t be allowed, or shouldn’t have been allowed to take part in ministerial meetings or sight government documents. The interesting…
Read More Lynton Crosby briefs the Cabinet. Vomit now, it will save timeOK, a bit of Lobster. Two things have happened recently to up my tuit on the project. First, I learned that Drew Conway of the Zero Intelligence Agents blog has given NetworkX the ability to generate a force-directed graph in d3.js, which you can stick right in a web page. Second, I’ve been reading the…
Read More Project Lobster user storiesSo, Create Streets. Inside Housing has the story, pointing out that the thing campaigning for knocking down high-rise social housing in south London is basically a group of Tories. But there’s a bit more, or less, to it than that. Their wesbite won’t tell you whether they are a company, a charity, a lobby, or…
Read More A slightly less simple plan.