There are many myths about the World Wide Web or Net, prominent amongst them the belief that it is a neutral vehicle for sharing information and opinions. A fallacious belief as the Chinese government has recently demonstrated by forcing Google to restrict the sites available in the People's Republic. Furthermore, Google has recently introduced Search History Personalisation, a system designed to deliver results tailored to an individual's interests as indicated by his previous searches. Today I discovered matters go much deeper than this. To explain.
In his reply to a eurosceptic reader's letter in the Corriere della Sera, the readers' editor, Sergio Romano, alluded to an EU document which claims that EU functionaries provide better value for money than their Westminster counterparts:
"Agli inizi di quest'anno il Parlamento europeo ha tirato una stoccata agli inglesi con un rapporto comparativo in cui si afferma che i funzionari della Commissione lavorano di più, versano un contributo più elevato al loro fondo di previdenza e sono pagati un po' meno di quelli del Regno Unito." (At the beginning of this year the European Parliament scored a hit against the English [eurosceptics] with a report which affirmed that the European Commission's officials work longer hours, pay higher social insurance contributions, and are paid less than their Westminster counterparts.)
As a europhile I was eager to read the document and searched Google UK to find it. To my surprise I could find no trace of it, only the usual Mail and Telegraph anti-EU diatribes. However, translating the search terms into Italian and putting them into Google Italia immediately produced the relevant hit:
All of which suggests that, rather than creating an international community, the Net cocoons us safely in our national comfort zones. An Englishman is protected from ever having to read anything which might disturb his xenophobic prejudices. So whilst in reality millions of English men and women don't conform to the eurosceptic stereotype, Big Brother Google has decided that their interests can be ignored in favour of the views of the majority of their compatriots. Pretty worrying, don't you think?
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