Martin Wolf did right opening the cage!

Sir who could have thought a year ago that we would read Martin Wolf say “Why regulators should intervene in bankers pay”, in the Financial Times, January 15, and agree that he has a valid point; that the system cannot stand to see many franchises of public confidence so savagely exploited by so few. Mind you, on a much different scale, that is exactly how we ended up turning over Venezuela into the hands of an instigator of hate.

Perhaps what we now need is a new layer of progressive taxes specially designed for those who earn more than 100 times the income per capita of the country. The argument seems also applicable to the area of intellectual property rights. When we the society agreed to award patents and invest money defending these so that new inventions would follow, we never did it in order to help the general managers of those patents to earn salaries like hedge funds managers or bankers.

But also what could be most needed, in this case for all, instead of new regulations, is to restore the power of the shareholders since as long as management can decide their own salaries, the market constraints have really not a chance to operate. There’s a fiction making its rounds in the world that the big salary checks are all well deserved and well earned. Who do you think put a spin on that theory?

In search of answers on search engines

Sir, the discussion around Google issues as in Denise Kingsmill’s “Google’s market power warrants an inquiry” June 13 and Maija Palmer’s FT front page report that same date with respect to the “European fight over storage of personal data” naturally befuddles many of us.

Clearly a search engine should mostly be valued in terms of the services it offers to the searchers but in this case it is actually the searchers that become the searched and this leads to some very strange signalling effects. In fact I would not mind if Google was allotted, by the system, to perform a maximum of free searches, let us say 20 per cent of all the searches on the web during the last 24 hours, and thereafter, in order for a Google search to be allowed, a searcher would have to demonstrate Google’s search worth, by being willing to pay a substantial amount to Google for their service.

Also, with respect to privacy issues, we suddenly read about a possible compromise that would have Google cookies expire after only 18 months instead of 30 years, as if privacy had anything to do with time. On the contrary, if privacy was indeed the case, then one would perhaps be able argue that it is only after 30 years that Google could be allowed to use any personal data.

PS. We might need a Global Web Constitution