1) His comment that democracy needs newspapers shows that ‘a moment’s thought’ was not enough. Democracy needs investigative reporting and freedom to publish reports. Newspapers were just a 19th century technology. Porter is arguing that the government should shut down some media outlets and licence others is a very dangerous interference with our liberties.

2) Google’s Chinese service complies with Chinese law, just as Google complied with UK law over the Baby P case, and German law about indexing Nazi sites. That’s not “brattish amorality”. Some basic fact checking would have improved the article. If Porter wants to argue that a publisher should be selective about which laws it obeys, let him argue the case, instead of carelessly throwing mud.

3) Google UK returns 122,000 pages for ‘Henry Porter’ and the top matches are to his own website, his Guardian blog, and a paid link to Amazon promoting his novels! He seems quite happy to use Google to help himsef earn a living. His choice. His hypocrisy.

4) Porter’s editors at GMG allow all their content to be indexed by Google. They could block Google bots from crawling their pages but they don’t. Their choice.

So he’s a hypocrite employed by a hypocrite to advocate government restrictions on the free circulation of journalism, in the interests of democracy making money.