It is no use saying it at the moment when “regulation” is flavour of the month but it is still a fact: state regulation usually fails, because the regulators tend to be short-sighted people who are always behind the times.

That was true of the vast bureaucracy that had “oversight” of the highly-regulated banking sector but which did nothing to prevent the bank crisis – and it is doubly true of the much smaller bureaucracy that tries to regulate abuse of the internet.

For example, pity anyone providing an internet service in the UK over the last fortnight...

Two weeks ago, the British government was obliged – probably with very little reluctance, it must be said – to enforce a European Union directive ordering ISPs to keep records of all their customers’ internet transactions for a year, allegedly, like all these things, “for security purposes”.

This week, the same British government has been criticised by the same European Union for not doing enough to clamp down on the sale of records of their customers’ internet transactions by ISPs.

The European Union likes the idea of records being kept for supposed security purposes but not for commercial purposes. Once again, it is one rule for governments and another for everyone else.

However, this is not to support the sale of confidential data by ISPs. This information is used in “behavioural targeting advertising”. This technique, the most notorious version of which is Phorm, enables advertisers to send advertisements to individual ISP customers selected on the basis of the sites those customers have visited previously.

If some businesses find this idea attractive, consider this: if a potential customer visits your website in search of a particular product, that fact may be sold to your competitor, who will then know that the customer is interested in that product and will have the ability to send an appropriate offer directly to the customer. The whole idea of Phorm is that those with it will be able to steal customers from those without it, so that it becomes practically compulsory.

One would have thought that the British authorities would not have needed the European Union to tell them that this is wrong and that they ought to stop it.

On the contrary, the British police came up with the truly astonishing defence that if you click on to a website you have given your “implied consent” to be monitored!

No doubt the real reason is that the police were probably too busy to pursue the case – going about their appointed duties of shooting Brazilian electricians, beating newspaper vendors to death, and trawling through our browsing histories “for security purposes”.