WORLD VIEW: ‘It’s called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this.”

So said Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt this week in a Bloomberg interview defending the company’s use of legal incentives in Britain, Ireland and other states to minimise worldwide taxation and therefore maximise worldwide profits. He spoke as a perfect storm engulfed the company on three fronts.

Governments throughout Europe bristled at the tax practice and vowed to bring large multinationals more into the mainstream of corporate taxation and anti-trust legislation in an age of austerity. In Dubai the International Telecommunication Union discussed how to update the treaty governing the internet. And in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria, parliaments and courts are deciding whether online news aggregators should pay copyright fees to media whose work they reference for advertising.