The report on this lengthy interrogation is now out. And guess what: the committee is less than impressed with Google’s performance. Indeed, the language of the report could only constitute a more direct accusation of lying if, well, it used that word.

Here’s committee chair Margaret Hodge:

“Google generates enormous profits in the UK. But despite an $18 billion turnover between 2006 and 2011 it paid the equivalent of just $16 million in taxes to the UK government.

“Google brazenly argued before this committee that its tax arrangements in the UK are defensible and lawful. It claimed that its advertising sales take place in Ireland, not in the UK. This argument is deeply unconvincing and has been undermined by information from whistleblowers, including ex-employees of Google, who told us that UK based staff are engaged in selling.

“The staff in Ireland simply process the bills. Google also conceded at this second hearing that its engineers in the UK are contributing to product development. The company’s highly contrived tax arrangement has no purpose other than to enable the company to avoid UK corporation tax.”

Hodge went on to say Google wouldn’t be able to repair its reputation until it “arranges to pay its fair share of tax in the country where it earns the profits from the business it conducts.” Whether or not Google values its reputation over the money it saves remains to be seen.

The committee did also point out the flipside to all this, which is that the British tax authorities’ rules are over-complex and riddled with loopholes. However, it argued that Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) should “now fully investigate Google in the light of the evidence provided by whistleblowers”, because it now looks like the company was not acting lawfully.

Who’d have thought there was something wrong with paying corporate tax at a rate of 0.09 percent?

Anyway, I’ve spoken to HMRC but it says it won’t discuss any individual or business’s tax affairs. So, even if it does open an investigation into Google, we won’t know until it comes out through Google’s U.S. filings.

And here’s what Google had to say in response to the report:

“As we’ve always said, Google complies with all the tax rules in the UK, and it is the politicians who make those rules. It’s clear from this report that the Public Accounts Committee wants to see international companies paying more tax where their customers are located, but that’s not how the rules operate today. We welcome the call to make the current system simpler and more transparent.”

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That’s kind of unsurprising, as EE currently has a monopoly on 4G in the UK — the carrier has been “refarming” all the lovely 2G 1800MHz spectrum it already holds for 4G services, and rivals will only enter the LTE game later this summer using other spectrum they bought at auction earlier this year. Still, EE’s numbers seem to show an acceleration in takeup, as less than 2 months ago it reported a total of 318,000 LTE subscribers.

That said, with those rivals (Vodafone, O2 and Three) about to launch their own 4G services, EE seems aware that it needs to evolve its own offering. So it’s about to start providing two new twists, namely shared 4G plans – for multi-device or multi-person use – and its first pay-as-you-go 4G plans, for tablets and laptops only.

Pricing and availability are yet to be announced, but EE is coming to the end of its 4G-exclusivity honeymoon phase and it would be foolish to make these offerings too pricey. Of course, it would be pretty dumb to make them too cheap either – no-one in the uber-competitive British mobile market wants a race to the bottom just as they spend billions upgrading their networks.

“By the end of June, we will have rolled out 4G across 55 percent of the population, and will continue to switch on new towns and cities,” EE CEO Olaf Swantee said in a statement. ” And with commuters spending an average of 75 minutes travelling every day, EE will also roll out 4G across the busiest airports, commuter routes and shopping centres across the UK.”

EE aims to have 98 percent population coverage by the end of 2014. The next towns and cities on its rollout list are Aberdeen, Bath, Bournemouth, Brighton, Cambridge, Ipswich, Middlesbrough, Northampton, Norwich, Poole, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Swansea and York.

Incidentally, EE says its average 4G download speed is 19.4 Mbps at the moment. That’s decent, but it’s worth noting that its average download speed across both 3G and 4G is a still-respectable 13.6 Mbps — bearing in mind that EE has around 26 million customers, 98 percent of whom will still be on 3G technology, that’s a handy reminder that modern HSPA networks can do a pretty good job too.

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The news was first broken by The Guardian (see disclosure) on the weekend, and was subsequently confirmed to me by the National Audit Office (NAO) itself on Monday morning. The upcoming investigation was triggered by member of parliament Helen Goodman, who complained that the government “failed to get value for money” in the auction.

“It’s a little early to say exactly what we’re going to be looking at,” a spokesman for the NAO told me. “We will soon be in a position to put a remit of the study and a timescale on our website.”

This should be an interesting one. The telecoms regulator Ofcom, which has hailed the result as a success, has always been crystal clear on the fact that its auction was not designed to raise the maximum revenue possible (everyone has learned their lessons from the £22.5 billion 3G auction a dozen years ago, which nearly crippled the industry), but rather to keep the market competitive and make sure as many people as possible get coverage.

As for the source of the £3.5 billion figure floated by the government, there seems to be a disturbing amount of buck-passing going on. As I wrote on the auction’s completion in February:

“The reserve price for the auction was £1.3 billion, although the government had budgeted for it to bring in £3.5 billion. Does that make the result disappointing? That depends on whether you see the government forecast as politically motivated or focused on the actual worth of the spectrum. There was never much justification given for the £3.5 billion figure, and no-one appears to be taking responsibility for it — today the Treasury told me to take my questions about the figure’s rationale to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and the DCMS told me to ask the Treasury.”

Now, according to The Guardian, the Treasury is claiming the figure came out of the Office for Budget Responsibility. Whoever came up with it, I’ve not seen a scrap of the rationale behind it.

It is worth noting that the £3.5 billion figure was floated last year at a time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, was trying to maintain that the national deficit would fall, not rise, in 2013. Without the predicted boost from the spectrum auction, the margin would have been much smaller. And, as it turned out in last month’s Budget statement, the deficit for 2013 is indeed up on that for 2012, not down.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media, which publishes The Guardian, is a minority investor in GigaOM.

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The idea, much as it was with printed content, is to archive the U.K.’s cultural and intellectual output. The libraries — including the British Library, the national libraries of Scotland and Wales, Trinity College Library Dublin, the Bodleian Libraries and Cambridge University Library — will be allowed to scrape and store everything on the .uk domain, and to demand copies of ebooks, e-journals and even CD-ROMs published in the U.K.

Here’s an interesting snippet from the FAQs:

“Legal Deposit Libraries will copy U.K.-published material from the internet, including freely accessible material on the open web. They are also entitled to harvest copies of password-protected or paid-for material, but are putting alternative arrangements in place for any publisher who prefers to deliver such material to them instead.”

A British Library spokesman confirmed to me on Friday that this was a reference to paywalled content. However, given that people will only be able to access the archive by physically visiting the libraries in question, and that there will be a seven-day lag between publication and archiving, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem for the publishers.

The spokesman said social media output would also be included, “as long as it is U.K.-based and openly available on the web,” and confirmed that this includes identifiably U.K.-based individuals’ Twitter feeds, although “we’d need to select people because it’s a .com” — no Library of Congress-style catch-all approach, then.

“The main thing we’re trying to capture first time round is .uk domain websites,” the spokesman added, while also stressing that no non-public social media material would be scraped.

On the book publishing side, The Bookseller reported that priority will be given to ebook-only publishers. This is presumably because those who aren’t ebook only are already submitting their books under the previously existing legal deposit scheme.

So why is this all happening? As my colleague Mathew Ingram pointed out last year, digital content can often be ephemeral and easily lost. That sentiment was echoed on Friday by British Library chief executive Roly Keating:

“Ten years ago, there was a very real danger of a black hole opening up and swallowing our digital heritage, with millions of web pages, e-publications and other non-print items falling through the cracks of a system that was devised primarily to capture ink and paper.

The regulations now coming into force make digital legal deposit a reality, and ensure that the Legal Deposit Libraries themselves are able to evolve — collecting, preserving and providing long-term access to the profusion of cultural and intellectual content appearing online or in other digital formats.”

The U.K. is not the first country to update its legal deposit rules in this way – similar requirements are in place in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and New Zealand.

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The operator’s latest marketing tactic involves one of London’s greatest icons: the Hackney carriage, or “black cab” as most people call it. EE has put a 4G MiFi router into 50 of the vehicles in London and Birmingham (40 in the former, 10 in the latter), and passengers will be able to use the service for free.

Displaying a true marketing professional’s grasp of physics, EE brand chief Spencer McHugh claimed in a statement that users will be able to “browse, download, catch up on emails, Tweet and check Facebook literally at the speed of light”.

EE’s three-month promotion is not the first to combine the black cab with wireless connectivity. Back in December, ad firm Eyetease said it had gained approval from London’s transport authorities to put hotspots into the vehicles, with users needing to watch a 15-second ad in order to get 15 minutes of free surfing. The ISP Virgin Media also gains a great deal of exposure by providing Wi-Fi for commuters in certain London Underground stations.

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Bill Ford is, of course, the great-grandson of Henry Ford, and the executive chairman of the company that bears his name. He also co-founded a venture capital firm called Fontinalis Partners that focuses on next-generation mobile technologies. Fontinalis is leading a $2.8 million investment round in Masabi with participation from London’s MMC Ventures and existing backer m8 Capital. The company has already gone through several funding rounds, raising $2 million in 2010 and $4 million in 2011. m8 led both rounds.

London-based Masabi said that the strategic investment is aimed at promoting its mobile ticketing technology to U.S. transit agencies, building off of its success in the U.K. (it has 13 transit contracts across the pond), and its recent deployment with Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. To date, the company claims it has processed $50 million in ticket sales worldwide and $3 million alone from the MBTA since its system went live in November.

Masabi’s key product is called JustRide, a cloud-based end-to-end ticketing platform that allows riders to purchase, manage and store transit tickets and passes in their mobile phones. Users can buy tickets from an app in their smartphones rather than wait in ticket lines. For train systems with conductors, the tickets show up as animated watermarks easily identified by ticket takers. For automated ticket systems, the app will display a QR code that will get you through the turnstile. Masabi is also upgrading its software to support near-field communications (NFC) in the future.

Boston, for instance, still utilizes smart card ticketing – which also can be linked to JustRide platform – but the gradual move of its smartphone-toting ridership to the cloud-based ticketing service saves it millions of dollars in ticketing machine and backend infrastructure.

Though smartphone-initiated mobile payments haven’t exactly taken off in the U.S., transit ticketing is starting to become a key component of the digital wallet. The carriers’ mobile wallet Isis may still be limited to two cities, but it’s become popular as a mobile pass for Salt Lake City’s public transit system. Amtrak has started accepting digital tickets on the iPhone, and all of the major airlines now have boarding pass features in their apps.

As for Ford’s interest in public transit technologies, the chairman appears to be throwing his money in the same direction as his rhetoric. Ford has spoken several times about how, at the current rate of growth, the number of cars on the world’s highways would soon lead to massive congestion problems. His proposed answer is coordination between public transit and intelligent traffic management systems to better control of the flow of billions of people as they go about their daily lives.

Fontinalis has invested in many startups designed to make cars smarter such as Streetline, Life360 and Parkmobile, but it’s also invested in companies like Masabi and Wheelz, which go against Ford’s vested interest in individual car ownership.

Bill Ford image courtesy jurvetson via Compfight cc

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Rather than fit into the headphone jack of a smartphone, the new reader pairs to the an iPhone or Android device via Bluetooth. And instead of swiping the card’s magnetic strip, the card is inserted into the reader so it can access the smart-chip embedded within typical European debit and credit cards, while the keypad is used for entering the customer’s PIN.

PayPal plans to showcase the new reader and service at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week, but U.K. merchants will have to wait a bit before they can get their hands on Here. According to PayPal’s blog, the company will roll out the service to select U.K. businesses in the coming months, after which it will launch nationwide. Following the U.K. launch, PayPal will roll out Here in other European countries, though it didn’t identify any by name.

The company faces stiff competition in Europe, with local rivals including iZettle, Payleven, mPowa, Adyen and SumUp.

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The auction took in 250MHz of spectrum in the 2.6GHz band, which is high-bandwidth and good for urban deployments, and the 800MHz band, which is lower-bandwidth but longer-distance and better for rural deployments. EE (which already runs 4G on reused 2G spectrum) and Vodafone both won spectrum in both bands, while Three and O2 (Telefonica) each won spectrum in the 800MHz band. Niche Spectrum Ventures (a BT subsidiary) won 2.6GHz spectrum.

The reserve price for the auction was £1.3 billion, although the government had budgeted for it to bring in £3.5 billion. Does that make the result disappointing? That depends on whether you see the government forecast as politically motivated or focused on the actual worth of the spectrum. There was never much justification given for the £3.5 billion figure, and no-one appears to be taking responsibility for it — today the Treasury told me to take my questions about the figure’s rationale to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and the DCMS told me to ask the Treasury.

According to the regulator Ofcom, new services should roll out in about six months’ time, and the whole of the UK will be able to receive 4G services “by the end of 2017 at the latest”. This will partly be helped by an obligation placed on Telefonica’s O2 to ensure coverage for at least 98 percent of the UK population through its own network alone.

Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards said this would be good news for parts of the country where mobile broadband is currently scarce:

“This is a positive outcome for competition in the UK, which will lead to faster and more widespread mobile broadband, and substantial benefits for consumers and businesses across the country. We are confident that the UK will be among the most competitive markets in the world for 4G services.”

Here’s who won what:

It’s worth remembering that this represents BT’s return to mobile network operator status, after spinning out BT Cellnet (now O2) in 2002. However, as expected, the operator will not be building a national network like the others. According to a statement, the spectrum will let BT “provide its business and consumer customers with an enhanced range of mobile broadband services, building on its existing strength in Wi-Fi”.

This story was updated several times throughout the day as additional information became available.

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This week Tamiz made wave with an appeal against Google, which he was trying to sue over defamatory comments about him made on Blogger posting. In a case that goes back to 2011, Tamiz had argued that Google was effectively the publisher of a series of comments calling him, falsely, a thief and a drug dealer, and should have deleted them as soon as they were made aware of them. Google did delete the comments, but only after a five week gap.

Tamiz is familiar with online controversy: one reason he was a lightning rod for angry comments in the first place was because, he stepped down as a local election candidate in 2011 after calling Margate’s women “sluts” on Facebook. And so, when he did not originally win his case — the first judge ruling that Google was not the publisher of the comments — he appealed to a higher court. There Google’s inaction was found to be troubling, though it did not actually overturn the libel ruling itself.

As the Financial Times reported:

Although Lord Justice Richards and Lord Justice Sullivan agreed with the original ruling that Google was not the primary or secondary publisher of the content it hosted, they said it was “at least arguable that some point after notification Google became liable for continued publication of the material”.

The Lords Justice likened the situation to a 1930s court case in which a golf club was held responsible for defamatory material left on its noticeboard because it failed to remove it after it was notified.

Cue the shrill sound of the press screeching into action. “Blogger.com libel case opens door for internet giant being required to monitor users’ posts”, squealed the Daily Mail with barely contained delight. Except, as it outlines in the story, the headline is essentially trolling — Tamiz was denied his libel claim and asked to pay 50 percent of Google’s legal costs: likely to be a tidy sum. And it’s a stretch to suggest, as much commentary does, that this is another step towards internet regulation — asking a company to respond to notices of illegal content may not be popular (just see the DMCA) but it is reasonable to expect them to comply with local jurisdiction.

Still, Tamiz — and the kerfuffle around his case — does show the amount of energy being expended around online libel in Britain right now.

Defamation laws in the U.K. are notoriously harsh, in large part because they lean in favor of the plaintiff and put the burden of proof on the defendant: it’s a case of “prove your comments were true” rather than “prove their comments were false”.

And the precedent for defamation in online publishing stretches back 15 years, to the case of Godfrey v Demon Internet Service, in which a physics lecturer sued an ISP over comments made in a Usenet group it hosted: the ISP settled the case, because a pre-trial ruling intimated that it was potentially culpable since, despite knowledge of the situation, refused to act for 10 days. Although the award was small — just £15,000 in 1997, the equivalent of around $33,000 today — it has laid the groundwork in Britain.

It’s one major reason many media companies employ battalions of comment moderators, and carefully police the comment threads on their own stories.

But remember, we are all media companies now. And that means that we are all open to the same set of rules. There have also been plenty of high-profile cases on Twitter and Facebook against individual users, but so far there has not been much success in taking on platform providers themselves. Just last week a judge in Northern Ireland ruled that while anonymous comments made on Facebook were defamatory, Facebook itself was not liable.

Still, with Godfrey in the background and more and more cases coming along, you can understand why people see Tamiz’s case as another push at a brick in the wall between platforms and publishing.

Yes, everyone’s a media company now: and eventually that will go for Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest as much as it does you and me.

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The hobbyists have established a startup called The Flexiscale Company, which launched a Kickstarter project on Monday that aims to fund the production of model kits for several old and very obscure locomotives, the Ffestiniog Englands. If recently-announced plans to 3D-print a moon base are all about creating futuristic designs, The Flexiscale Company is trying to recreate designs of the past.

Copying trains with lasers

What’s fascinating is the accuracy with which they can achieve this. Last year Chris Thorpe, the man behind the project, approached a firm called Digital Surveys that was more used to modelling for the energy sector. He got someone from the company to come over with his equipment and laser-scan Winifred, an 1885 steam engine that had recently returned to the UK for restoration after a 40-year stint lying in storage under the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

This was the result:

With that data in hand, Thorpe was able to do two things. First, he sent it off to the French 3D-printing firm Sculpteo to make a 1:25-scale model of Winifred. As he put it in a blog post:

“Even printed in the cheapest white plastic and with all of the inherent faults of the medium and process it is an exquisite model and so much more. It is an artifact of digital reproduction and the industrial revolution; both the old one powered by humans and the new one which has more computers and robots.”

However, the other thing Thorpe wanted was to recreate part of Winifred in 1:1 scale, namely her smokebox door. To test whether this would work, he sent the data for the door latch to Shapeways, which returned a copy in stainless steel: effectively a spare part for vehicle that’s more than 120 years old, complete with the patina gained by the original part over the years, with 1mm accuracy.

To make that finish even more authentic, though, The Flexiscale Company needs more accuracy in its scanning, so the four Ffestiniog Englands are being scanned with a system called Surphaser, which offers 0.2mm accuracy. That means around 10GB of data per train, since you ask.

Those who donate to the Kickstarter campaign can get the resulting model at varying sizes – in the old days scaling a model meant hard, manual work, but with this sort of data it’s becoming easy to automate. Those who donate £1,000 ($1,572) or more will also get to have themselves scanned, so a mini-me version can be the train’s driver.

The Flexiscale Company itself is unlikely to become large-scale though, Thorpe said:

“I’m doing this because I’ve always wanted these kits. I’m interested in a space where you can have the things you really want. A lot of the time you tend to buy things that aren’t optimal and you don’t tend to have a long-lasting relationship with them. I’m interested in the sustainability aspect of it as well.”

What can we learn from this?

The model train scene is about as niche as you can get, but the work being done by The Flexiscale Company will allow those with even more specialized interests to be catered for. The big model manufacturers such as Hornby are themselves testing out 3D scanning, but even there they will stick to relatively well-known engines. The Ffestiniog Englands will only be of interest to a small subset of people but, once they’ve been scanned, the trains can be made to order on demand and in a variety of sizes — economy of scale is not an issue.

Chris Thorpe presenting at the Monki Gras scaling conference in London

As for the cost of the scanning, well, that depends on what you’re scanning. The equipment being used to record locomotives costs in excess of £15,000, but it can be rented with an experienced technician for a lot less — the Surphaser scans only cost £900 per train.

The resulting product cost is pretty eye-opening. According to Thorpe, a model of a certain mass and detail may cost £160 from Hornby and around £200 from The Flexiscale Company – more, but not nearly as much more as you might suspect. For something so niche, this is remarkable.

And what about smaller objects? After all, that’s where the scanning itself can become something for the home hobbyist.

“You can use Kinect and a cheap USB-powered turntable,” Thorpe said. “There are different bits of software – the one that works the best is Artec Studio. The Artec guys make really good laser scanners, so you’re using all their knowledge.”

This stuff is being done now, and it can be achieved incredibly cheaply, so it’s probably worth starting to chew over the implications. Here are just a few of questions I have running through my mind:

• Are we going to see more heritage preservation operations go technical, with objects being scanned in the same way Google is trying to scan and record the world’s book catalog?
• Will there be any way to enforce design rights when anyone can not only disseminate schematics online, but create those schematics themselves through 3D scanning?
• How might these advances affect the servicing and repair industries, particularly in terms of after-sales support?

I don’t expect to see answers anytime soon. But in the meanwhile, if you’re interested in supporting an innovative model train startup, here’s the Kickstarter pitch:

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