Britain may impose new taxes on tech giants like Google and Facebook unless they do more to combat online extremism by taking down material aimed at radicalising people or helping them to prepare attacks, the country's security minister said. Ben Wallace accused tech firms of being happy to sell people's data but not to give it to the government which was being forced to spend vast sums on de-radicalisation programmes, surveillance and other counter-terrorism measures.

"If they continue to be less than co-operative, we should look at things like tax as a way of incentivis_ing them or compensating for their inaction," Wallace told the Sunday Times newspaper in an interview. He accused the tech giants of putting private profit before public safety. "We should stop pretending that because they sit on beanbags in T-shirts they are not ruthless profiteers," he said. "They will ruthlessly sell our details to loans and soft-porn companies but not give it to our democratically elected government." Britain suffered a series of attacks by Islamic extremists between March and June this year that killed a total of 36 people.

Copyright Reuters, 2018