It's not surprising that Mark Zuckerberg's state-visit-style trip to Brussels got a chilly reception from EU officials. The Facebook co-founder is pleading for more regulation to solve what he and his top lobbyist Nick Clegg consider to be a failure of public policy: if governments could agree on how to regulate the internet without curbing free expression, the social network would be only too happy to comply.

This analysis entirely misdiagnoses the problem in Europeans' view: it is Facebook's business model, which hoovers up billions of users' intimate thoughts and behaviour patterns to better target ads, which is the issue...

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