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In defence, Schmidt points to Google’s record of job creation and investment: “I understand that people are frustrated… but this is how international tax regimes work, and we have to follow the rules.” He is similarly robust when I ask whether he thinks his company has undue political influence. “Doesn’t the Guardian, and the Telegraph, and the Times? I think I could argue that the press has more impact on politics than corporations.”

And what about people who call for Google and co to do more to regulate what people – especially children – can see on the net? “The core problem,” he says, “is that the world is full of people who would like to take 99% of the information that’s on the Internet, and eliminate 1%. Everyone has their own thing they don’t like.”

More broadly, Schmidt and Cohen do have plenty of warnings about the way things are going – for instance, over governments’ tendency, even in democracies, to increase surveillance of the population. “You have to fight for your privacy, or you will lose it,” Schmidt insists. “Whenever there’s a conflict, the logic of security will trump the right to privacy.” He also talks passionately about the need to balance entrepreneurial freedom and regulation, citing the way that the U.S. railroad system was mired in corruption when it was left to private interests, and starved of innovation when the government cracked down.

Yet at heart, Google’s executive chairman is something of an optimist. He doesn’t subscribe, for example, to the idea that technology is somehow transforming our nature: the internet, he says, “is just another tool for empowering individuals”. I mention Time magazine’s recent suggestion that the web’s delivery of what you want, when you want, is turning young people into narcissists, and he makes a pained face. “To argue that this generation is different is to ignore history,” he insists. “Read the coverage about the King’s Road in the Sixties, and the pop revolution. You want to talk about narcissism? Those people all grew up, and they’re all 65 or 70 years old, and they all seem to have perfectly fine lives.”