Twitter is coming to London, despite the super-injunction row it got pulled into last week.
The company’s deal-maker Tony Wang has already moved across the Atlantic with his family, and is starting work on building a new London-based team to look after Twitter’s business in the U.K. and Europe.
The injunction row, centered on a famous footballer whose name is all over Twitter but who cannot be named by the media as a result of the court ruling, has become a national joke in the U.K.
Everyone – and I mean everyone, even the Prime Minister – knows who the footballer is, and the details of the relationship he is alleged to have had. His name is everywhere on the internet, not just Twitter. If he wants to take on the whole internet, that’s up to him, but it seems unlikely that the court order is enforceable anymore. The whole thing has become a farce.
The injunction only caught Twitter in its wake as it flew past. The misguided lawyers involved in the case didn’t have any particular bone to pick with Twitter – presumably, they did what their even more misguided client asked them to.
Tony Wang’s move to the U.K. will have been planned long in advance, along with the adverts for U.K.-based jobs on Twitter’s website. Twitter is already a huge business (if not, yet, a huge money-maker), and isn’t going to let something like a ridiculous British legal wrangle get in its way.
(Via FT)