In the last week or so I’ve found myself wanting to roar Oh come off it! with increasing regularity.

As media coverage of so-called ‘super-injunctions’ has gathered momentum, so the attendant criticism of privacy laws from the press and some politicians has become correspondingly self-serving and hypocritical.

Watching the journalistic frenzy you might naturally have assumed some serious misfeasance by an elected official or major corporation. Instead we find a past-his-prime Premiership footballer who is alleged to have had an affair with a contestant from Big Brother (yes, that is pretty much the extent of her cv), who, it’s suggested, then sought to benefit financially from the relationship with the help of ‘publicist’ Max Clifford and a national newspaper.

Compare this with the virtual media black-out over claims of phone hacking by newspapers which, if proven, could point to systematic illegality by journalists over a period of several years.

In point of fact we have a perfectly good law of privacy in the UK as things stand, embodied in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and written into English law by the Human Rights Act. It says simply that everyone has the right to a private life, but this must always be balanced against national security, public safety, the country’s economic well-being, preventing disorder or crime, protecting health or morals, and protecting the rights and freedoms of others.

Despite claims to the contrary by some disingenuous politicians, the judges are simply applying the law as enacted by Parliament. Lib Dem MP John Hemming, who used Parliamentary privilege earlier this week to ‘out’ the footballer at the centre of the debate, did so not because the issue concerns one of his constituents, nor because he has some other professional interest in the matter. It appears he just likes seeing his name trending high on Twitter.

Which brings us to one of the genuinely vital issues of principle at stake here, viz. the role of the internet and how it should be regulated.

Twitter is being held up as the reason super-injunctions are now unsustainable. But this too is self-serving: the argument being in effect that if you can persuade enough internet users to flout the law then that should trump the view of a judge (regardless that many see Twitter as only one step up from the pub, and that some Twitterati may have allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by one-sided and ill-informed media coverage).

Even the UK Culture Minister, Jeremy Hunt, has jumped on his high horse, claiming recently that “The internet is a very powerful force that you can’t buck.” This sounds familiar. In the early days of the dot-com boom entrepreneurs claimed that regulating the web was a technological impossibility. It therefore followed that e-commerce should be tax free (because there was no way to record revenue across cyberspace) and ISPs should be absolved of responsibility for tracking down rascists and hackers (because there was no way to police content). Most of us thought these hoary old arguments had been put to bed. The coup de grâce was Yahoo’s attempt to convince French authorities it couldn’t block the sale of Nazi paraphernalia over its servers. It could, and it did, once the French refused to blink.

The French have stepped into the fray once again this week, with President Nicolas Sarkozy opening the first ever e-G8 forum in Paris, bringing together leading figures from the tech industry to discus the impact of the internet. (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Google's Eric Schmidt are among those due to speak.)

Sarkozy has urged delegates to work with governments to find a consensus on web rules, saying there’s a “collective responsibility” to ensure good governance. “The world you represent is not a parallel universe where legal and moral rules and more generally all the basic rules that govern society in democratic countries do not apply,” he said. “Don’t forget that behind every anonymous internet user there is a real citizen who lives in a society, a culture, an organised nation, with rules to which he adheres.”

Although David Cameron immediately sought to distance himself from the French President’s comments he has already bowed to domestic pressure by asking a cross-party committee of MPs and peers to look at the implications of social media in the wake of recent events. Let us hope that the quality of the debate improves. So far the only real conclusion we can draw is that sex still sells and the press want to supply as much of it as possible...