I read about that article, too. While they mention spam as a problem, wouldn't it be a more obvious problem that a lot of the english text on the net is not written by native english speakers?

(Including this text here, of course)

Good point. I guess using only sites originating in
English-speaking countries would alleviate the problem, but otherwise you just have to hope the native-speaker texts vastly outweigh the others.

Oh, and it's a pity that the Economist doesn't sign their articles. But the science and technology author is an agreeable fellow, perhaps he will answer if we ask? :-) He's got a weblog at http://tomstandage.com