Ban Twitter? Surely ICC should be doing the opposite?

I'm scratching my head this morning at the news that the ICC has banned the use of Twitter during the Cricket World Cup in order to reduce the likelihood of corruption and the use of inside information. I picked it up as I arrived in the office after attending a breakfast at which the Egyptian Ambassador to London told the gathered throng that events in his country, where GDP has quadrupled in the last decade, were the result not of economic hardship (since this generation is having it far better than any previous Egyptian generation), but because of the broad reach of... you've guessed it: Twitter. And on the same day as i, the newspaper, published its list of the 100 most influential tweeters in Britain (inexplicably not mentioned, by the way. I'd have thought my 100 followers would put me right up there), which outlines how close you can get to breaking news if you follow the right people. The dichotomy between these stories  seems to me to ram home a point that has long been implied but perhaps never more clearly demonstrated: there is a serious lack of understanding out there about what constitutes inside information, and by extension, in my view, what constitutes corruption in sport. The ICC ban has been imposed on the back of Cricket Australia encouraging "team manager Steven Bernard and coach Tim Nielsen to tweet during games as a way of keeping the fans informed during the Ashes". The experiment, apparently, was "a big success, and Bernard attracted over 1 100 followers to his Twitter account". If a piece of information is known to 1,100 people, how can it possibly be deemed to be 'inside information', or to be the cause of corruption? Surely, the last thing on earth the ICC should be doing is banning Twitter. In fact, they should be doing exactly the opposite. If Twitter does anything positive (and my wife tells me it doesn't), then surely it is democratising information (I hesitate to say 'knowledge'). And what bigger blow to corruption can there possibly be than for everyone to be 'in the know' and privy to the inner-most thoughts of people nearest the action? Far from being a threat to a sporting contest, a Twitter feed is a positive. Ban the use of Blackberry Messenger by all means, if you can find a means of imposing it; but Twitter? This reminds me of the time when the media got its knickers into an enormous twist over the fact that Harry Redknapp was moving from Southampton to Portsmouth - a managerial transfer which, they said, showed that betting corruption lurked round every corner. Five Live Sport led their flagship evening programme with the news that 'more money has been bet on Redknapp going to Portsmouth than was bet on this year's Grand National' - a statistic based on turnover of £16million with Betfair, without the understanding that much of the money was being matched at 1.01, where to win £1 you need nominally to 'turn over' £200, by having a £100 stake matched by someone else. The furore had been whipped up by the fact that the then Southampton Chairman, Rupert Lowe, had commented that an FA rule had been broken and there must have been an illegal approach made to Redknapp, for evidence you only needed to look at the movement in the betting. It was a perfectly sensible comment which was completely misinterpreted, and all hell broke loose. What Lowe meant was that he, as Chairman of Southampton, should have been the first person to know that Portsmouth were interested in hiring his manager, because FA rules required them to approach him before they made an approach to anyone else. But the price of Redknapp in the 'next Portsmouth manager' market had shortened from around 25-1 to about 3-1, before anyone had asked him for permission to make an approach. And when he subsequently refused permission, the price continued to shorten, suggesting that plenty of people knew that talks were on-going. His statement was therefore absolutely correct: there was obviously enough knowledge out there that Redknapp was a serious contender, and in theory there shouldn't have been because without Lowe's permission, he couldn't be. But by the time the story was making big headlines, Rednapp was basically a shoe-in for the job and was trading at odds on. In fact, as mentioned, he traded, for a long time, at 1.01. And that was when the media went mad: the fact that people were piling in at 1.01 was, they said, proof of inside information - completely missing the point that if there was inside information anywhere, it had been demonstrated by the small sums of money that had moved the market from 25 to 3. But forget that: it was the big money at 1.01 that showed there was a problem, ran the story. Someone, somewhere, knew that Redknapp was going to sign. What a load of old cobblers. Someone, somewhere? How about 'just about everyone, just about everywhere', not least because it was being broadcast as a stone-cold certainty at just about every media outlet in the country? That's not inside information: it's information that you basically need to be living on a desert island not to have heard. In that particular case, even my mother knew about it, and she spent 40 years while dad was doing Match of the Day not understanding the difference between the League Championship and the FA Cup, given that the same teams appeared to play - a mantle which, I was amused to hear this morning on Five Live, has now been picked up by Vassos Alexander's missus. If you put money on an outcome where you have to bet £100 to win £1, you are not really betting on the fact that an unlikely event is going to occur. You are betting that a very likely event indeed will be formally announced before the person connected with the event in question is hit by a bus. You aren't using inside information at all: you are betting on the percentages, like you do when you take out insurance. But if this seems obvious, it clearly wasn't understood at all at the time. And if the ICC's ban is anything to go by, it would appear that it still isn't today. People in and around sport appear to continue to believe that they need to prevent the broad dissemination of information, when what they need to be tackling is the opportunity for shady back-room deals in meaningless matches, and people actually altering a result in order to ensure that an outcome falls in line with them. These are two very different things, and an understanding of that fact would make the problem a whole lot easier to address.