Is google responsible for videos posted on its sites?

Nate Anderson at ArsTechnica has a good post on the question of Google's responsibility over video postings.

It's pegged to the strange lawsuit from Italian authorities that wants to hold Google responsible for a video of some Italian students harrassing an autistic student. The Italians seem to think that posting such a video is a bad thing, although the video started an investigation into the act and a debate over how to deal with such activities. That's rather like saying, "Thanks for the info, we'll look into it, and by the way, we're going to arrest you for letting the world see the evidence."

Should newspapers and TV shows be prohibited from reporting violence because violence is bad?

The main point is that, in order to prevent "bad" stuff from being posted, someone has to decide what is "bad."  Censorship happens, but it happens differently in every country. Each nation, including the U.S., is trying to make the Internet conform to its own laws and standards.

Is that reasonable? Nobody owns the Internet, and the only way to impose local standards on a network without borders is to emulate the Great Firewall of China, an onerous attack on information by a dictatorship so repressive that it can only stay in power by keeping its people ignorant of its own actions.

But I don't see any near-future scenario in which the Internet gets treated as an entity unto itself, unbound by local laws. Not even if some international organization were formed to decide appropriate ways to regulate it. From the beginning, the Internet has been, by definition, unregulated.

The second question is if it's even possible to pro-actively enforce all countries' laws. It would require screening everything  before it's posted. That's why in the U.S., DCMA gave such sites immunity from prosecution as long as they remove illegal postings once informed of them.

But DCMA is not universal, and even in the U.S. it is being challenged in court by copyright holders.

A fundamental concept of Web 2.0 is to move power from the hands of the corporate elite to the masses. Corporations, such as media networks, can be regulated. But if we try to regulate individuals' postings by regulating the sites that host them, we destroy that shift. It puts power and responsibility back in the hands of corporations, which will be forced to censor everything -- as all the search engines are forced to do in China.

The Internet represents an enormous advance in the concept of freedom of speech and freedom of information. As always, there are downsides to such freedom.

But never in history have the negative aspects of greater freedom of speech outweighed the positive ones. Never.

If Google wants to avoid evil, it needs to fight against regulating the Internet whenever possible. It's a heady responsibility.