Italian Court Attempts To End Internet, Convicts Google Execs of Privacy Violations

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Into an ocean of amateur video, a few thugs floated a foul product of their own – and it bobbed and drifted there until objected to, when Google promptly took it down.  On Google’s end, at least, one feels hard-pressed to locate the criminality in this.  As The Guardian reports, “Google called the outcome of the case ‘surprising to say the least, since our colleagues had nothing to do with the video in question: they did not make it; they did not upload it, and they have not seen it.'”

Certainly, it would be daft to argue this was anything but a dark episode for Google.  The video is disquieting, an abuse of free speech whose ramification would have been impossible without the Google revolution in content-sharing.  Sober debate was in order – possibly, unsober debate.

But unless the claim is that Google’s executive, out of some malevolence, connived at maintaining the video online – in which case, the ruling is just ludicrous – the ruling is ludicrously rigid.

“The ruling,” as The Atlantic Wire wrote in its roundup of bloggers’ “livid” responses, “punishes Google for not vigilantly monitoring the content it hosts.”

In a way, the principles behind the ruling are unimpeachable.  Nobody should have to put up with having their traumas billboarded for all to see by their traumatizers.

But it’s also tone-deaf.  It displays no awareness whatsoever of the lay of the land it seeks to legislate.  To impose such a heavy burden of vigilance on Google, a company defined by its embrace and acceleration of the free market of ideas, would be to hamper it to death.

Not only would the obligation to vet all content leave Google unrecognizably enervated.  Not only would the enforcement of this standard of vigilance jeopardize, with its requirements of manpower, Google’s ability to stay profitable.  It also, as TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher pointed out, absurdly flouts “existing European law, which gives hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence.”

Google, unsurprisingly, has already announced its intention to contest the Magi court’s ruling.  One turns again to The Guardian:

“The company vowed to appeal against the ruling, which it described as ‘an attack on the fundamental principles of freedom on which the internet was built’.”

More to come soon.