Trapped by the Internet

A court in Milan, Italy, convicted three Google Inc. executives on 2/24/2010 for violating the privacy of an Italian boy with autism. The conviction resulted from a video of the boy being bullied by classmates, which was posted on Google’s website in 2006, and ran for two months without being removed. This is the first case to hold the company’s executives criminally responsible for the content posted on its website. Critics of the ruling compared it to “blaming the mailman for delivering a nasty letter.” Google is appealing the verdict, which sentenced the three executives to a six month suspended jail term in Italy.  A spokesman from the United States Embassy in Rome responded to the verdict by reiterating, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statement on February 21^st that “a free internet is an integral human right that must be protected in a free society.”

            This article is pertinent because of our class discussions on censorship in the media. The ruling certainly raises questions about the freedom on which the internet is based. None of the Google employees had direct contact with the video; they did not up load, film or review it.    The Italian decision to hold Google’s executives responsible for photographs or videos made available by people through Google and its online services such as YouTube challenges the premise on which the company is founded as well as those of internet companies such as Facebook and Twitter. Google’s search and advertising business relies on its ability to have access to all of the global internet and on giving its users access to postings. Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi owns most of the private media in Italy and indirectly controls the public media, so the internet is regulated more vigorously in Italy than in other European countries. This attempt to control the content of the internet has been criticized as a way to stop competition by the Web to public television stations and Berlusconi’s own private channels.

             I understand the prosecution’s point that the verdict is not about censorship, but about the balance between free enterprise and protection of human dignity; I also understand its contention that  the distasteful video ran for months, was widely viewed, and  generated advertising revenue for the company.   However, Google’s point, that it would be impossible for the company to monitor all the videos on its website, since twenty hours of video are uploaded to the site every hour, makes sense. Also, Google removed the video within hours after receiving a formal complaint from the Italian police. I think the need to protect freedom of the internet, supersedes the posting of the distasteful video. Also, this case did illustrate one positive effect of internet freedom, also pointed out in textbook.  The “enhanced circulation of images, even troubling ones, plays a key role in exposing injustice around the world, even when making and circulation the images can be founded upon that injustice,” (Cartwright and Sturken 259).  As a result of the video, the teenagers who made it were brought to the attention of school authorities and their parents, were disciplined by the school, and sentenced to six months of community service because of the evidence provided by the video.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/technology/companies/25google.html