http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/Shackling-The-Net/articleshow/5784887.cms
Shackling The Net Yamini Lohia, Apr 12, 2010, 12.00am IST While Google's confrontation with the Chinese government grabbed attention, a judgement that could change the internet as we know it went under the radar. In an outrageous decision, an Italian court recently held three Google executives criminally responsible for a particularly tasteless video uploaded by some evidently troubled people who bullied a boy with Down's syndrome and filmed it. The decision's ridiculousness was compounded by the fact that the boys who committed the crime who Google helped the Italian police track down, incidentally received slaps on the wrist in the form of community service, unlike the executives, who got jail time. The decision is an ominous portent for the future of the internet. The Italian court's verdict amounts to holding the Web giant responsible for content on its websites. It is in direct contradiction to US and EU safe harbour laws, which protect service providers from prosecution for content generated by users. Google maintains, rightly, that it is not a content creator it is merely a service provider, or an internet intermediary, that helps users find what they're looking for, or gives them a platform to post their content to. Videos uploaded on, say, YouTube are not created by Google, just as letters are not written by the post office. So, holding Google criminally liable for the content of a video is in essence the same as holding the postal department responsible for hate mail. When alerted to something objectionable or in violation of copyright laws, Google will take down the offending file. But the sheer volume of content uploaded every minute means it is impossible to police each file as it is uploaded. Placing the burden of policing the contents of each video or document on the service provider means that the much-vaunted freedom of the internet is suddenly under threat, because what Italy wants Google and, by extension, other search engines and Web companies to do is to censor content, even before anyone complains about it. If just one Italian court had passed this judgement, perhaps it wouldn't have been a big deal. Unfortunately, several other countries have given in to the temptation to make internet intermediaries liable for content accessed via their portals. In China, it's called 'self-discipline', and however much we pretend otherwise, what Italy and several other democratic countries want of it will take the internet closer to the Chinese vision than the raucous, ultra-free ideal we aspire to today. Google may have quit China over censorship, but the sad truth is that if it were to quit every country that imposed content controls, it wouldn't be left with much of a business. Australia, for instance, is legislating to introduce an internet filter that will block all material deemed as 'refused classification', a term encompassing information that may "describe, depict, express or otherwise deal with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults...". The government alleges the law targets child pornography, but such a wide-ranging blacklist would give Canberra the power to block all potentially contentious issues, such as abortion or euthanasia. India's own IT Amendment Act, passed quickly in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack, allows the government to block access to any website to protect 'national interest', which could lead to censorship. Executives of domestic and international Web companies can be held accountable for failing to uphold "public order, decency or morality", those vague clauses that could be extended to just about anything. It's cold comfort these wide-ranging powers have yet to be exercised. France and Britain are formulating legislation that would result in the internet connections of supposed copyright violators being cut off. Some would have us believe the internet is not so much the greatest transformative tool to have emerged over the last couple of decades as a tool of Satan that facilitates terrorism, child pornography, piracy and other garden variety crimes like identity fraud, data theft and phishing scams. Yet it's humans who utilise tools for good and bad it's stupid to blame our foibles as a species on something that isn't even sentient. If anything, it's a tragedy that democratic countries are attempting to censor this forum. If Google and other companies are going to be held liable for content they help users access, it's not going to be feasible for them to offer us this platform any longer. The Web has transformed our lives in ways we could not have imagined even a few years ago, and it continues to do so every day. Its power lies in the fact that in cyberspace, we're all free. Free to say things we can't otherwise, without anyone knowing it's us saying it. Internet has brought us closer together, helped spark political revolution and changed entire industries or made them irrelevant. It isn't surprising that we're still struggling to come to terms with the changes this new technology has wrought in society. But muzzling its best aspects and overreaching ourselves trying to control it aren't going to help. The writer is a journalist.
