Threat to Web Freedom Seen in Italy's Google Case
NY Times
ROME — Three Google executives were convicted of violating Italian privacy laws on Wednesday, the first case to hold the company’s executives responsible for the content posted on its system.
The case, though subject to appeal, could have sweeping implications worldwide for Internet freedom: It suggests that Google was not simply a tool for its users, as it contends, but effectively no different from any other media company, like newspapers or television, that provides content and could be regulated.
The ruling further complicates the business environment for Google in Europe, where it faces a wave of antitrust complaints. And it comes shortly after Google threatened to withdraw from China, citing sophisticated attacks by hackers there and Chinese demands that it restrict information available to local users.
Google’s enormous search and advertising business depends heavily on its reach into every corner of the global Internet and on providing users access to as much digital content as possible, regardless of its origins or ownership.
The Italian move to hold the company or its executives responsible for text, photographs or videos made available by third parties through Google and its online services, like YouTube, poses a significant challenge to the company’s business model, along with those of other Internet companies.
In Italy, where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi owns most private media and indirectly controls public media, there is a strong push to regulate the Internet more assertively than it is controlled elsewhere in Europe. Several measures are pending in Parliament here that seek to impose various controls on the Internet. Critics of Mr. Berlusconi say the measures go beyond routine copyright questions and are a way to stave off competition from the Web to public television stations and his own private channels — and to keep a tighter grip on public debate.
“It’s a deliberate effort to control the means of communication,” said Juan Carlos de Martin, the founder of the Nexa Center at Turin’s Polytechnic University, which studies Internet use in Italy.
Italy has one of the lowest rates of Internet use and e-commerce in Europe, and experts warned that the ruling on Wednesday could erode the nation’s position further and limit information to young people, who watch television less than their parents.
In Milan, Judge Oscar Magi sentenced the Google executives in absentia to six-month suspended sentences for violating the privacy of an autistic boy. He said Google did not act fast enough to remove from the site a widely viewed video posted in 2006 showing a group of teenage boys harassing the boy.
But Judge Magi cleared the Google executives of defamation charges. The three were Peter Fleischer, Google’s chief privacy counsel, David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer, and George Reyes, a former chief financial officer. A fourth defendant, Arvind Desikan, charged only with defamation, was acquitted.
Internet activists, as well as the American ambassador to Italy, cried foul about the ruling, which some likened to punishing the mailman for delivering a nasty letter.
A spokesman for Google, Bill Echikson, called the ruling “astonishing” and said the company would appeal. In its blog, Google added that the ruling “attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built.”
Prosecutors said Google waited to remove the video until after complaints to the police by Vivi Down, an Italian group representing people with Down syndrome, whose name was mentioned by the boys in the video.
Google said it removed the video within two hours of receiving a formal complaint from the Italian police, two months after the video was first posted.
The boys, all minors, were not charged by prosecutors, but were sentenced by a different judge to community service. Prosecutors named the Google executives because Italian law holds corporate executives responsible for a company’s actions.
Google maintains that the ruling contradicted a European Union directive on electronic commerce that gives service providers safe harbor from liability for the content they host.
But prosecutors argued that because Google handles user data — and uses content to generate advertising revenue — it is a content provider, not a service provider, and therefore broke Italian privacy law. The law prohibits the use of someone’s personal data with the intent of harming him or of making a profit.
“To say this is about censorship has a big media effect, but is false,” said Alfredo Robledo, one of the prosecutors. “This is about finding a balance between free enterprise and the protection of human dignity.”
Still, the upshot of the ruling, if it prevails on appeal, is that Google will be expected in Italy to monitor the content it hosts. Mr. Echikson, the Google spokesman, said that would be impossible considering that 20 hours of video are uploaded to its site every hour.
The American ambassador to Italy, David Thorne, said he was “disappointed” by the ruling.
“We disagree that Internet service providers are responsible prior to posting for the content uploaded by users,” he said in a statement, adding that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had said that “free Internet is an integral human right that must be protected in free societies.”
Mr. Robledo said that a company like Google could easily find ways to monitor its content, and that it should not profit from advertising revenue generated from content that violated privacy laws. He said if Google had found a way to create filters in China, it could do the same in Italy, not to monitor political content “but to protect human dignity.”
Google disagreed.
“If company employees like me can be held criminally liable for any video on a hosting platform, when they had absolutely nothing to do with the video in question, then our liability is unlimited,” said one of the three executives, Mr. Fleischer.
The Google ruling comes amid other proposed legislation that would seek to bureaucratize the Internet in Italy, including the highly contested Italian version of a European directive that would compel online broadcasters to seek the same licensing agreements as broadcast television. Google lobbied for changes to the proposal.
Paolo Romani, a deputy communications minister who sponsored the measure, said the issue was copyright protection. “It has nothing to do with the fact that our prime minister also owns television stations,” Mr. Romani said. “It’s in Berlusconi’s interest not to be accused of conflict of interest.”
Another proposal pending in Italy, tucked into a bill on wiretapping, would require blogs to publish corrections within 48 hours, as newspapers are required to do, while a third would make sites responsible for anonymous comments posted on them.
Paolo Gentiloni, a leading opposition member and a former communications minister, said Internet regulation was inevitably political. Today in Italy, “political power is in the hands of people who do TV, not the Internet.”
“The slower broadband is, the better it is for a broadcasting-oriented government,” he added.
Others warned that Italy’s red tape — including the Google ruling — could stifle free expression. Mr. de Martin, of the Nexa Center, said that universities and companies might not want to run the risk of opening Web forums if they would be criminally liable for their contents.
“If you bureaucratize it even a little, you eliminate thousands or millions of people who don’t feel like making the effort,” he said.
