[governance] FW: [Dewayne-Net] Google: Copyright removal requests spike to 2.5 million per week

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

> request at lists.igcaucus.org] On Behalf Of Michael Leibrandt

> ...which means that we already have borders in cyberspace - a fact
sometimes
> ignored in the IG discussion, including WCIT. The difference to the pre-
> Internet age is that these borders are not enforced by governments, but by

An overly literal belief in "code is law" type lessigism has its pitfalls, I
guess.

Borders are *enforced* by governments.  And jurisdiction is asserted *by
governments*

Any company (whether or not in the Internet business) that does business
across borders has a duty to comply with the laws of all the countries that
it operates in.

This does lead to a balancing act of sort, when there are conflicting legal
requirements between two different countries, and when the content is
created in one country, hosted in another country, and accessed in yet a
third country [all of which are grounds for jurisdiction].

This is sometimes a good thing.  And sometimes a debatable (not illegal at
any rate, given the amount of legal review any cross border transaction
gets) thing - to quote one pet peeve of Mr.Gurstein's, companies will
leverage to the hilt any cross border tax loophole at all they have access
to, and set up business in some countries solely for the tax advantage this
brings them.  

> private companies - something not everybody might see as an improvement.
> The interesting question is to what extent Google does make a content
related
> distinction between (legally correct) requests coming from "good" or "bad"
> countries, because this would include political value judgements. For the

This is not a political value judgement.  Take it this way.

1. Google's base location is the USA - which has a constitutionally
protected right to free speech

2. It does business, has offices, sells service, and has users in other
countries that may limit free speech to some extent on specific topics (eg:
Naziism in Europe, criticism of the King in Thailand), or repress it across
the board, in other countries.

So, when such requests come in, a simple test (with which you'd begin) would
be - is the content illegal both under US as well as local law?  For
example, if it is malware, child pornography or similar.  In such cases, it
becomes much simpler to decide to take it down, and possibly retain a copy
of the logs and other forensic evidence for law enforcement, to be rendered
to them on receipt of a subpoena.

In other cases, where it is illegal in only one jurisdiction, but mostly
legal elsewhere - it gets blocked for users in that one jurisdiction

If it violates the terms of service Google has for its users across the
world, [which can occasionally be a different thing from "it is illegal
across the world"] - for example, gambling (to pick an example out of thin
air, I am not sure of Google's policy about these], then too, it gets taken
down.

If it is violative of US law - as Google asserts US jurisdiction for content
that it hosts - it gets taken down.

> user, it doesn't make that much of a difference if a non-democratic
> government directly controls Internet content, or if this government
passes a
> law which results in blocking "illegal" content by Google.

It is a way out for that government to not block Google services for all its
citizens - and potentially affect Google service worldwide, as Pakistan
Telecom accidentally did when it leaked fake routes for Youtube into the bgp
cloud rather than restricted to its peers in Pakistan.

--srs


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