(2010-03-08) Italy Youtube Liability Case

An Italian court has held 3 high-level Google-rs criminally liable for a cruel video posted to YouTube by Italian teenagers.

So let's turn our assumptions on their heads, stop running interference for (aspiring and actual) multi-billion dollar corporations, and imagine a web without Safe Harbor protections. We have to remember that we built the web and that we can reshape it into whatever fits us best, not the other way around... Many of the online reactions to the Italian Google case saw it as an attack on personal expression and free speech. I'm arguing that it's not. It's an attack on industrial production. The product in this case the aggregation of everyone's cat videos. The reason Google will take down your video if someone so much as suggests that Mr. Whiskers' piano stylings are actually a Metallica song, is that they don't care about your individual free-speech, they care about the ability to farm and profit from the phenomenon of cat videos en mass.

Nearly all business models in the information world (Business Models For Information) are based on Artificial Scarcity. The online content farms profit based on the fact that it's hard to share your own content, yourself, via a Means Of Production that you control. This is the central fact free-speech activists should be upset about. Don't confuse Google's Freedom with your own.

The number one technology we need to make the personal web, is simple web servers everywhere. (Home Server?)... To really get the personal web off the ground, we need symmetrical Broad Band connections and DNS that's optimized to treat everyone on the net as a peer.