seek, consumers with the content they desire, and firms with the revenue they need. The intransigence and arrogance of the parties involved do not help.
In the meantime, and contrary to its Murdoch-inspired public image as an insurgent force against mainstream news, Google has been working furiously on a system that would combine the efficiency of news search with the depth and professional quality of serious journalism. The company has a team of engineers working with major news organizations such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Associated Press to experiment with better ways to present serious journalism coherently and systematically, so that quality journalism does not get buried among the detritus of a million shoddy Web pages that share search terms. Google is essentially bending its news-search and indexing services to favor established, commercial sources in hopes of keeping the Web filled with quality content. What’s good for the Web, after all, is good for Google. So clearly, Google’s future role in the journalism industry will be far more complex—and perhaps more positive—than Murdoch’s shallow accusations of free riding would indicate.44
Viacom is the most notorious accuser of Google as a free rider. The video production company, which owns MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central, among many other major video services, objected to the fact that millions of fans of its programs had the habit of taking bits of those shows and putting them up on YouTube. Digital copyright law in the United States is clear on these matters: the service provider has no legal obligation to block copyrighted content from appearing on the Internet if it’s put there by a user, a third party. An Internet service provider is simply required to remove the content on receiving a notice of its existence. That way, providers don’t have to spend resources inefficiently filtering and blocking the actions of their users. Congress decided to insulate them from liability for the damage that their users do, much as phone companies cannot be held responsible for crimes planned or executed using the phone. So the burden of enforcement, according to a law that Viacom helped write back in 1998, rests on the copyright owner to defend its own interests. Viacom no longer likes this policy, as the burden of scrubbing YouTube of Viacom content quickly became expensive. So in 2007 Viacom filed suit against Google asking for $1 billion in damages. In early 2010 Google prevailed in a court ruling. So for now, Google and other Internet companies may be secure in the belief that they are not responsible for the copyright infringement their users might commit within the United States.45
The political significance of the case is clear, regardless of Google’s victory in court: even though YouTube itself loses money, Google overall makes money. Therefore, Google is a source of Viacom’s anxiety. Google does, in fact, try to police the content of YouTube, even though the law does not require it to do so. In fact, Google regulates YouTube more heavily than it regulates the Web in general, largely because of the more immediate threats to its reputation and the potential to offend millions of users with violent, hateful, or sexually frank videos.
YOUTUBE TROUBLE
Since about 2002, every segment of the traditional media industries has apparently been losing money—or at least making less money than before. Yet Google has succeeded spectacularly. This fact has generated a significant sense of envy among media industry leaders and has led to many outbursts and frictions. Interestingly, Google’s power over the media phenomenon of the first decade of the twenty-first century—YouTube—has challenged many of the core beliefs and values of Google itself. If the stakes are high for governing the Web in general—a mostly textual collection of pages that are hosted beyond Google’s control—they are enormous for running the most important source of visual entertainment and information in the world. YouTube is where politics and culture happen online. Video is uploaded at a rate of ten hours of content per minute and consumed at a rate of 200 million videos per day worldwide.46 YouTube videos produced by Barack Obama’s supporters generated more passion and interest than his official election campaign. YouTube is where global terrorists try to recruit followers and boast of their gruesome actions. It’s where serious academic lectures and goofy home videos intermingle. It’s where dogs ride skateboards. And while you and I create and donate the content, Google hosts it on its servers and acts as publisher of all this potentially litigious and controversial material.
Ever since Google purchased YouTube in 2006, when the video service was just over a year old and already a major sensation on the Web, YouTube has changed Google, and Google has changed YouTube. YouTube has become the central battlefield in the struggle to define the terms and norms of digital communication. YouTube is where Google most clearly governs, and not always gently. As YouTube grows in cultural and political importance every week, we hear more stories of important video clips coming down. It’s understandable when YouTube removes a clip after a music or film company sends a “notice and take-down” letter to YouTube complaining that a user-posted video contains its copyrighted material and thus possibly infringes on copyright, but when someone demands the removal of clips simply because of their political content, that’s a different problem. Here is an example in which copyright acts as an instrument of political censorship: U.S. representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) was running for reelection in a close race in 2006. Back in the mid-1990s, she chaired the New Mexico Department of Children, Youth, and Families. Her husband was being investigated about accusations that he had been sexually involved with a minor, and one of the first things she did as head of the department was remove his file. Soon, however, people across New Mexico found out about the cover-up. A political blogger in New Mexico posted on YouTube a news clip of Wilson and others discussing it. But New Mexico voters could not view the clip for long: the TV station invoked the “notice and takedown” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to require YouTube to remove the video clip. Any of my media studies students could explain why posting a news clip of a public official under scrutiny and up for reelection is considered fair use under U.S. copyright law: it constitutes an allowable use of copyrighted material for the purpose of news and commentary. But when it comes to the Web, the copyright act respects fair use only as an afterthought, long after the provider has removed the content. The clip came down, and Wilson was reelected.47
In another blatantly political example, the radical right-wing American columnist Michelle Malkin posted a video of a slideshow she had spliced together showing the consequences of violence by Muslim extremists. For some reason, the editors at YouTube judged it inappropriate. When Malkin asked YouTube officials to explain the their reasoning, especially in light of the fact that YouTube is full of clips that seem to glorify violence against American troops, she got no response. Malkin started a conservative YouTube group to protest the removal, and soon that group was flagged by users who dislike Malkin’s politics for having “inappropriate” content.
The Malkin story is troubling and revealing on a number of levels. One of the clever things about YouTube is that it uses its members to police its content. Thus a virtual community could, in theory, enforce something like community norms. However, YouTube has no mechanism to establish what those standards or norms should be, and reaching a consensus among billions of viewers would be impossible. So YouTube employees make these decisions internally to minimize controversy. Current YouTube policies make sure that sexually explicit content rarely comes up in a YouTube search, and that’s nice: YouTube is one of the few places on the Web where you can be confident that people won’t appear naked uninvited on your computer screen. But such broad policies effectively invite flame wars and flag wars, in which competing political activists flag the other sides’ videos as inappropriate. That is what seems to have happened in the Malkin controversy.
I watched Malkin’s video on a competing site. It’s pretty dumb and simplistic, consisting merely of images of victims of violent extremists, spliced with some of the controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammed. If all dumb and simplistic material were considered inappropriate for YouTube, far fewer videos would be posted there. In her writing, Malkin recklessly associates the deeds of a handful of marginal, murderous thugs with the sincere and humane faith of more than a billion followers. She spreads bigotry on her blog (to which Google’s Web Search links) and her books (which Google offers on Google Books). But that does not mean that this particular video is bigoted: it’s
