YouTube is informed by the concerns of governments around the world (House of Commons, 2008, Ev 121: Q269) and has worked with different governments to respect different laws and made illegal material unavailable without “letting one country, any country, dictate the global content of the Internet.” (House of Commons, 2008, Ev 121:Q265) Thus Nazi paraphernalia has been removed from the German YouTube, defamatory content toward Mahatma Ghandi in India and toward Kemal Atatürk in Turkey with the use of a technique called I.P. blocking. Yahoo! was the first company to use this technique after it was sued in French court on behalf of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism and others in April, 2000. (Goldsmith, 2006, Chap. 1)
Besides working together with governments, YouTube also works with a lower level of authority as a YouTube spokesman says in a BBC article: “it encourages police to let them know if they see videos of criminal acts. If the police ask for information then YouTube cooperates, as long as police follow the correct legal process governing disclosure that the government has laid down.”
YouTube continues “to look at ways of implementing [their] guidelines in a way that would have either a legal or cultural sensitivity built into them so that [they] could have different standards for different countries, but that is a work in progress.” (House of Commons, 2008, Ev 121:Q267)
Q294 Mr. Evans: At what level in the company are these decisions [ed.: regarding the assessment of various criteria applied to different countries] made? Is it one person or is it a group of people that make these decisions? Are they different people for different countries?
Mr. Walker: Right now our Executive Management Group, which is the very senior people in the company, has reviewed several of these issues. There is a woman on my staff who we have christened “the decider” who is involved in reviewing a variety of these things around the world. We have policy teams, corporate communication teams and people on the ground involved because these are close issues. There are different points of view even within the company as to the right approach. In most cases we are able to reach consensus internally. In some cases we have escalated them to the senior management of the company for decisions as to what to do.
The G Team: Nicole Wong, the “Decider”; Andrew McLaughlin, global public-policy director;
and Kent Walker, general counsel. (Photo: Jason Madara for The New York Times)
The ‘decider’ mentioned in this excerpt is identified as Nicole Wong (the deputy general counsel of Google) in a New York Times article. “Google has given Nicole Wong a central role in the company’s decision-making process about what controversial user-generated content goes down or stays up on YouTube and other applications owned by Google” (Rosen, 2008); Blogger, Picasa, Orkut and Google the search engine. Giving her “and her colleagues arguably [have] more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.” Of course she is not alone in this and is accompanied with Andrew McLaughlin (global public-policy director) and previously mentioned Kent Walker (general counsel). The question of who is placed in these positions is a very hot topic nowadays, in the light of the net neutrality discussion, of who controls this “ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.” (Rosen, 2008) This aspect of the story makes it interesting for me to highlight such a seemingly minor detail as flagging. To me it forms a way to democratize the regulation of content, if applied in the right way. Down the line I’d like to get to adjustments to the system as is and / or alternatives, in order for it to (possibly) work in a truly democratic manner.