One of the pre-requisites for a website/service to qualify for the trendy ‘Web2.0’ label, as coined by gurus like Tim O’Reilly, is that it be designed for ‘remixability’. To quote O’Reilly: “the most successful web services are those that have been easiest to take in new directions unimagined by their creators.”

Google is, in many ways the poster child for ‘Web 2.0’, with its various services which now include blogging, video and image directories etc. The potential for ‘remixability’ was shown, unfortunately, recently in Italy. One imagines that when a video, taken with a mobile phone in a Turin classroom, of students beating up a fellow student with downs syndrome made its way into the Google video classifications, it wasn’t entirely what Google had in mind when developing the service.

Indeed both Google and YouTube have been used to post various disturbing images from Italian classrooms – videos of bullying, of teachers being threatened, of classrooms being vandalised etc.

Things took an interesting turn last week when two of Google Italy’s executives, both American, were placed under investigation regarding the Turin classroom incident. Magistrates are investigating whether the executives can be charged with participation in defamation – in one video that was downloadable from Google’s video site, one of the students made disparaging remarks about his fellow student.

The suggestion, obviously, is that the executives should have been responsible for filtering objectionable material from the google site – something that Google Italy has made clear is not in their power. It would require intervention on the google servers in America.

In the hullaballoo, a lawyer, Guido Camera, acting for Vividown, an association protecting the rights of downs syndrome individuals in Italy, remarked “it’s an important step forward because it can help bring a bit of clarity in the world of the internet”¹

Vividown is, no doubt, acting in good faith, but freedom of information is often first threatened by those acting in good faith.
The targetting of Google, above all else, makes little sense. Sure, it could be argued, that the ability of thugs to post videos on Google encourages the bullying – but what then of the nightly news that has shown the clip repeatedly, on all channels? It can be argued that Google, without supervision, allows the thugs to diffuse harmful and offensive clips – what then of the mobile phone networks, that allow the same videos to be sent through their networks?

If anything the posting of the video on Google has done some good. Firstly it has brought to attention serious problems in Italy’s schools, and society at large. Secondly, and more concretely, nothing on the net is as anonymous as it seems, and Google, once informed by the relevant authorities, have been helping the police with an investigation that will hopefully bring criminal charges against the thugs beating up on a weaker classmate.

¹ – Video sui disabili, perquisita Google Italia – Corriere della Sera, 25/11/2006