“The story began on Sept. 8, 2006, when four Turinese high school students uploaded a three-minute, eleven-second cellphone video onto the Italian language site of Google Video. The clip showed these four male teenagers taunting and hitting another student, a 17 year-old with Down Syndrome. This profoundly offensive video remained up on the Google Video site for two months, presumably generating a few nuggets of gold for Google because, in accordance with its business model, advertising space was sold to third parties alongside the free, unedited video. Then, on Nov. 7, after two complaints about the content of the video, one of which was from the Italian Interior Ministry, Google finally removed it.”
Story by Andrew Keen:   http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=556&doc_id=172171&
You’ll all be glad to hear that that’s not the end of the story.  Whilst visiting Turin in January last year, 4 of Google’s top execs were slapped with criminal summons.  According to Italian law,  allowing the offensive video to be broadcast could get them each up to 3 years in an Italian jail.  Case still to be heard.

Andrew Keen again:  “I would argue Google can’t make money on content, but take no responsibility for this content when it flouts the law. For better or worse, Google is a media company that should, like all other media companies, have responsibility for the content posted on its site. And given the company’s phenomenal profit margins, Google could actually afford to hire a small army of flesh-and-blood editors (people, not an algorithm) to guarantee that no more self-evidently illegal videos, such as the disgusting Down Syndrome cellphone example, get published on its site.”

And I would argue that we have to be very careful of imposing censorship on the internet (Andrew’s flesh-and-blood editors – who are they anyway?) because let’s face it, the internet is the only shot we as a species have at truly free communication.  BUT  self-censorship - removing offensive stuff when users object to it - should go some way to deterring cretins from insulting normal people with their god-awful efforts.

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