The Googles and free speech

I suppose I should be shocked and disturbed that three people in Mountain View, CA make these kinds of momentous decisions.

In late 2006, for example, Wong and her colleagues debated what to do about a series of videos that insulted the king of Thailand, where a lêse-majesté law makes criticisms of the king a criminal offense. Wong recalls hearing from an employee in Asia that the Thai government had announced that it was blocking access to YouTube for anyone with a Thai I.P. address. Soon after, a Thai government official sent Wong a list of the U.R.L.’s of 20 offensive videos that he demanded Google remove as a condition of unblocking the site. Some of the videos were sexually explicit or involved hate speech and thus clearly violated the YouTube terms of service. Some ridiculed the king — by depicting him with his feet on his head, for example — and were clearly illegal under Thai law but not U.S. law. And others — criticizing the Thai lêse-majesté law itself — weren’t illegal in Thailand but offended the government.

After an extensive debate with McLaughlin and Walker, Wong concluded that since the lêse-majesté law had broad democratic support in Thailand, it would be better to remove the videos that obviously violated Thai law while refusing to remove the videos that offended the government but didn’t seem to be illegal. All three told me they were reassured by the fact that Google could accommodate the Thai government by blocking just the videos that were clearly illegal in Thailand (and blocking those for Thai users only), leaving them free to exercise their independent judgment about videos closer to the line. The Thai government was apparently able to live with this solution.

But we are talking about videos.