Google, a River of Information. Let it Flow Free.

We've discussed here, in reference of the on-going Internet Governance Forum's meeting, the issue of the Internet's being the great equalizer, a revolutionary information force that knows no frontiers. Let's call it matter.

And on the other hand, inevitably, we have a counter-force ignited by those who fear that too much freedom will bring chaos (or their own demise). Let's call it anti-matter.

That's the rock and a hard place where the big rivers of this fertile plain find themselves stuck in. What to do when your river, say Google, reaches every corner of the plain, and some of the farmers downstream don't like the water you bring to them.

Then you have Google vs Turkey, as reported by The New York Times, and its ancient insult laws that impose that country's taboos (or any country's for the same matter) on the rest of the world.

"If your whole game is to increase market share," says Internet legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, speaking of Google to The Times, "it’s hard to . . . gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy concerns or in ways that might help repressive governments to block controversial content."

And that constitutes a big conundrum for rivers of free content such as Google. How to deal with the shock free expression and free press often trigger on governments who are afraid of people being given the tools to think for themselves?

Let's go back to Turkey, a country itself stuck in its own rock and a hard place. For more than a century, Turkey has struggled to catch up with the advanced European nations that are oh-so-very-close to its Euro-Asian borders. "Modernity" was the theme that practically guided Turkey's secular leaders starting with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the Young Turks.

But the dream became an obsession and today, that obsession is protected by 11 insult laws, relics from the past that, among other pieces of repressive legislation, are keeping the country from meeting the preconditions to join the European Union.

One of those laws, the one that protects the memory of Ataturk, is today one of the biggest headaches for Google’s very busy legal team. Last March, Turkish courts ordered for YouTube, which is owned by Google, to be blocked because of some videos that allegedly insulted the memory of Ataturk by calling him “gay.”

The “international force” behind the scandal that triggered protests throughout the country was a video clip posted on YouTube by Greek football fans looking to taunt their Turkish rivals.

More from The Times:

[Deputy general counsel of Google] Nicole Wong and her colleagues asked the Turkish authorities to reconsider their decision, pointing out that the original offending video had already been voluntarily removed by YouTube users. But after the video was taken down, Turkish prosecutors objected to dozens of other YouTube videos that they claimed insulted either Ataturk or “Turkishness.” These clips ranged from Kurdish-militia recruitment videos and Kurdish morality plays to additional videos speculating about the sexual orientation of Ataturk, including one superimposing his image on characters from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” “I remember one night, I was looking at 67 different Turkish videos at home,” Wong told me recently.
(…)
Wong decided that Google, by using a technique called I.P. blocking, would prevent access to videos that clearly violated Turkish law, but only in Turkey. For a time, her solution seemed to satisfy the Turkish judges, who restored YouTube access. But last June, as part of a campaign against threats to symbols of Turkish secularism, a Turkish prosecutor made a sweeping demand: that Google block access to the offending videos throughout the world, to protect the rights and sensitivities of Turks living outside the country. Google refused, arguing that one nation’s government shouldn’t be able to set the limits of speech for Internet users worldwide. Unmoved, the Turkish government today continues to block access to YouTube in Turkey.

This is a very long, wonderful article that deals with many other issues related to the Internet and how autocratic countries are scrambling to restrict this onslaught of free speech.

But we must concentrate on the particular issue of insult laws, the anti-matter of free press and free speech, and how pernicious these relics dating back to ancient times continue to be in our times.

Our hat is off to Google and its efforts to bring this wonderful river of information to every corner of the world regardless of so many impossible obstacles.