Intermediaries

This week, an Italian magistrate convicted three Google employees for an Internet video that none of them had produced, uploaded, or even seen. The case arose from an Italian video that was uploaded in 2006 to Google Video, which showed a disabled child being bullied by other schoolchildren. An advocacy organization and the boy's father in Milan pushed for a criminal prosecution; a local prosecutor decided to pursue a case against four individual Google employees. In the decision, a defamation charge was dropped, but three of the named executives were found guilty of a charge related to Italy's privacy laws, and each sentenced to a six month suspended sentences.

We may not see the Italian decision stand for long, and cannot imagine a similar case happening in most Western countries. But it represents a growing temptation of courts and lawmakers worldwide: to find excuses to strip away the protection the law grants to Internet intermediaries. It's also an intimation of the very serious consequences to the Net and free speech if those safe harbors are weakened.

Europe has, in theory at least, at the EU level, strong protections for Internet intermediaries in its E-Commerce Directive: Article 14 of that directive provides that hosting providers are not responsible for the content they host, as long as they are not informed of its illegal character, and they act promptly when informed of it. Article 15 clarifies that hosts do not need to monitor hosted content for potentially illegal content.

This judgement guts both these principles. The court dismissed the allegation of criminal defamation but upheld a charge of illegally handling personal data on the basis that a video is personal data, and that under EU data protection law, Google needed prior authority before distributing that personal data.

This interpretation of the law means that Google is co-responsible for the legality of content containing the images of persons -- before anyone has complained about the content. That effectively means to comply with the decision, any intermediary working within Italy must now pre-screen every piece of video with anyone who appears within it, or risk prosecution. As the judgement stands, it also presents such a wide definition of personal data that it might effectively require that all hosts pre-screen all content be it video, text, audio or data.

The unconscionable fact that this prosecution is of individuals, while devastating for those involved, is only part of the problem. The whole Internet relies on the fact that third-parties can carry messages without having to self-police, interfere with those messages or take responsibility for millions of others' communications.

The Net is made of intermediaries, and attacks on the safe harbor protections for those intermediaries is under way across the world. In China, it's called ISP "self-discipline". In the United States, it's rightsholders demanding secondary or even tertiary liability for infringement by users, or loopholes in net neutrality, or attempts to weaken the protections of CDA 230. Italy may choose to unfairly victimize three American executives in this case, but the openness of the entire Internet risks becoming a victim if the safe harbors are compromised elsewhere.

Google has been talking a lot about changing the marketplace for display advertising over the past few years, and today it is making good on the promise by announcing a simplified way to sell and manage display advertising campaigns.

Today Google announced that it has finished combining DoubleClick's DART system with its own Ad Manager product into one entity now known as DoubleClick for Publishers. And the move could lead to a shakeup in the display ad serving space.

It's been two years since Google purchased the DoubleClick ad network for $3 billion in March 2008. But it has taken that long for Google to deliver on its promise to start changing the display market. Google says on its blog:

"We see an opportunity to improve ad serving even further by combining Google's technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick's display advertising and ad serving experience. Since we acquired DoubleClick in March 2008, our engineering and product teams have been working with online publishers to tackle the obstacles that prevent them from maximizing revenues from their websites."

Google is offering two versions of its new product: one for large online publishers that takes most advanatage of existing DART architecture and DFP Small Business, which is a more basic, free opton for smaller pubs.

The search giant stepping up its role in the display market certainly puts the pressure on a few smaller players that established themselves in the area. As MediaMemo puts it:

"Google’s announcement also has a direct impact on startups like Rubicon and Pubmatic, whose core business is built on helping publishers sell their inventory to multiple ad networks."

Moving forward, there is bound to be a shaking out of intermediaries in the display advertising space. There are myriad players that help to sell, track and serve display ads and as inefficiencies in the market are removed, many of them are sure to disappear. But many are trying to adapt to the changing marketplace. As Brian O'Kelley, CEO of AppNexus, put it at AlwaysOn:

"They'll be DSPs this year, they'll be another acronym next year. All these pieces of the ecosystem are just getting more sophisticated."

And Google's announcement today is not catching competitors offguard. Rubicon Project, for one, is redoubling its efforts to prove it has the most to offer publishers. On Friday, the company declared the ad server dead and published a manifesto outlining its plans to streamline and expand its ad serving offerings.

Today, J.T. Batson, Rubicon's EVP of revenue and global development, says that publishers are scared of Google:

"Google (and dfp before that) have been saying these things for years. We've seen nothing, and more importantly our publishers have seen nothing, that demonstrates any difference. Google competes with publishers in the content game and the ad sales game. They're a great company and do a lot of things well, but putting publishers first is not one of them.”

But while Google is rarely a first mover, if the search giant can prove to publishers that it is more efficient than smaller (or lesser known) players in display, it may get publishers on board yet.

Image: Google

"The three strikes is key - the draft chapter finally puts to rest the question of whether ACTA in its current form would establish a 'three strikes and you're' out model [ed: if someone in your house is accused of three acts of copyright infringement, your whole house loses internet access]. The USTR has recently emphatically stated that it does not establish a mandatory three strikes system. The draft reveals that this is correct, but the crucial word is mandatory. The draft U.S. chapter does require intermediaries to play a more aggressive role in policing their networks and the specific model cited is the three-strikes approach. In other words, the treaty may not specifically require three-strikes, but it clearly encourages it as the model to qualify as a safe harbour from liability.

"This leaks shows how deceptive the USTR has been on this issue - on the one hand seeking to assure the public that there is no three-strikes and on the other specifically citing three strikes as its proposed policy model. Given the past U.S. history with anti-circumvention - which started with general language and now graduates to very specific requirements - there is little doubt that the same dynamic is at play with respect to three strikes."

The ACTA Leak: Revealing Deceptive USTR Claims on Three Strikes (Thanks, Michael!)

Google could be making as much as $500 million a year from users' dodgy spelling.

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For years, 'typosquatters' have been registering misspelled versions of popular website names in the hope of attracting clumsy typists to their sites. If they get enough visitors, they can attract advertising via Google, with Google getting a cut.

And now two maths buffs at Harvard University have worked out just how much this advertising is worth to Google.

Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman looked at the 3,264 most popular .com sites, and then found 285,000 typosquats that were exploiting them.

They used software to crawl the sites and work out just how much they might be making, and what Google's share would be. On the assumption that the world's top 100,000 websites were suffering the same rate of typosquatting as the ones they studied, they worked out that Google was making $497 million per year.

Thee authors say that if they can identify these dodgy sites, then so can Google.

"The overwhelming majority of typos are easy to recognize, by hand or using straightforward automation. At the same time, with typo domains highly concentrated at a few large domainers and ad platforms, intermediaries could significantly discourage the registration and use of typo domains if they were so inclined," they say.

"We find that typosquatting is highly concentrated: Of typo domains showing Google ads, 63 percent use one of five advertising IDs, and some large name servers host typosquatting domains as much as four times as often as the web as a whole."

There's a paper on their findings, here.