Google vs. Government – who will win?
While more and more countries around the world try to emulate Silicon Valley-style digitally-fuelled economic success, it’s ironic that the free flow of data is increasingly problematic for the governments that run them. The ease with which the Internet moves information, sans frontiers, seems to emphasise the smallness of national government compared to the ‘bigness’ of data. Privacy, defamation, national security, taxation and, of course in the news at the moment, pornography, are the regular flashpoints between the big Internet brands and governments in a battle which pitches the freedom web users against the laws of the State they live in.
Transparency The negotiation between citizen and state is as old as humanity and historically has been resolved with revolution, execution, imprisonment and, thankfully, most often by legislation. However, the Internet is a new factor in the relationship – empowering citizens to make choices, (some good, some bad and some ghastly), independently of the laws of their land on an unprecedented scale. Not surprisingly governments try to assert the law when one of their citizens uses the Internet to do something that they consider ‘ghastly’ – the problem is that what the state considers ‘ghastly’ varies from country to country. In fact Google deals with so many requests to modify or block online material from governments around the world that it publishes a Transparency Report listing them all. As the search giant explains:
“Like other technology and communications companies, Google regularly receives requests from government agencies and courts around the world to remove content from our services or to review such content to determine if it should be removed for inconsistency with a product’s community policies. In this report, we disclose the number of requests we receive from each government in six-month periods with certain limitations.”
Fascinating Reading! And fascinating reading it is – the number of content removal requests from government agencies has doubled to close to 2,300 in the last three years with over 30% of the them being concerned with defamation compared to just 3% over adult content. The detail of requests by country is an insight into the sheer breadth of world’s diversity in terms of culture, values and laws … and the Internet’s border-traversing ability to trample all over them!
The kind of ‘micro-management’ offered by Google – taking requests, considering them and then sometimes removing the content – clearly frustrates governments. The UK Prime Minister’s is the latest political leader to take on the issue, focussing on blocking child pornography on which he has massive support. While the moral mandate is clearly there, what precise action should be taken is already proving problematic. When the rubber hits the road and national legislation comes up against the physical reality of that sprawling bundle of hardware and software we call the Internet, control is difficult. Behind the beguiling simplicity of the Cloud is an international patchwork of servers, data centres and networks that host and transport the content that users call up via their search box. Where these servers and data centres are located in the world and which borders the networks cross really does matter, not only because there’s some web-content that we want to block, but also because there is web-content that we want to protect.
Where is your data stored? For web-based businesses, the location of the data centre where your data is stored is a significant factor in how much tax you pay, what legal protection you have if someone tries to violate your copyright, and what level of control and ownership you have over your data. Clients of MigSolv’s colocation data centre in Norwich, for example, can rely on the strength of the UK legal systems, a stable tax rate and benign Government interference when it comes to freedom of speech and expression, all of which amounts to security. When they say that in the Cloud it doesn’t matter where your data’s stored, it’s simply not true – while it’s important that, (most), data moves freely, it’s vital that web businesses can rely on a stable, secure and fair legal environment for their data.