Is Google a service provider or a content provider? Before you answer I have to read you your Miranda rights, because you can go to prison if you answer the wrong way, at least in Italy.

The Italian government says Google is a content provider, and an Italian court supporting that position found three Google executives “criminally responsible for content posted on its system,” reports Rachel Donadio in the New York Times. Under Italian law, executives can be held responsible for actions taken by the companies they work for. The decision “suggests that Google is not simply a tool for its users, as it contends,” writes Donadio, “but is effectively no different from any other media company, like newspapers or television, that provides content and could be regulated.”

The case revolves around a video posted in 2006 that showed a group of teenage boys bullying an autistic boy. Prosecutors for the Italian government asserted that Google should have removed the video from its site faster than it did. It took two months after the incident before the Italian police formally complained to Google, but within two hours of receiving that complaint Google says it took the video down. Donadio writes that the response among Internet activists could be “likened to punishing the mailman for delivering a nasty letter.”

Google has posted a blog arguing that the Italian decision contradicts a European Union directive protecting Internet service providers from liability for content hosted on their site. You can read it in full here.

Though it’s hard to believe that the Italian ruling will not be thrown out on appeal, this incident is a wakeup call for Google and for anyone who believes he or she can simply throw a video up on a website without any consequences whatever. If the court decision is upheld it could have a catastrophically depressing effect on the Internet as we know it. As Google’s blog said, “If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.”

This is not a war being fought on a foreign shore. It’s one that is playing out beneath your nose. So, I respectfully suggest you take more than an intellectual interest in the income. Read the Times article in full here.

Richard Curtis