Regular readers know I’ve been hard on Google for wrongdoings, and think Google got off way too easy for the Safari spy hack, and for the WiSpy situation, but some of these attacks right now are silly. Youtube is a user-generated content service. As such, Google doesn’t produce what’s on there, and can only take things down if they’re breaking the law to be posted. The fact that some grandstanding Attorneys General are trying to bully Google into censoring the service, is the real troubling issue here.
This is completely different from the Adsense situation, where it was shown that people at Google were seeing sites for illegal drugs and approving them for ad revenue It’s not even comparable, and people are hoping you don’t realize that. Stop making me defend Google here!
Further, if it’s “coercive” for Google to put conditions on the inclusion of Youtube on a television, including a) correctly implementing Internet standards and b) giving it prominent placement, then trademark rights themselves are coercive, people. Again, quit making me defend these guys. Get better complaints.
Like advertising services. People are acting outraged that AT&T is going to sell aggregated, anonymized data, but this is the sort of thing Google has been doing for years, and look at all the people still using Gmail.
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