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The New York Times’ Jeffery Rosen wrote a nice article this weekend about the inner workings of Google’s international legal team, in their efforts to comply with varying national standards of free speech protection. It’s well worth reading, and I’ve posted some quotes here to pique your interest.

To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king. One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.

— Tim Wu, Columbia Law, former scholar in residence at Google

During the heyday of Microsoft, people feared that the owners of the operating systems could leverage their monopolies to protect their own products against competitors. That dynamic is tiny compared to what people fear about Google. They have enormous control over a platform of all the world’s data, and everything they do is designed to improve their control of the underlying data. If your whole game is to increase market share, it’s hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.

— Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law

The whole article is a nervewracking look into the processes behind Google/YouTube censorship.

The idea of a 20-something with a laptop in San Bruno (or anywhere else, for that matter) interpreting community guidelines for tens of millions of users might not instill faith in YouTube’s vetting process.

Nicole Wong, the deputy general counsel of Google, and her colleagues arguably have more influence over what counts as valid and legal online expression than anyone else on the planet. (Image via)