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)

Rule Number One of branding is: consistency, consistency, consistency. A brand has to have the same appearance whenever someone sees it -- that's how it gets programmed into people's heads. Violate the brand and conventional wisdom says you’ll lose your audience recognition. For example, you wouldn’t see a Coke logo that’s blue, nor its Coca-Coca wordmark in anything but script. Nobody breaks the rule; it just isn’t done.

Well, somebody did. A recent Valleywag post faulted Yahoo for high crimes against its own brand (emphasis mine):

Racing to reach markets before its rivals established themselves, Yahoo started dozens of country-specific websites with a frenzy of joint ventures in the 1990s. Its haste still haunts it; Yahoo's international websites may cater to local preferences, but at the cost of consistent branding.

Look at this collection of Yahoo logos. Is the Yahoo logo red, or purple? Reversed out, or solid? Mirrored shadow underneath? Take your pick of stylized designs; somewhere in the world, Yahoo has it.

In the classical marketing view, then, consistent branding trumps “local preferences”. (Doesn’t that phrase sound derogatory? Like “community organizer”) That’s fine for American soft drinks, perhaps, but is it also true when it comes to more flexible, truly global products, like Yahoo?

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I’m very late to the party with this one, but while shopping online recently, I noticed that Wal-Mart has updated its brand. The response so far seems cautious. Folks seem to like the new color scheme, the trendier font, and sentence case hyphen-less wordmark, but there is considerable confusion over the new glyph that replaced the five-pointed star in the logo.

What is that thing? Some people think it’s a sun, or maybe an asterisk. Others are quick to point out its resemblance to a sphincter. Quite a range of interpretation!

It’s an unfortunate bit of abstraction, to be sure, but I think all the consternation about what the logo looks like misses the bigger question of why?

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