Google Expects South Korea to Come After YouTube Under User ID Law
BERKELEY, Calif. -- The South Korean government probably will confront Google this year in connection with the breadth of its YouTube operation’s compliance with a national law on real-name registration, a senior company lawyer said. The law requires companies that reach more than 100,000 users a day to make those that post content register under their real names and national ID numbers, said Nicole Wong, deputy general counsel at Google.
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YouTube responded to the enactment by imposing the requirement for its South Korean subdomain, kr.youtube.com, but users in the country still can post through www.youtube.com and other national pages without revealing themselves, Wong said late Monday at the Soul of the New Machine conference, organized by the Human Rights Center at the University of California. The response early this year has upset the South Korean government, she said.
“We were really uncomfortable” taking even that step, Wong said. YouTube serves “fundamental political speech” needs and anonymity “is a fundamental element of being able to express yourself,” she said.
“We are going to be in some rough discussions with the Korean government over the next few months,” Wong said. South Korea may apply the law across all of YouTube’s operations or require them to do filtering by Internet Protocol address, she said. The Korean Communications Commission is in charge of enforcement, including by producing an annual list of companies that the law applies to, Wong said. She spoke on a panel of participants in the Global Network Initiative on protecting Internet users’ rights. A similar event with a number of the same speakers was scheduled for Tuesday at the Yahoo Business and Human Rights Summit at the company’s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters.
The goals of the Initiative are to change corporate behavior through accountability to accepted principles, including through monitoring by outsiders; to gain wide recognition of the principles as international standards applicable to businesses in general, not just those that formally signed on; and to further collaboration toward human rights in regard to the Internet among academics, companies and other private organizations, said Leslie Harris, CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology.
The aims are “ambitious,” but the effort has a big leg up with the support of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, Harris said. The variety of interests involved, including investment managers and technology groups, is the greatest strength of the campaign, but also its biggest challenge, said Dunstan Hope, a managing director of Business for Social Responsibility. Fortunately, there’s broad agreement on the centrality of protecting free expression, trust and privacy online, Hope said.
The Initiative has held unsuccessful discussions with unspecified European companies to get them involved, Harris said. “We obviously are disappointed about that and hope it will change.” The effort has a Web site and is finishing a governance charter, she said. It would like to do deep investigations of several user complaints a year, Harris said.
“Getting a global standard is enormously important for a company like ours,” Wong said. Problems have arisen this decade as the Internet swept a “second generation of countries,” such as China, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam without the rights widely shared across the developed world, she said. Then restrictions spread into more advanced countries, she said. Wong pointed to mandatory filtering by ISPs that Australia has imposed and Italy is considering. This trend “in the wrong direction” gives less-developed countries a precedent and prompts them to raise accusations of double standards against those that protest the countries legal restrictions, she said. The Global Network Initiative offers uniform principles for all companies to apply in all countries, Wong said.
The participants acted without a government requirement to do that, said Bennett Freeman, Calvert Investments’ senior vice president for research and policy. But they were under the long shadow of a “pretty tough hearing” in early on Internet companies’ cooperation with repression by foreign governments, and of a bill introduced by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., Freeman said. It will take a year to see how well monitoring and reporting under the Initiative ensure companies’ accountability, he said.
Michael Samway, deputy general counsel of Yahoo, said work that he and others at the company did in consulting with State Department and other experts to deal with the Vietnamese government in 2007 on privacy and free expression fed into the company’s participation in the Initiative. The joint effort has produced “an enormously powerful tool” to help companies respond properly to issues as they arise, he said. - Louis Trager