It’s not really the kind of thing that brings a multinational giant to its knees. In 2006, some young Italian students in Turin filmed themselves bullying an autistic schoolmate and uploaded it onto Google Video. The police were notified and they, in turn, contacted Google, which claims to have promptly removed the video, cooperated with the authorities and helped them to track down the person responsible for uploading the video, who was then sentenced to 10 months of community service. All in all, a nasty episode. But there are a million such cruelties happening all over the world and you could be forgiven for thinking that Google had done its bit by removing the video, living up to its profound corporate motto “Don’t Be Evil”.

Not quite. A public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict three current Google employees, David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and a former employee, one George Reyes. Worse was to follow on February 24, 2010 when a judge in Milan convicted Drummond, Fleischer and Reyes for violating the Italian privacy code, although it acquitted all four of the charge of criminal defamation. Google claimed that the decision would have a chilling effect on the development of the Internet in Italy and Europe and argued that liability should attach only to the actual uploader of the video, not service providers who removed illegal content upon being notified.

Google’s stance has attracted both support and criticism. Brian Leiter, a law professor at the University of Chicago, caustically remarked that Google’s actual motto was “Do no evil, unless there is money to be made.” A more supportive commentator claimed that holding Google liable was like blaming the postal service for delivering a ransom note.

This isn’t the first time that Google or a major internet service provider has run into this kind of trouble. A few years ago, French courts had required Yahoo to prevent French users from accessing Nazi memorabilia being sold on Yahoo’s English language portal, although no such items were being sold on Yahoo’s French portal. Google even faced the issue quite recently in India when a single Judge Bench of the Bombay High Court issued an interim order staying Google from hosting defamatory blogs about a local cardiologist.

The Google case is merely the latest avatar of a question that Professors Tim Wu of Columbia and Jack Goldsmith of Harvard asked in their 2006 book, “Who controls the Internet?” Although the internet is sometimes viewed as a vehicle which renders national boundaries and physical locations meaningless, in reality, national authorities have sought to impose control over the internet right from its inception.

As the Italian case shows, sometimes the country that has the most restrictive law may end up creating internet policy for all other countries. Thus, for instance, if China has the harshest laws for pornography or defamation, Google may be forced to treat Chinese law as the global standard in order to be continued to do business in China, although European or U.S. law on free speech may be considerably more relaxed. Sometimes, of course, the struggle between an assertive government and the vibrant internet community may lead to productive results which benefit users globally as evolving norms on file-sharing suggest.

In the shorter term, however, companies like Google may find themselves somewhere between a rock and a hard place. The Italian case represents an extreme example of the troubles that it can run into – it wasn’t enough to remove material when requested – even the brief period during which the video was available was sufficient to render Google liable. But perhaps some good things may come out of this judgment – for instance, Google might now sponsor anti-bullying legislation or at least plead with bullies to not film their horrible handiwork and share it with others. And that would be a mercy for us all.

Lexpert is an Indian lawyer currently working in the United States.

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