Yesterday my colleague Richard Koman wrote that a federal judge ruled that Google, Yahoo, Time Warner and Microsoft could refuse advertising.

 Search engines are constitutionally similar to newspapers, the decision says and they have the same limited First Amendment rights as newspapers to accept or reject advertising.

Link to:   Judge Google is a media company, legally speaking

Interesting. Google says it is not a media company yet it invokes legal protections granted to newspapers.

Here is Rachel Rosmarin from Forbes:

Is Google a media company? Its officials often skirt around the concept, for fear of offending potential partners or competitors.

Yet under the Communications Decency Act (CDA) Google and other search engine companies are not considered media companies and are protected from legal liabilities arising from what they publish--newspapers have no such shielding.

Could this recent legal ruling lead to the loss of CDA protection for Google and similar companies?

Richard commented:

That's interesting. This dismissal decision actually has it both ways. Google is given the free speech protections of a newspaper and the court cites Miami Herald (newspapers can't be required to print candidate responses to editorials), Daily Nebraskan (decision not to print gay ads protected as free speech), Associates & Aldrich Co (newspaper can't be  compelled to print ad as is; right to edit).

At the same time, Google is an online service provider under CDA. So they are protected from the liability that newspapers have for the editorial decisions they make.

That's a sweet spot to be in. I think the thing to realize is that the First Amendment right not to speak is not a press freedom but a commercial freedom. The cases are newspaper cases because newspapers are traditional ad publishers. As an ad-running business, GOOG has the right not to run ads.

But they don't exercise any other editorial discretion, so they are very much an online provider. In fact, since all they do is aggregate others' content, they really have no editorial liability.

You could argue they should have a responsibility for the content they carry (ie Google News), but that's where CDA steps in to say: No liability.

But can Google have its cake and eat it?

Google News is produced by human editorial decisions--they are merely expressed in different ways, through the design of the Google News algorithm. Otherwise Google News would pick content at random and publish it, which it doesn't.

An ISP can argue that it is just a pipe, a bit carrier, and therefore has the protection of the CDA. However, the Telco/Cable ISPs want to climb up the value chain and add their own services, content, and advertising. Will they run into similar legal issues?

And If there is no net neutrality, and they are choosing which services/content to carry, could such editorial activities affect their DCA protection?

The Telco/Cable companies are government regulated which means they have some powerful friends.  My cell phone bill comes with 13 different taxes and fees, and my landline phone has nearly as many. That makes for a lot of government, state,  and regulatory agencies that are stakeholders in these businesses.

Or does being in a government regulated industry increase business risks? There is greater exposure to changes in political climates. And the will of the people can be expressed in unwelcome ways... 

Either way, I'm sure the newspaper publishers and their lawyers would love to have a more level playing field against Google and the rest--it costs them a lot of money to police media content.

Some of Silicon Valley's largest companies are media companies: Google, Yahoo, EBay, for example are media companies--they publish pages of content and advertising around it.

Some of the most interesting and most valuable new Silicon Valley companies, such as Youtube, Facebook are based here in Northern California. So is Craigslist, the seventh largest online media company in the English language world (in terms of traffic).

Take a look at Business 2.0's 25 startups to watch and look at how many of these mostly "social" media and advertising companies and are based in the Bay Area:18. Only two are based in New York.

Masters of the Universe

But if you work in Manhattan you feel at the center of the media universe. Midtown and the Avenue of the Americas is where the capital of the media industry has sat for many decades.

Whenever I am in New York, it feels as if I am in the coolest, the most media saviest place in the world. Just as in the famous New Yorker magazine cover, in which New York is depicted large and the Rest of the World is shown as distant, small, and uninteresting, that's the way it feels to me when I'm there.

As a media professional, New York has always been a mecca, where I love to be. It was one of the perks and attractions of working at the Financial Times that our US HQ was smack dab in the middle of Manhattan, in the ITT building, and I loved those opportunities of working in New York.

Which leads me to my point, New York's media industry doesn't see the shift that is going on because it feels as if it is master of its universe. It has noticed that its business models are under tremendous pressure but it hasn't noticed the shift westwards, the competition in Silicon Valley and in Santa Monica.

Google, Yahoo, Ebay, etc, are keen to portray themselves as technology companies rather than media companies--it is much more conductive to establishing partnerships and ad network deals in which they benefit far more than their old school media partners. If they were seen as more media company than technology company, I'm sure things would be different.

The New York Times, for example, would not give over its online front page to Google AdSense, which means Google owns the advertisor relationship ("if you would like to advertise on this site click here").

If Google were seen more as a media company the partnership advertising deals would be a lot different.

Our media industry is growing

Which is why our media industry is growing by leaps and bounds. Last time I looked New York's media industry was contracting, facing lower revenues, layoffs and a confused future. But still building skyscrapers(!)   New York Architecture Images- Times Tower.

Let me help out the New York media industry...

Five basic rules for media company success:

-Tomorrow's media industry is all about being technology-enabled and community-powered.

-Get your content as near-to-free as you can with machine harvesters such as spiders and searchbots.

-Use algorithms and community-power (also nearly free) to organize the content.

-Publish it widely and in many forms (video, podcasts, etc) through the amazing scale that the global internet provides and that our media technologies (RSS, media platforms, TCP/IP, etc) provide.

-And remember Foremski's First Law of New Media: Content is infinitely scalable.