Busy week coming up for Google's lawyers. On Tuesday, Google's senior legal office Dave Drummond will be on Capitol Hill to answer questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on his company's proposed search ad partnership with Yahoo. Although Congressional hearings are mostly for tourists, Drummond will need to be careful in answering the committee's questions as the deal is also under investigation by the Department of Justice, which probably isn't just doing it for show and will likely regard anything Drummond says as part of the record. Drummond will be joined at the witness table by Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan and his counterpart at Microsoft, Brad Smith.

Meanwhile, negotiations continue this week between Google and Viacom over Google's handover of YouTube user data to Viacom, as ordered by the judge in Viacom's copyright infringement suit against the file-sharing site. Although Viacom reportedly agreed to allow Google to strip out any personally identifiable information before turning over the data, it apparently wants to make an exception for YouTube employees.

According to CNet, negotiations hit an impasse last week over Viacom's insistence that the data include the personal uploading and viewing histories of YouTube employees, including founders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen. The information could help Viacom counter YouTube's legal argument that it has no knowledge or what its users post to the site and therefore can't be held liable if the material is infringing, as per the "safe-harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

There, too, Google's legal position is complicated by the fact that Congress has also begun making noises about regulating the kind of information online service providers can collect about their users and what can be done with it. Google's senior privacy counsel Jane Horvath, in fact, was a witness just last week before the Senate Commerce Committee, which used the judge's order in the Viacom suit as a hook for a hearing on online privacy. Although Horvath said Google supports comprehensive federal privacy legislation--which could potentially shield it from future discovery orders such as Viacom scored--it needs to be careful that any new privacy law not bar OSPs from logging and retaining personal information for their own use, since virtually any monetization scheme will depend on knowing who is watching what and when.

The bigger Google gets, the more it finds itself in court and on Capitol Hill, the more it gets dragged into the world of unintended consequences. It may set out not to be evil, but the legal and legislative processes are unpredictable. It would be ironic if a company that grew huge by virtue of its superior technology and entrepreneurial flair ended up having its greatest impact on the digital economy by virtue of the legal precedents and regulatory schemes it provoked.

Paul Sweeting

Paul Sweeting is the Editor of Content Agenda, a business-to-business brand dedicated to the nexus of content, technology and business. This piece was originally published on Paul's blog "Media Wonk" on Content Agenda and is posted on DMW with the author's permission.

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