You’ve probably noticed this sentence oin your Orkut page after logging in:
“A friendly reminder: We all love orkut.com so help us keep it clean. Please use the service responsibly and be proactive in reporting abusive profiles and communities. Illegal content will not be tolerated and will be removed.
View our Terms of Service.
Stay beautiful
- orkut team”
None of the more then 12 million BR users of Orkut (yes: 12 million !) wondered what this announcement is about. Wel, it’s the start of an amazing Brazilian soap opera. I’ve announced it a few months ago on this blog, but now it’s really starting: the Orkut soap in Brazil. Lean back comfy in your couch and follow the amazing tale (only possible in Brazil).
Brazilian prosecutors say that Google’s community website Orkut contains information promoting crime and child pornography. The same problem as myspace, fotolog, photoblog, or whatever online social network is facing. The real issue is of course not that; the real issue is Brazilians would-be-Orkut can’t compete with the real stuff and Brazilians have a sudden attack of their ‘not made here’ phenomenon. Child pornography? Comon… Brazil is one of the heaviest ‘content providers’ on Morpheus and e-mule (I’m not referring to music really) and “Mike in Brazil” is selling publicly his ‘adventures in Rio’ (living in Rio I can exactly tell you where it’s filmed and I can assure you 18 years is not really a must in his casting).
Google has done everything to please the Brazilian government. They opened an office in BR, hired more then 150 people,…and obeyed to the law. But the federal prosecutors want a judge to order Google in Brazil to disclose users’ information or be closed down. They also want Google to pay 61 US$ million as a fine for “damages”. Damages? To whom? And where would this money go to? The argument of the prosecutor is that by withholding information about Orkut users, Google is thwarting a separate criminal investigation. Hilarious of course, ‘information of the users’; most of the Brazilian users are even not registered as being Brazilian; so what information would they go after? The IP adress? The real smarties really know how to mask that. And besides, the investigators are apparently that dumb not realising that actually Virtua (one of the major cable operators) is using Uruguay registered IP adresses.
Nicole Wong, Google’s spokeswoman said Google met all the requirements of the BR prosecutor.
“We have obeyed all the judicial orders that requested we remove undue content. Some orders demanded that we turn over user information for investigation and we complied.”
And Google knows exactly what the real issue is about. They said Brazilian officials should request information from the US, since that is where Orkut pages were hosted. The search engine said it did not hold information about its users or any of Orkut’s online communities in Brazil, since there is no obligation whatsoever to do so. Do you really think Terra fotologs keeps track of the user data? Of course not. You can post a gangbang of 8 years old on Terra Fotolog without ever fearing to be prosecuted.
Based on Google information, Orkut has about 16 million users, of which nearly three-quarters are Brazilian.
The real issue is that Brazil, supposedly being democratic, just cannot cope that more then 12 million (almost 10%) of it’s (well educated) citizens are logging in daily on a US-based social platform. And indeed, this is indeed a serious risk for Brazil. In an increasingly networked world Brazilians are ending up using foreign-based services. China, Europe, Korea, Japan,… are all equally competing with innovation, entrepeneurship and innovation. And Brazil is truly missing the boat. To Brazilian politicians, who still have dictatorship-blood flowing in their veines this is a serious threat to the Brazilian ‘identity’, thus they are prosecuting and threatening to close Orkut down.
But what they don’t realise is that the world changed since the 80’s, alot. It is quite impossible to close down Google, it would put Brazil on the map as being an authoritarian regime beyond China as to online policies. Already this Monday the word is allover; read o Bloomberg and here and Reuters. And even when they would shut down Orkut, the problem would remain. The more then 20 million Brazilian broadband users will shift to another online social network who will be either Europe or US based. Why? Because Brazil simply doesn’t have the innovation and entrepreneurs to compete.
Time the Brazilian politicians wake up and realise what is really needed to keep Brazil as a pride country on the worldmap of an open global interconnected world.