It's not just a fun quip: it's a moral principle that I really think more people in our industry should come around to.

What we do has consequences. Often times, profound consequences on vast numbers of lives. We have a responsibility, as individual contributors, managers, leaders, and "founders", for the outcomes of our work.

If Google is as smart as they'd like us all to believe, they can find a way to make their business work. Sure, the margins might not be quite as fantastic, but society doesn't owe them maximum return to its own detriment.

It's not my job to solve Google's scalability problems, that's their job. It's my job to hold them just as accountable as my local coal power plant for the choices they make. If Google wants me to love their brand, and support their work, then they should stop being a social and intellectual polluter. It's a lot easier to see and sense the danger of toxic fumes from a power plant than to see and sense the toxic danger of massive social media and tech companies, but they are no less real and no less lethal.

"It's not just a fun quip: it's a moral principle that I really think more people in our industry should come around to."

Which i actually buy into, and have lived for many years, but it also just seems a bit silly applied to this case.

The usual answer is "it's not my job", which you use here.

That's great - throwing rocks from the sidelines is real easy, but it's not clear exactly what you want to happen, so let's instead actually be clear and concrete about that.

So again, concretely: Is your suggestion that someone should review every single web page crawled by a search engine, Google or anyone else?

If not, can we move past the silly quips and try to get to a better place constructively?

If I put something defamatory on my website I can get sued.

Why should it be different for Google?

"We cannot have someone response to every complaint!" – okay, I understand. Then maybe don't do whatever you're doing at all then if you can't handle the responsibility?

It isn't different.

Let's not change the subject - this isn't about responding to complaints - the suggestion here was basically that someone should have to review every single web page that gets indexed.

Either that's what we want or it isn't. Let's not change the subject because this is a line that might have to be drawn.

If you can't build your product within the bounds of laws and morals, your product sucks or you don't have what it takes to build such a product.

This is again, a great quip, but let's go back to the literal concrete question i asked, to see what line is getting drawn here.

Should Google, or whoever, have to literally review every single page they index?

If yes, how do you expect that to work. If no, what is actually being suggested beyond the quips?

To answer your question: no.

Google's attempt at a defence implied that they should have checked the pages. There is plenty of internet related law to protect internet companies from responsibility for user submitted content. You can make tons of applications for tons of businesses without breaking the law, and that includes building a search engine.

In this case, Google was notified about the slanderous content on their platform. From that moment they knew, or reasonably could've known if a human actually dealt with their legal notices, that the content was breaking the law. They did not remove the material and the case was brought to court, where Google stated that they were a mere subordinate distributor left in the dark.

If they can't operate their product without dealing with legal complaints, then yes, they should hire more people or reduce the ways their search engine can break the law.