The venue, a building on the Rue de Richelieu in Paris, near the Paris Bourse, offered a classic Old World setting for Google to present its Brave New World. A good, but not perfect, "mashing".

On a warm June day the air conditioning broke down, a spill upstairs resulted in a leaky ceiling above the podium and eventually a power cut during a presentation by Google's head of search. The event was however a good showcase for how Google offers new tools to efficiently serve up the best of what the world has to offer.

CEO Eric Schmidt told the assembled journalists that he thought the "killer app" . . . the San Greal of the technology industry . . . was "the one that everyone contributes to".

Schmidt pointed to YouTube, the video-sharing site Google bought last year for $1.6bn, as the best exemplar of this ideal. "YouTube grows because people contribute to it . . . that's why it's so powerful . . .users are generating the content." YouTube does for video what Google has done for information generally . . . remove the barriers. Linking up all the world's information allows viral effects to take hold. "All of this is a new model . . . person to person and device to device. . . that viral thread is a fundamental shift in the way that information is shared. Sharing . . . more sharing means more searching . . . more searching means more Google."

The Great Firewall of China In the coda to his presentation, Schmidt alluded to some uncertain clouds on the horizon. "I think there are a lot of challenges ahead. . . What are the next billion people who come online going to do? Are they going to democratise the web? Are they going to bring new languages? Are they going to bring more tribalism or more globalism? I don't really know . . . but I do know that they are going to come. And they're going to test existing power structures."

The Venezuelan TV station, RCTV is an example of this latter phenomenon. After being forced off the air by the country's president, Hugo Chavez, RCTV managed to survive by publishing on YouTube.

But on the way to Google nirvana, cold reality intervened. Raising the spectre of the search giant's deal with the Great Firewall of China, a decision about which Schmidt and other Google executives seem to have sincerely agonised over, a reporter asked Schmidt, if Hugo Chavez ordered Google to take RCTV off YouTube, would it comply?

"The answer to this set of questions is, every case is different. YouTube must operate under the national law. If there is a law . . . and the law has to be written down, by the way . . . which is legal, binding and so forth. . . under that set of scenarios, we would look into it. And if we felt that this was a huge violation of some law. . .we would basically look at it on a case by case basis. Laws about video and expression differ by country. I think in the case you're describing, probably not, but I'd have to look at the specifics."

It was a moment of uncertainty in the face of what should have been thorny questions over concerns among some European regulators about privacy, change at the top at Yahoo, and the relationship between Google and Apple. "I can't announce anything today, but expect more announcements soon, " beyond the addition of Google Maps on the iPhone. (Schmidt got his biggest oohs and ahhs by producing one of the world's few pre-launch iPhone handsets from his pocket. ) It merely reinforced a concern that as Google becomes more ubiquitous forces including governments and content owners bristle at the idea that someone else should be able to set the rules of the global information game. Effectively these are real-world limitations on the theoretically boundless freedom that Google offers its users.

Google versus governments Earlier in the day, YouTube co-founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley fielded a question about the decision of the Pentagon to block access to YouTube by people in the US military. What were they doing to assure IT managers in other organisations who might have similar concerns. It was a trick question. The Pentagon's stated reason for blocking access is the amount of bandwidth YouTube uses . . . one-third of all internet traffic today is video, even if YouTube accounts for only a part of that.

"YouTube complies with local laws and customs, " said Hurley, when deciding whether to regulate content on YouTube.

That leaves a pretty broad swathe of restrictions to which YouTube says it could adhere, and may be a source of future friction between the idea of YouTube as an enabler of a global digital culture and the very local, analogue desire to control information. Nor is that desire limited to digital dictators in Latin America.

Localised versions of YouTube have been launched in nine markets including Ireland and the UK. It follows a raft of agreements with content providers in those markets to have their own-brand YouTube "channel", allowing traditional content owners more control of how and whether their copyrighted content will be made available.

These include top football clubs from Chelsea to Real Madrid to AC Milan, French presidential candidates, music from labels and even artists including Paul McCartney. As well as content from TV rights owners from Al Jazeera, the BBC and to TV stations all over the world.

However the BBC's main channel is blocked from view if you are outside the UK. And despite there being a YouTube Ireland, not one Irish content provider has signed up. When the Sunday Tribune revealed last week that Irish content deals were not likely to feature in YouTube announcements, RTE's Conor Mullen suggested the reason for RTE's non-involvement was broadband availability. In the past, other sources at RTE pointed to the difficulty of rights management issues . . . footage of GAA matches, for example, is jointly owned by RTE and the GAA. Perhaps there's a similar problem to the BBC's with the licence fee. Whatever the reason, RTE doesn't yet fit into YouTube's Brave New World . . .

and Google's goal of organising all the world's information remains a vision, not a reality.

rdelevan@tribune. ie