Perhaps I wasn't clear about one important point: while safe harbour schemes are one example of corporations like Google pushing back the frontiers of what is legal, I did not mean to imply that all such moves rely on the safe harbour principle. It is merely one example. Something like the proposed Google Books settlement would be another. A lack of effective privacy laws is a third.

As for the difficulty of running things without safe harbour provisions, people are quick to assume that there are no or only limited alternatives, and that without the current scheme we would somehow "kill the Internet", but I challenge that assumption, based on the argument that follows.

Firstly, if there's one thing the Internet has managed to do successfully for a long time, it is evolving creative solutions to large scale problems. The Web started as a small network of pages, with only a few carefully chosen links between them. Then we evolved web rings to help people find related content. After that, ever-improving search engines became the dominant way to find material. Today we have link aggregators, status updates/tweets, etc. There is no reason to believe that removing one form of expression would make things worse; on the contrary, if history is anything to go by, it might well catalyse the development of a better replacement.

On which note, I think we are going to move towards "Web 3.0" where user-generated content is balanced with editorial control by real people anyway. Web 2.0 was an interesting experiment, but the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible, the volume of information is overwhelming, and the simple, user-supported voting systems of today are widely abused and not really up to the job. Even the poster child, Wikipedia, now has policies that prevent open contributions to certain articles, internal politics among the volunteer editors about what should be allowed, etc. I think the kind of purely automated content hosting sites with unlimited user generated content are already dead, they just don't know it yet.

Next is a key point that I imagine some here may disagree with: I have never believed in absolute freedom of speech (of the kind where you can say whatever you like with no responsibility for any consequences). Words are very powerful things, and in the Internet era that power is magnified many times over. I believe that people should be held responsible for something they say that is unreasonably damaging to others, whether it be betraying a confidence, starting a malicious rumour, giving misleading "expert" advice in a field such as health or finance... This is just common decency and courtesy, and indeed almost nowhere has really had freedom of speech in law for many years, because of issues like defamation, national security, court-ordered anonymity for victims of certain crimes, etc.

These things have been part of the law in many jurisdictions since long before the Internet. The difference is that on the Internet, there is no such thing as an off-hand comment quickly forgotten. Society needs to adapt to this new reality, appreciating the benefits of giving everyone the power to speak to millions of others, but imposing suitably harsh penalties for those who use that power irresponsibly.

I just don't see how that is compatible with broad measures like absolute freedom of speech or complete safe harbour rules for those republishing material to potentially huge numbers of people. Those are merely convenient blanket laws designed for ease of implementation, not because they reflect the ethical thing to do.

So I'm not convinced that a law that imposed responsibility and as a side-effect made it difficult to run unlimited user-generated content sites would cause the loss of something truly valuable. If you want to write a dozen spam comments on a blog about how hot Hayden looked on Heroes last night, you are welcome to do it on your own personal web site, where your deeply-considered and original thoughts will no doubt receive the attention they deserve. And if you say something unfair in your next blog post that destroys someone's career, you can look forward to a personal letter telling you when to turn up in court and defend that action or be held accountable.

Meanwhile, I don't see the kinds of rules I'm talking about halting the development of the Web, because I think we're going to move toward more editorial control on the big, popular sites for other reasons anyway. And even if you do believe in absolute freedom of speech, you can still publish what you want on your personal web site, you would just have to take personal responsibility for it accordingly instead of hiding semi-anonymously behind some giant organisation who will republish your material but shield you from being identified and thus held responsible for the consequences. I, for one, don't have a problem with that.