Success Quote by Joichi Ito

Google’s “amazing position” isn’t praise so much as a coolly delivered warning: scale turns you into the test case. Joichi Ito is pointing at a structural reality of the internet era that most users experience only as convenience. When one company becomes the default gateway to information, it also becomes the default defendant. The word “target” is doing heavy lifting here, reframing innovation not as a triumphal march but as an invitation for every unsettled question - privacy, copyright, defamation, surveillance, competition - to arrive as a summons.

The subtext is almost strategic. Lawsuits aren’t just risks to be minimized; they’re the mechanism by which societies decide what “the internet” is allowed to be. Courts don’t merely punish; they crystallize norms into precedent, and precedent becomes infrastructure as real as fiber-optic cable. Ito’s phrasing also implies a kind of inevitability: legislators move slowly, regulators often lack technical fluency, and so the judiciary ends up arbitrating the future one adversarial case at a time.

Context matters: Ito came up in the thick of late-’90s/early-2000s digital optimism, when the web’s rules were being written in real time and corporate platforms started replacing the messy plurality of early internet life. Google, with its reach across search, ads, video, mobile, and data, was uniquely positioned to collide with every stakeholder at once. The line is less about Google’s fate than ours: whichever way those landmark cases fall, they won’t just define a company’s liability. They’ll define the boundaries of speech, ownership, and autonomy online for everyone else.