• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, August 28, 2009

Do the Italian authorities have it in for Google? First, there's the ongoing criminal case against four executives stemming from a YouTube video. The executives were hauled into court after a high-school student posted a three-minute clip of himself and three others bullying a 17-year-old with Down syndrome.

The Italian authorities say the clip -- which was live for around two months in 2006 -- violated the youngster's privacy and are seeking to hold the Google execs personally responsible. The search engine employees could face three years in prison. In January one exec -- global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer -- was briefly taken into custody after lecturing at the University of Milan

Now, in what looks like a new showing of anti-Google sentiment, the country's antitrust regulators are targeting the search company for allegedly taking aim at newspapers that opt out of Google News by excluding them from the main search results.

"Google allegedly makes it possible for a publisher to not appear on Google News, but that allegedly involves the exclusion of the publisher's content from the Google search engine. That is a highly penalizing condition," the authorities said in a statement, according to The New York Times.

Highly penalizing? Perhaps if it were true. Google says it's not. Addressing the allegations on its European policy blog, the company says that publishers can arrange to keep their sites off Google News -- and only Google News. "All they need to do is contact us to be removed," Google says.