I imagine good faith applies in Google's case and they are protected by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_harbor_%28law%29 .
I am not a lawyer but I am fairly sure O'Dwyer does not have to abide the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Google, as an American Website, however has to.
I suspect the UK law that was broken was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Economy_Act_2010 and that is being used by US to request the extradition.
Once on US territory, US law would apply.
At that level of income, a significant part of his audience could be proven to be from US. It would also matter if he used US servers, US registrars (.net is controlled by Verisign which is an American corporation) and so on, but I doubt prosecutors would have much issues in proving US jurisdiction once he's in USA.
What I fail to understand is why the US has jurisdiction here. What brings this crime to the US? If it is just that the US is on the Internet too, then the logical extension would be to pass this guy around every country in the world, which is clearly ridiculous.
He should be answerable to the law. But the UK seems like the appropriate jurisdiction here, not the US. If the problem is that UK law doesn't cover this case, then that is what should be questioned, rather than pretending that the US has jurisdiction in order to work around the rule of law.
Let's say the truth that we all know... Google, is google, they cannot go against it because it's too big, it's easier to bully with someone smaller than you.
I suspect the main difference in Google versus a specifically-made torrents search engine is the good faith criteria that would apply to Google. Also, it's not enough to reply to take-down requests in order to plea safe harbor protection, you actually need to have a registered agent and pay the registration fee (around $100).
