I recently attended in Brussels a European Parliament hearing on Internet governance and whether Europe should sponsor its own Internet Governance Forum.The United Nations Internet Governance Forum is a great place to discuss everything from privacy and censorship to copyright and freedom of information. At the latest one held in Hyderabad, a rich dialogue developed on the future of the net.Read More

I recently attended in Brussels a European Parliament hearing on Internet governance and whether Europe should sponsor its own Internet Governance Forum.The United Nations Internet Governance Forum is a great place to discuss everything from privacy and censorship to copyright and freedom of information. At the latest one held in Hyderabad, a rich dialogue developed on the future of the net.

It's an important step forward for the European Parliament to address this issue. In my opinion, three important ingredients are required to compose a recipe for a successful forum.

First, the discussion must include a broad set of stakeholders, not just officials, but also members of civil society, representatives from industry and technical experts. A good model is the OECD's work on the Internet which includes a wide range of representation from Civil Society and the Internet Technical Community, from privacy organizations and the Internet society as well as from businesses. The multiple stakeholder model model has served the Internet exceedingly well.

Second, let's avoid requiring a lowest-common denominator consensus and let's avoid replicating existing decision and policy making processes nationally or in the European Union. What is needed, we believe, is lively and confrontational discussions that come up with new ideas on how to keep the net open and free, give users transparency and choice and unleash the economic growth the Internet can bring.

Third, European parliamentarians should participate in any forum. Their presence would help safe-guard the European values of open networks, freedom of speech, freedom of information, and free trade. The last thing we would like to see from a European Internet Governance Forum would be moves to enact trade barriers limiting global electronic commerce. It is also important to safeguard the innovative and open role of the Internet which benefits so many European companies.

Internet governance faces several key challenges this year. After last year's meeting in Hyderabad, we're looking forward to this year's gathering in Cairo. Let's hope there will be record European parliament participation. The UN's Internet Government Forum is scheduled to come to Europe - Vilnius - in 2010. If Europeans work together, we then will have a great chance to leave a lasting contribution to the future of the Internet.

Posted by Dr. Nicklas Lundblad, Public Policy and Government Affairs, Sweden

We were proud to host a celebrity this week in Brussels -- Dr. Vinton G. Cerf. Vint holds one of the great job titles ever invented, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for our company. Vint is best known as a "Father of the Internet," the co-designer of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet.Read More

We were proud to host a celebrity this week in Brussels -- Dr. Vinton G. Cerf. Vint holds one of the great job titles ever invented, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for our company. Vint is best known as a "Father of the Internet," the co-designer of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet.

At the Open Forum Europe summit "The Future is Open" today, Vint gave the keynote address. He explained that the conscious choice to design an open and neutral Internet turned out to be the main ingredient for its tremendous success. If the Net stays open, he predicted that it will help us getting out of the present economic gloom by unleashing creative ideas and helping create successful businesses, small and large, in Europe and elsewhere. Before Vint took to the podium, Professor Ziga Turk had explained how the first communication revolution - cheap paper from China - empowered the masses and helped unleash the Renaissance's creativity, and how the Internet is provoking a second communication revolution by spreading knowledge across the globe. Vint took up the train of thought and offered an analogy to the French Revolutionary goals of liberté, egalité and fraternité, saying openness, open standards, and open source must be the three guiding principles for the Net to achieve this revolutionary promise.

The most timely element of Vint's talk concerns open and non-discriminatory network access, commonly called net neutrality. While the European Union is close to a deal on European Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding's electronic communications package, it so far has failed to reach agreement on a provision ensuring that the ones controlling the physical layer do not favour their own or affiliated content or services at the application layer of the Internet. Vint acknowledged that telecom operators should have the necessary flexibility to manage traffic on their networks to keep them functioning in a smooth and secure fashion. Also, Vint acknowledged that an effective way of ensuring fairness in resource allocation is to charge more for faster than slower data transfer rates. This will help avoid congestion.

But it is crucial to ensure that flexibility does not lead to abuse. As "Skype Evangelist" Sten Tamkivi pointed out at the same conference: competition law and transparency may provide certain safeguards - but chances are this won't be enough, especially not for start-ups. A recent consumer survey that Google helped commission, showed that an overwhelming 91% of consumers in the UK, France and Germany expect their Internet Service Provider to avoid blocking or limiting their service. We have joined with a group of Internet companies including France's Dailymotion and PriceMinister, as well as Yahoo, eBay, Skype and Amazon, in favor of maintaining an open Internet. Together with them, we have signed a position paper urging the EU legislator to avoid eroding end-users rights to access the content, applications and services they choose.

Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, traditional or unconventional – can compete on equal terms to serve users. Those providing the highway shouldn't be able to decide who gets to drive in the fast lane. As Vint said, "the Internet must stay open. That’s where new ideas come from. That’s where new entrepreneurs come from. That’s what creates new jobs, new wealth, new knowledge. The openness of the network is going to be the engine to create new wealth. If we do anything to hurt that, we will do untold damage."

Posted by Sebastian Müller, European Policy Manager, Brussels

It’s one of the hardest moment for a parent – letting go of your children and letting them fly by themselves. Sam went with the Belgian national team to compete at the French Boys International. He hesitated. He doesn’t know many of them and wondered whether he could measure up. I wondered about letting him travel by himself, and face the pressure of an international tournament, and the pressure of being alone.Read More

It’s one of the hardest moment for a parent – letting go of your children and letting them fly by themselves. Sam went with the Belgian national team to compete at the French Boys International. He hesitated. He doesn’t know many of them and wondered whether he could measure up. I wondered about letting him travel by himself, and face the pressure of an international tournament, and the pressure of being alone.

The results were mixed. After playing with Belgium’s best, Sam felt he could measure up to them and felt more accepted as an equal by them. But he also felt outgunned in this tournament open only the best 120 under 18 players in Europe held at a tough course just outside of Toulouse.

The first day opened bright and sunny. Scores were low. At around 12:30, the win started blowing. By the time Sam teed off, he said the gusts were almost knocking him off his feet. He found it difficult to control his balls. Even so, he said he played well, until the 17th hole, when he hit what he thought was a good shot, only to see it bounce on the top of the green and over a near cliff out of bounds. He ended up taking a triple bogey and a disastrous 83.

The next day, the wind again was blowing and it was raining. He struggled with an 81.

Only two of the seven Belgians made the cut. Many of the others also struggled and shot in the 80s.

“It was a good learning experience,” Sam said afterward. “Certainly not a success, but not a total failure, either.

For a worried Dad, it also represents a mixed result. Sam learned more travelling and playing with his peers than with his parents. But he still struggled.

Early Monday morning, the Italian region of Abruzzo was hit by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake. The epicenter of the quake was in L'Aquila, a town about 100km northeast of Rome. According to the latest news reports, authorities fear that more than 289 people may have lost their lives.
In the last were days of tears and sadness but also of acts of dedication: I'm thinking about all the volunteers coming from every side of Italy to support the people from Abruzzo.

In our own small way, Googlers from Italy and from all our offices have dedicated their time and resources to provide useful information about this tragic event. We have created a web page to help people from the Abruzzo region and the areas hit by the earthquake where you can find real time information on the current situation and the rescue efforts. Users can also read the latest news, visit the websites of the the relief organizations providing aid in the region, and make a donation. This page is available both in Italian and in English.

We have launched this initiative in collaboration with the Italian Authorities (Minister of Interior and the Dept. of Fire Service, National Police, National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, Civil Protection Service) with the aim of giving as much real time information as possible.

Our hearts go out to the victims, their families, and the population that has been affected by this tragedy.

Read More

Early Monday morning, the Italian region of Abruzzo was hit by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake. The epicenter of the quake was in L'Aquila, a town about 100km northeast of Rome. According to the latest news reports, authorities fear that more than 289 people may have lost their lives.
In the last were days of tears and sadness but also of acts of dedication: I'm thinking about all the volunteers coming from every side of Italy to support the people from Abruzzo.

In our own small way, Googlers from Italy and from all our offices have dedicated their time and resources to provide useful information about this tragic event. We have created a web page to help people from the Abruzzo region and the areas hit by the earthquake where you can find real time information on the current situation and the rescue efforts. Users can also read the latest news, visit the websites of the the relief organizations providing aid in the region, and make a donation. This page is available both in Italian and in English.

We have launched this initiative in collaboration with the Italian Authorities (Minister of Interior and the Dept. of Fire Service, National Police, National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, Civil Protection Service) with the aim of giving as much real time information as possible.

Our hearts go out to the victims, their families, and the population that has been affected by this tragedy.

Posted by Marco Pancini, Public Policy Analyst, Italy

The European Commission held its first Consumer Summit this week, hosted by Commissioner Meglena Kuneva, bringing together 250 representatives of consumers, of business and of the regulators. Our President of International Operations Nikesh Arora, was one of the keynote speakers.Read More

The European Commission held its first Consumer Summit this week, hosted by Commissioner Meglena Kuneva, bringing together 250 representatives of consumers, of business and of the regulators. Our President of International Operations Nikesh Arora, was one of the keynote speakers.

We urged the audience to consider how our children see the digital world touching every part of their lives. Kids ask their parents why they needs to sit in front of a television set at 19:00 for a specific show. They want to watch right now, and the Internet allows them.

Extrapolated to 1.4 million net subscribers, we explained how shopping, entertaining and learning habits are being revolutionized. At the Summit, Ofcom's Collette Bowe cited her agency's report showing that more than one in five adults in UK, France, Italy and the United States watched feature films or full-length TV shows' online. According to Forrester, 37% of West European adults regularly shopped online in 2008. Yet the Commissioner recently recorded that only 7% of EU consumers had shopped cross-border. That's something we'd like to work with the Commission and we have produced a new set of tips to encourage cross-border shopping.



These online consumers are powerful. When they unite to challenge business practises, they force change. Earlier this year, thousands of Facebook members protested a sudden change in the site’s terms of service and Facebook reverted back to their old terms.

Businesses need to recognise the force of the networked consumer. We built consumer control right into the heart of our recent interest based advertising announcements. In her speech at the Summit, Ofcom's Mrs. Bowe described the pre-requisites for privacy in a connected world - transparency, opt-out for consumers, and excluding from targeted advertising sensitive areas such as individual health without an explicit opt-in. Google subscribes to all these points.

We told the audience that regulation has a vital role to play in supporting tomorrow's consumer - enabling innovation while also protecting consumer rights. But just as this presents businesses with both great opportunities and great challenges, the same is true for regulators. Regulators have not only the challenge of deciphering the issues and weighing the alternatives, but also of doing them in "Internet time", fast enough to make a difference.

Posted by Simon Hampton, Director for European Public Policy and Government Affairs

This week, Gmail celebrated its 5th birthday with the international launch of Gmail Labs, a quirky experimental feature playground. To mark the occasion, we held a press conference in Brussels to talk about how Gmail has evolved from its beginnings as a straightforward email service to the robust and flexible communications product we offer users today. Here's a quick recap of the event for all of those who attended by about 40 journalists.Read More

This week, Gmail celebrated its 5th birthday with the international launch of Gmail Labs, a quirky experimental feature playground. To mark the occasion, we held a press conference in Brussels to talk about how Gmail has evolved from its beginnings as a straightforward email service to the robust and flexible communications product we offer users today. Here's a quick recap of the event for all of those who attended by about 40 journalists.

Our Director of Product Management Eric Tholome put Gmail in context by giving a short history of computing, noting how we moved from the mainframe to personal computers, and from being disconnected to becoming a part of a network via the Internet. Using the power of the Web, many applications today including email, calendars, and online photo albums now can be run from within a browser over the Internet, or "in the cloud." This transformation is analogous to the creation of the electric grid a century ago. Before, everyone owned their own electricity generator. Now that seems inefficient and unnecessary.

Working in the cloud also eliminates the annoyance of manually keeping software up-to-date. Instead of relying on each individual to upgrade his or her software, a web-based application receives new features, security patches, and general updates from the server-side. Users can stop worrying about running updates: they will always see the newest version. Gmail, a web-based service, is a good example. Hundreds of changes have been launched since 2004, and users simply saw the newest version every time they logged on. These new features include increased storage space, video chat, and updated interface, and more.



At the event, Product Manager Christian Miccio introduced the crowd to Gmail Labs, a set of experimental features that you can turn on to modify how your Gmail works. Initially launched in English in June, 2008, Gmail Labs has launched 43 features in 43 weeks - including features like Offline Gmail, Tasks, Mail Goggles, Undo Send, and the Forgotten Attachment Detector. Such a rapid launch schedule, Christian noted, could only happen for a cloud-based application. And now, with the launch of Gmail Labs in 47 new languages, users globally can play with these features in their local languages.

If you are unfamiliar with Gmail Labs experiments, which can be turned on and off individually with a few clicks of the mouse, take a look at the video below for a brief introduction.

To set up a Gmail account, just click and get started. To turn on Gmail Labs features, go to the Settings link in the top right, then navigate to the Labs tab within the window. f you haven't tried Gmail Labs yet, we encourage you to play around - there's a feature (or two!) for everyone.

Posted by William Echikson, Senior Manager, Communications and Kasia Chmielinski, Communications Associate