Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
British MP David Davis, Google, and Setting the Record Straight
Monday, July 27, 2009
We were surprised and disappointed to open the Times newspaper today and find a vitriolic
column
on Google and our record on privacy, from Conservative Member of Parliament David Davis. Responding to speculation in the Times several weeks ago that the Conservative party was in favour of giving patients the ability to transfer their medical records to private companies, Mr Davis decided to launch an extraordinary attack on Google, riddled with misleading statements. Of course, Mr Davis didn't ask us first for our comments or to check his facts before going to press.
Mr Davis' argument is based on something of a straw man, given that Google Health, our health records product, is only available in the US, and we have no immediate plans to bring it to other countries. But given that he goes on to attack our Street View product as a "high-handed" intrusion on privacy, assert that we do not respect European privacy law, argue we have entered into "an amoral deal with China," and attribute our economic success to "legally unfettered use of personal data", we wanted to set the record straight.
Allegation: Google is "hostile to privacy."
We were the first company in our industry to anonymise information when people conduct searches. We took the US government to court when we were asked to hand over large amounts of data to them. Like all of our products, Street View was built from the ground up to respect user privacy. The imagery is not real time. We automatically blur faces and vehicle number plates, and we make it easy for people with concerns to have their homes removed from Street View if they wish. In the months since Street View launched in the UK, tens of millions of people have found it a useful and interesting tool, whether for exploring a tourist destination, finding a restaurant or checking driving directions.
Allegation: Google claims that European privacy legislation "does not apply to it."
For a company that supposedly ignores European laws, we did not launch Google Street View in the UK until we had the green light from the Information Commissioner! "Google Street View does not contravene the Data Protection Act," said David Evans, the Commissioner's Senior Data Protection Practice Manager, "and, in any case, it is not in the public interest to turn the digital clock back."
Allegation: Google entered an "amoral deal" with China.
As we said
when we launched Google.cn, it wasn't a step we took lightly, but we felt we were doing it for the right reasons - to bring more information to more people. Where Chinese regulations require us to remove sensitive information from our search results we disclose this to users - which is not standard practice in China.
Allegation: Google makes its money from "exploiting its customers' private data for commercial ends."
Google makes the vast majority of its revenue by providing users with free services and serving ads targeted to what the user has searched for or has read. This does not involve selling user data or exposing it in any way. When we launched interest based advertising we did so only after putting users in control of the information collected about them, as we make clear in our
user FAQ.
In addition, we do not use categories defined by
European privacy laws
as "sensitive" such as race, religion, sexual orientation, or health when showing ads.
If managed and used responsibly, the free services Google offers can be of tremendous civic benefit. We’ve developed a tool called “Flu Trends”, which offers an early warning system for flu outbreaks based on the anonymous actions of millions of people searching for symptoms. Relief agencies depend on Google Earth images after natural disasters like tsunamis or hurricanes and Indian farmers leverage our topographical maps to help with flood management.
We're proud of our track record of protecting user privacy. We work hard to make sure our users understand what data we collect and how we use it, because we are committed to transparency and user choice. The important work of education is made more difficult by polemicists who abuse the truth. We are happy to debate our privacy record or policies anytime, but we'd rather that debate was based on fact not fiction.
Peter Fleischer, Google's Global Privacy Counsel
Closed networks are a risky business
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Consumers like open networks; operators want to use their control of the network as the basis for developing new business models. It was ever thus!
Europe's legislator and its regulators currently rely on competition to police the gulf, and it has generally worked. New entrants have entered the market and consumers are enjoying a choice of service provider. Meanwhile, an explosion of innovation in the devices used by consumers (such as netbooks, the iPhone, or
Android
-powered handsets) has been matched by massive investment from an array of players in datacentres to enable the so-called Internet "cloud". It has never been a more exciting time to be on the Internet.
The Commission is currently
consulting
on a Recommendation on the regulation of Next Generation Access networks (NGAs, the deployment of fibre either to street cabinets or to the home). This paper aims to translate the legislator's willingness to recognise that investments in NGAs are more risky than traditional investments (e.g. of fibre in an operator's backbone network). The lay-person could be foregiven for wondering why investing in infrastrucutre is seen as risky, given the ongoing signs of exponential bandwidth demand from consumers, but that is not a part of the debate.
The Commission is seeking views on the sort of "risk premium" those that build NGAs (frequently the traditional, incumbent) operators should be able to include in their wholesale prices to other ISPs. Two of the parameters the Commission is considering recommending national regulators to take into account are "demand for additional bandwidth, [&] consumers' willingness to pay".
Our
contribution to the consultation
makes the simple observation that bandwidth demand and consumer willingness to pay are themselves dependent on how open are the Internet access services available to them.
The telecoms package
equips regulators with powers
to ensure consumers can access the services and applications of
their
choice. Weak application of these rules would permit operators to run less open neworks, reducing consumer willingness to pay. But if this was then used as evidence in favour of higher "risk premiums", higher wholesale rates would feed in to increased consumer prices and cause still lower demand. A vicious circle.
We have therefore proposed that the Commission require risk premiums be calculated under the assumption that the regulators' new powers to keep networks open are applied vigorously. Lower risk premiums will increase demand, facilitate market entry and hopefully result in competition continuing to police the openness of network access. A virtuous circle, where assuming regulation is applied will (hopefully) result in it not being needed in practise.
Posted by Simon Hampton, Director of European Public Policy
Un modèle ouvert pour l'internet mobile
Monday, July 20, 2009
En avril 2008, le plan
France Numérique 2012
a consacré la réutilisation de 72 MHz du dividende numérique - les fréquences qui vont être libérées avec la transition vers la télévision numérique terrestre et l'arrêt de la diffusion analogique - pour des services haut débit.
L'ARCEP
, le régulateur des communications électroniques français, a ouvert
une consultation publique
durant le premier semestre de cette année sur l’attribution d’autorisations dans les bandes 800 MHz et 2,6 GHz pour les services mobiles à très haut débit. La bande 800 MHz en question correspond précisément à la portion du dividende numérique qui sera consacrée au haut débit.
L'enjeu est de taille. En effet, alors que l'internet a conquis ses premiers 1,5 milliards d'utilisateurs en 20 ans sur des réseaux fixes, le prochain milliard d'internautes sera mobile. C'est donc l'un des grands axes de développement de l'économie numérique dans les prochaines années et les modalités de disponibilité des futures infrastructures sans fil seront un critère déterminant de succès pour faire figurer l'Europe parmi les puissances numériques mondiales, avec tout le potentiel en termes d’emplois et de croissance que cela peut représenter pour l’économie dans son ensemble.
Conscient de cet enjeu, Google a participé à cette consultation publique et vous pourrez consulter notre contribution sur ce billet d'ici quelques jours.
Notre message principal vise à promouvoir le modèle ouvert de l'internet dans l'environnement mobile. Le
modèle ouvert
a permis toute l'innovation que l'on connait sur la Toile, a favorisé l’éclosion d’une multitude d’applications ou de services et généré une infinité de nouveaux usages.
Concernant l'Internet mobile, des approches différentes pouvant être qualifiées de "walled gardens" ont montré leurs limites par le passé. Google croit que la clé du décollage de l'Internet mobile nécessite notamment d'apporter "tout l'internet" auprès des utilisateurs, pas seulement un bouquet d'applications. L'apparition récente de terminaux incluant un navigateur offrant la possibilité aux utilisateurs de naviguer sur l'ensemble des sites web - sans qu'il soit nécessaire d'adapter ces sites - a déjà prouvé l'intérêt de cette approche. On constate deja un succès de ces terminaux et une explosion du trafic et des usages internet au départ de ces terminaux. Un cercle vertueux s'engage dans la mesure où les fournisseurs d'applications, constatant l'explosion du trafic provenant de ce type de terminaux, sont incités à optimiser leurs applications à l'environnement de ces terminaux pour une expérience utilisateur meilleure encore.
Le modèle ouvert est bénéfique pour tous, y compris pour les opérateurs, car le foisonnement d'applications innovantes est le meilleur moyen d’attirer les abonnés en grand nombre sur les nouveaux réseaux. C’est aussi le moyen de donner les meilleures chances à la France et à l'Europe d'être le berceau des futurs champions de l'économie numérique mondiale.
Posté par Olivier Esper, Policy Manager - France
Promoting an open model for mobile internet
In April 2008, the plan "
France Numérique 2012
" (Digital France 2012) confirmed the reuse of 72 MHz of the so-called digital dividend (frequencies that will be freed up by the transition to terrestrial digital television and the analog switch-off) for wireless broadband services.
ARCEP
(the French regulator for electronic communications) opened a public consultation during the first half of this year about licensing in the 800MHz and 2.6 GHz frequency bands for very high speed mobile services. The 800 MHz band is precisely the portion of the digital dividend dedicated to broadband by France Numérique 2012.
Although the subject might sound technical, it is a highly important matter. While the Internet attracted its first 1.5 billion users in 20 years over fixed networks, the next billion Internet users will be mobile. Mobile Internet represents therefore a major strategic development for the French digital economy, with all the potential economic growth and job creation this represents for the economy as a whole.
Google contributed to the public consultation and you will be able to read our submission here shortly.
Our main message is about promoting the open model of the web in the mobile environnement. This
open model
has enabled the development of a multitude of innovative applications and services.
Indeed, different approaches to the mobile internet that can be described as "walled gardens" have shown their limits in the past. Google believes that one key to the take-off of mobile Internet requires that "the entire internet" is available to users and not just a closed set of applications. The recent appearance of handsets including a browser offering the possibility to users to browse the entire web - without the need to tailor these sites - has already proven the benefit of this approach. This can be shown by the success of these terminals and the explosion of traffic and internet usage. A virtuous circle is created to the extent that the application providers, noting the explosion of traffic from this type of terminal, are encouraged to optimize their applications to this more powerful mobile environment and resulting in an even better user experience.
We believe that the open model is beneficial for all, including network operators, because a plethora of innovative applications is the best means to make the next generation access networks attractive to the greatest number of subscribers. The open model is also key for Europe and France to become the home of next generation digital champions.
Posted by Olivier Esper, Policy Manager - France
Smart Meters for Smart Energy Consumption
Thursday, July 16, 2009
The new Swedish Presidency of the European Union has rightly put the climate change challenge as one of its priorities. Next week, Europe's environment and energy ministers will
meet
in the Swedish town of
Åre
. Together they hope to develop synergies on climate change, energy-efficiency, innovation and competitiveness.
We made the case recently on this blog for an
Energy Information Policy
that would harness the power of information technology to support social change. In general, information technology can play a key role in giving citizens access to data that helps drive environmentally friendly behaviour. In particular, we suggested that the deployment of smart meters was a huge opportunity, especially as we would be building on an area of existing European leadership.
Smart meters collect real, or near real, time information on energy use. When this is reflected back to users, studies show that this has a significant impact on end consumer behaviour: On average, household energy savings amount to 5 - 15%. Even greater savings are possible if this information is used to see the value of retiring an old refrigerator, installing a new air conditioner or insulating the home.
The potential impact of large numbers of people achieving similar efficiencies is even more exciting. For every six households that save 10% on electricity, for instance, we reduce carbon emissions as much as taking one conventional
car
off the road.
We wanted to leverage these large energy opportunities for our users, so we created Google
PowerMeter
. It receives information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provides customers with access to their home electricity consumption right on their personal
iGoogle
homepage.
The positive effects are already visible in our
first pilot agreements
for Powermeter with utility companies around the world. Just recently, we announced our latest partner and first European utility,
Yello Strom
, in Germany. Yello uses one of the globally most advanced smart metering technologies, giving users real-time feedback on their energy consumption.
Many of our internal users have seen significant savings opportunities through being a pilot tester for PowerMeter, and
all
of them have become much more aware of energy lingo, and, much more importantly, just what it means to leave your HiFi on standby the whole day round (it translated to an impressive 140 Euros yearly savings
for me
).
When fed into a social network context, we believe the value of getting access to energy information could be even greater. For example, imagine setting a savings target for yourself, sharing it with selected friends, and getting pinged if you exceed or miss your targets.
"Energy education" - making users aware of kiloWatt hours, and the Euro costs they translate into, is one of the key tasks when trying to make this planet greener. We are only at the beginning, and PowerMeter is a small puzzle piece in this much larger challenge. Most people that you would ask on the street would be able to tell you the price of a litre of petrol, or what they spend on their mobile phone bill per month, but very few know hard facts about their energy consumption or cost. Do you? We strongly believe there's a lot of room for change here.
At Google, we have been interacting with policy makers, industry leadership and industry influencers a lot in the past year. It is truly exciting to see that many of the experts' expected developments in that space are well aligned with our idea of making more information accessible to the end user.
This will ultimately lead to lower energy bills, more informed users and a planet a little greener, and we greatly applaud technology, projects and policy that can help drive this trend.
Posted by Jens Redmer, Principal, New Business Development, and Benjamin Kott, Green Business Operations Manager, EMEA
Working with News Publishers
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Last week, a group of newspaper and magazine publishers signed a
declaration
stating that "Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost," and that they "no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission."
We agree, and that's how things stand today. The truth is that news publishers, like all other content owners, are in complete control when it comes not only to what content they make available on the web, but also who can access it and at what price. This is the very backbone of the web -- there are many confidential company web sites, university databases, and private files of individuals that cannot be accessed through search engines. If they could, the web would be much less useful.
For more than a decade, search engines have routinely checked for permissions before fetching pages from a web site. Millions of webmasters around the world, including news publishers, use a technical standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to tell search engines whether or not their sites, or even just a particular web page, can be crawled. Web
masters who do not wish their sites to be indexed can and do use the following two lines to deny permission:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
If a webmaster wants to stop us from indexing a specific page, he or she can do so by adding '
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">
' to the page. In short, if you don't want to show up in Google search results, it doesn't require more than one or two lines of code. And REP isn't specific to Google; all major search engines honor its commands. We're continuing to talk with the news industry -- and other web publishers -- to develop even more granular ways for them to instruct us on how to use their content. For example, publishers whose material goes into a paid archive after a set period of time can add a simple
unavailable_after
specification on a page, telling search engines to remove that page from their indexes after a certain date.
Today, more than 25,000 news organizations across the globe make their content available in Google News and other web search engines. They do so because they want their work to be found and read -- Google delivers more than a billion consumer visits to newspaper web sites each month. These visits offer the publishers a business opportunity, the chance to hook a reader with compelling content, to make money with advertisements or to offer online subscriptions. If at any point a web publisher feels as though we're not delivering value to them and wants us to stop indexing their content, they're able to do so quickly and effectively.
Some proposals we've seen from news publishers are well-intentioned, but would fundamentally change -- for the worse -- the way the web works. Our guiding principle is that whatever technical standards we introduce must work for the whole web (big publishers and small), not just for one subset or field. There's a simple reason behind this. The Internet has opened up enormous possibilities for education, learning, and commerce so it's important that search engines makes it easy for those who want to share their content to do so -- while also providing robust controls for those who want to limit access.
Image: 'Robots wallpaper,'
Jelene
(
Creative Commons Attribution
)
Update
on 7/20/2009: The word "crawling" in the fourth paragraph has been replaced with "indexing."
Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager
Some Good Ideas about European Innovation
Friday, July 10, 2009
A European Commission sponsored panel of top-ranking business leaders this week launched a fascinating online debate on
future EU innovation policy
. Entitled Re-invent Europe through innovation, the panel makes the case "for an innovation society where knowledge is utilised rapidly and powerfully for societal benefit and development. This goal requires a systematic transformation from fragmented, single issue, closed approaches favouring large incumbents to networked, flexible and open approaches favouring new entrants and ideas". It is a thought provoking agenda, and is timely given
President Barroso
's recent call for "a radical transformation towards a knowledge-based society".
Google is not on the panel, which includes representatives from manufacturing companies such as Kone, financial institutions such as the Czech bank CSOB as well as Cisco from the technology side. But we welcome the agenda and the tenor of the discussion. It echoes our own call for the European Union to adopt a
Fifth Freedom
for knowledge to the Treaty of Rome's original four freedoms. We strongly agree, for example, with the paper's effort to puts the issue of investment in infrastructure in a broader context - "broadband is not simply a new communication line but a new social infrastructure that is a pre-requisite for future innovation".
Of course, praise alone is of only limited use, and there are some issues where the panel would ideally have said more. Intellectual property is always a sensitive topic, and it is covered only in a delphic fashion. Likewise, while there's much focus on how government spends money to support innovation, there's little discussion of how the Internet has enabled grass-roots innovation precisely because - as the report states - public financing is frequently "directed to incumbents in mature industries". More than public financing, judicious public policy is required for intellectual property regimes to support innovation based mass-collaboration.
The panel also expresses a frequently heard concern that "ideas generated here [in Europe] are developed more successfully by others elsewhere." Unfortunately, but the panel extrapolate this logic into the new economy and in particular "social innovations to address climate change, aging and other major challenges". Yet one of the hallmarks of the knowledge economy is the emphasis on sharing, and we need to understand that sharing information may be the socially optimal policy to meet a global challenge such as climate change.
Posted by Simon Hampton, European Public Policy Director
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British MP David Davis, Google, and Setting the Re...
Closed networks are a risky business
Un modèle ouvert pour l'internet mobile
Smart Meters for Smart Energy Consumption
Working with News Publishers
Some Good Ideas about European Innovation
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