Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
What's up with Measurement Lab
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Cross posted from Google Public Policy Blog
Eight months ago
, we joined a group of researchers to launch
Measurement Lab (M-Lab)
, an open platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools.
We created M-Lab in order to help measure the
actual
performance of broadband Internet connections. Is your connection as fast as advertised? Where are the bottlenecks that impact VoIP or video performance? Answers to these sorts of questions will help users to make informed decisions in the market, and help governments around the globe to craft sound broadband policy.
So, how's it doing?
To date, more than 150,000 Internet users from around the world have used M-Lab to test the performance of their broadband connection and share information with researchers.
Now M-Lab is hitting the Mediterranean. We're thrilled to announce that the
EETT
-- Greece's telecommunications regulator -- and the
Greek Research and Technology Network (GRnet)
have contributed servers and connectivity for a new M-Lab node in Athens, Greece, and will collaborate with M-Lab to help improve the usability of the platform's tools.
EETT has already been working to provide useful information about broadband networks to consumers, through their
central Web portal
. EETT plans to incorporate data collected through M-Lab into this map, so that users will be able to compare broadband providers' and their Internet connection's performance across several dimensions.
In addition to EETT and GRnet,
Voxel
also has joined as an M-Lab partner, providing server nodes and connectivity in New York City and Amsterdam. Since launch, we've added many new servers, for a total of 38 between the U.S. and Europe.
We've also added two new tools,
PathLoad2
and
ShaperProbe
. PathLoad2 allows users to test their available bandwidth (the maximum bit rate you can send to a network link before it gets congested), and ShaperProbe detects whether the ISP reduces the speed of a download or an upload after it begins.
We're happy about M-Lab's successful beginning, but it's only the beginning. The platform and its tools are still very much in beta, and we continue efforts to improve them.
In the coming months we're aiming to make the collected data publicly available and accessible, improve the user experience and stability of our tools, and expand the availability of the site globally. Stay tuned, and in the meantime we hope you'll
run an M-Lab test on your own broadband connection
.
Posted by Sascha Meinrath and Robb Topolski, Open Technology Initiative (OTI), and Derek Slater, Policy Analyst, Google
(Editor's note: We're pleased to welcome Sascha Meinrath and Robb Topolski of the
Open Technology Initiative
(OTI) as
guest
bloggers. As a part of The New America Foundation, OTI works to support policy and regulatory measures that further open technologies and communications networks.)
Introducing DataLiberation.org: Liberate your data!
Monday, September 14, 2009
Cross-posted from
Google Policy Blog
Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you - not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you're like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it's also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all.
Although this may seem like a strange analogy, this pretty accurately describes the situation my team, Google's Data Liberation Front, is working hard to combat from an engineering perspective. We're a small team of Google Chicago engineers (named after a Monty Python skit about the
Judean People's Front
) that aims to make it easy for our users to transfer their personal data in and out of Google's services by building simple import and export functions. Our goal is to "liberate" data so that consumers and businesses using Google products always have a choice when it comes to the technology they use.
What does product liberation look like? Said simply, a liberated product is one which has built-in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you'd like to take it elsewhere.
At the heart of this lies our
strong commitment
to an open web run on open standards. We think open is better than closed -- not because closed is inherently bad, but because when it's easy for users to leave your product, there's a sense of urgency to improve and innovate in order to keep your users. When your users are locked in, there's a strong temptation to be complacent and focus less on making your product better.
Many web services make it difficult to leave their services - you have to pay them for exporting your data, or jump through all sorts of technical hoops -- for example, exporting your photos one by one, versus all at once. We believe that users - not products - own their data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle. We'd rather have loyal users who use Google products because they're innovative - not because they lock users in. You can think of this as a long-term strategy to retain loyal users, rather than the short-term strategy of making it hard for people to leave.
We've already liberated over half of all Google products, from our popular blogging platform Blogger, to our email service Gmail, and Google developer tools including App Engine. In the upcoming months, we also plan to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs (batch-export).
Feel free to take a deeper look into product liberation at
dataliberation.org
, a website we're launching today which is dedicated to explaining the Data Liberation Front and the products we've liberated.
If you'd like to contribute suggestions for services that you think need to be liberated, please do so on our Data Liberation
Moderator page
. We're also on Twitter
@dataliberation
.
Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation engineering manager
Bringing the world's lost books back to life
Monday, September 7, 2009
Today I am attending the European Commission's information hearing in Brussels on Google Books's agreement with American authors and publishers. This offers us a wonderful opportunity to clear up misunderstandings and further explain the opportunities offered by the US Agreement. All of us, on both sides of the Atlantic share the same crucial goal - to bring millions of lost books back to life.
If an American court approves, readers in the U.S. will be able for the first time to search, preview and buy online access to a great number of out-of-print books that were scanned as part of Google Book Search. A new non-profit registry will be set up to locate these in copyright but difficult to find books' rights holders and collect and distribute revenues to authors and publishers.
This hearing shows that European libraries, authors, publishers and users are grappling with the same issue of how to open up access to the world of knowledge contained in books. In recent weeks, we noted several important measures of support. We are already working successfully with libraries around the world, including in France, Belgium, the UK, Switzerland, Germany and Spain, insuring that our digital library includes works over 100 languages. I was particularly pleased to hear our Ghent Library Partner Sylvia van Peteghem talking about how together we have worked to allow viewers from all over the world access to her institution's priceless public domain collection. Last week, Mario Resca, General Director of the Italian Ministry of Culture, expressed a desire to partner with us to find ways on best valuing the Italian public domain books collection. Support from the Italian authorities represents an important step forward to demonstrating how our Books project can further benefit Europe.
While anybody is allowed to digitise and distribute out of copyright, so called public domain works, pose no legal problem free of charge or for a fee, what's really at stake are the fate of the vast majority of books -- by some estimate up to 80 percent of the total - which are in copyright out of print and hard to locate. These works are not sold through bookstores or held on most library shelves, and yet represent an important repository of the world's knowledge and culture. Often it is difficult to identify or locate the copyright holder. If the author has died, who holds his rights, his wife, children or another relative?
The agreement announced in October 2008 between Google and a broad class of copyright holders in the United States will dramatically expand access to out-of-print books, creating new revenue opportunities for authors and publishers. The new registry should help reduce the number of in-copyright works whose owners cannot be identified or found because authors will have a concrete economic incentive to come forward, claim their works and then earn money. For books that are in-print, the agreement would offer new distribution opportunities to copyright holders in the United States.
European authors and publishers whose books have been scanned from an American library may benefit from the new revenue that will come as American readers discover and purchase their books. They can register with the new registry to control and profit from online access to their books, or, just like American authors, they can choose to opt out. The registry will also benefit rightsholders by helping potential licensors for Europe reach out to rightsholders and negotiate agreements to license works in the EU. But no readers outside of the United States will reap the benefits American readers will see-- because the agreement is under U.S. law, it can by nature only govern what happens within the U.S.
In this context, we are delighted to see that the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding recently added her voice to the debate welcoming calling for Europe to act. "Google Books is a commercial project developed by an important player," she said. "It is good to see that new business models are evolving which could allow bringing more content to an increasing number of consumers." We agree. The bottom line conclusion from today's hearing is clear and straightforward: Europeans, not just Americans, should be empowered to rediscover long lost books
.
Posted by Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director
Europe unveils ambitious digital agenda
Thursday, September 3, 2009
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso today unveiled his
platform
to win a new five year term in office. He promised that the Commission will work for a successful exit from the financial crisis, tackle climate change and advance a "people's Europe".
For us at Google, the most important signal was the scale of his declared ambition to spur a digital revolution. The President's paper repeated the word "transform" nine times and "radical" four times - a "
Europe committed to the radical transformation towards a knowledge-based society"
is, for Google, an essential starting point to address huge societal challenges we face.
The paper emphasises the need to invest in the new skills for the jobs of tomorrow, and sets an ambitious program to bring fast speed Internet across the European Union. Importantly, Barroso aims to bridge the divide between Europe's digital haves and have nots. Naturally, we are particularly excited that the
"Commission will develop a European Digital Agenda (accompanied by a targeted legislative programme) to tackle the main obstacles to a genuine digital single market,
" echoing recent calls made by the European Digital Media Association
EDiMA
(Google is a member).
But we would have liked to see more analysis of the new dynamics of innovation. Presiden Barroso's platform avoids mentioning the academic insights to be found in works such
Wikinomics
or
We Think
. Social networking media (such as Facebook and Twitter) are transforming the way people communicate and organise. These collaborative sites are powerful engines both driving forward economic growth and for addressing the big societal challenges the Commission wants to address. As we move forward, Google will discussing these opportunities with policy makers.
Posted By Simon Hampton, Director of European Public Affairs
Google Translate now supports all 23 official EU languages
Monday, August 31, 2009
(Cross-posted from the
The Official Google Blog
)
We spend a lot of time thinking about how information travels around the globe. After all, there are Googlers living and working in
dozens of countries
— and we're pretty sure our products are used in many more. So we're familiar with the need to translate information across borders, and we've been working hard to build the technology to enable you to do just that. Today, we're excited to announce that we've added nine new languages to
Google Translate
:
Afrikaans
,
Belarusian
,
Icelandic
,
Irish
,
Macedonian
,
Malay
,
Swahili
,
Welsh
and
Yiddish
. That means that Google Translate now supports 51 languages and 2550 language pairs — including all
23 official EU languages
.
The translation quality of these newest languages is still a little rough, but it will improve over time — and we're continuously working to improve quality for all languages supported by Google Translate. We're also working to integrate Google Translate into some of our other products; you can already translate
emails
within Gmail,
webpages
using Google Toolbar,
RSS feeds
in Google Reader and most recently,
documents
within Google Docs. For more information about Google Translate and these latest additions, check out our post on the
Research Blog
.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager
Making the dream of digital libraries come true
Friday, August 28, 2009
The European Commission today set out more
detail
on the future of its digital library project
Europeana
and the Commissioner has stated how she welcomes the
evolution of new business models
. It's exciting as the project aims to bring even more books, paintings and pictures online.
Sure, some people have suggested this means there's some sort of competition between Europeana and our own projects on books. I guess it makes a nice headline, but it's just not true. The fact is that bringing our cultural heritage online is a tremendous undertaking that can only be achieved by both private and public effort. Both services are complimentary. Indeed, Google is working hard to expand its cooperation with European libraries which form Europeana's backbone.
Google has already forged partnerships to scan public domain works with 30 libraries all around the world, including the Oxford University, the Bavarian State Library, the University of Lausanne and the University of Ghent. Google Books contains works in more than 100 languages. Just this week, the Italian Ministry of Culture announced that it would like to work with us to accelerate scanning of Italian-language works.
I recently visited one of our library partners, the Ghent library. I was amazed by the progress there. In just two years, almost 100,000 of the university's of public domain books have been scanned, making them available to anyone anywhere in the world. An Australian or African studying 17th-century Flemish art history now has access to a treasure trove of Dutch-language books, without needing to travel all the way to Belgium or to attend the University of Ghent. This revolutionary spread of knowledge represents the inspiration of projects such as Europeana and Google Books.
Of course, a key challenge for such projects is how to revive access to books that are in copyright, but are out of print. Until now, it is very difficult for projects like Europeana or Google Books to enable readers to access these books, even though they represent the bulk of library collections. In Ghent, for example, we only scan work published before the mid 19th-century.
By contrast, Google last year reached a groundbreaking agreement with an international class of authors and publishers that aims to bring back to life millions of these out of print in copyright books. If an American court approves, readers in the U.S. will be able for the first time to search, preview and buy online access to a great number of out-of-print books scanned as part of Google Book Search. A new non-profit registry will be set up to locate the rights holders of these in copyright but difficult to find books and collect and distribute revenues to authors and publishers.
The Commission is holding an information hearing on this agreement in Brussels on September 7. We welcome this as an opportunity to talk about the agreement and on how to develop solutions contributing to spread knowledge and culture through projects like Google Books and Europeana. Here, too, the European Commission Communication released today is helpful, as it launches a public consultation about how to allow for the developments of services similar to the one proposed under the US Google Book agreement. Google is interested in pursuing all avenues of strengthening and expanding our partnership with this ambitious digitization effort.
Posted by Antoine Aubert, European Copyright Policy Manager
About Google News In Italy
Thursday, August 27, 2009
You may have read in the press that the Italian Competition Authority
today notified us of the opening of an investigation in relation to Google News in response to a claim by the Italian Editors Association (FIEG). We're still reviewing this claim, but in the meantime, we thought it might be helpful to clarify how publishers can control their content on the web.
First, Google News has always been about highlighting diverse perspectives from multiple sources and then driving new readers directly to publishers' sites. We don’t display the news stories in their entirety. Rather, our approach is akin to that of web search: we simply show the headlines, a line or two of text and a link to the site – just enough information to make the user want to read the full story. Once a user clicks through to the article, it’s up to the news publisher to decide how to profit from this free traffic. They can choose to charge people to read the story in addition to placing advertisements on their site.
We're constantly in dialogue with news publishers and users about how we can improve Google News. As we explained to the FIEG when we met them earlier this year, Google News has over 25,000 sources from around the world. All of these news providers--like any website publisher--are in complete control when it comes to whether they want to be found on Google services. So if a news publisher doesn’t want to be found on Google.com, Google.it or any other reputable search engines, it can prevent indexation automatically via a universally accepted Internet standard called robots.txt. Publishers also have a range of other ways of controlling how their content appears (or doesn't). One such option is for a publisher to continue to appear in Google web search, but not in Google News. In that case, all they need to do is
contact us
to be removed. In fact, we met with several Italian publishers and representatives of FIEG just this summer to explain these options.
We respect the wishes of content owners, which is why we've made it easy to opt out of our services. However, when it comes to Google News, we have far more requests for inclusion than for removal. That's because publishers understand that the traffic generated by Google News, and services like it, provide valuable traffic: Google News sends over 1 billion clicks per month to news publishers.
We'll continue to work with all web sites and news publishers to help more people discover their content -- and for those that don't want to appear in Google or Google News, we'll continue to honor those requests as we always have.
Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager, Google News
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