Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Controversial content and free expression: a refresher
Monday, April 19, 2010
Two and a half years ago, we outlined
our approach to removing content
from Google products and services. Our process hasn’t changed since then, but our recent decision to stop
censoring
search on Google.cn has raised new questions about when we remove content, and how we respond to censorship demands by governments. So we figured it was time for a refresher.
Censorship of the web is a growing problem. According to the
Open Net Initiative
, the number of governments that censor has grown from about four in 2002 to over 40 today. In fact, some governments are now blocking content before it even reaches their citizens. Even benign
intentions
can result in the specter of real censorship. Repressive regimes are building firewalls and cracking down on dissent online -- dealing harshly with anyone who breaks the rules.
Increased government censorship of the web is undoubtedly driven by the fact that record numbers of people now have access to the Internet, and that they are creating more content than ever before. For example, over 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day. This creates big challenges for governments used to controlling traditional print and broadcast media. While everyone agrees that there are limits to what information should be available online -- for example child pornography -- many of the new government restrictions we are seeing today not only strike at the heart of an open Internet but also violate Article 19 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
, which states that:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
We see these attempts at control in many ways. China is the most polarizing example, but it is not the only one. Google products -- from search and Blogger to YouTube and Google Docs -- have been blocked in 25 of the 100 countries where we offer our services. In addition, we regularly receive government requests to restrict or remove content from our properties. When we receive those requests, we examine them to closely to ensure they comply with the law, and if we think they’re overly broad, we attempt to narrow them down. Where possible, we are also transparent with our users about what content we have been required to block or remove so they understand that they may not be getting the full picture.
On our own services, we deal with controversial content in different ways, depending on the product. As a starting point, we distinguish between search (where we are simply linking to other web pages), the content we host, and ads. In a nutshell, here is our approach:
Search
is the least restrictive of all our services, because search results are a reflection of the content of the web. We do not remove content from search globally except in narrow circumstances, like child pornography, certain links to copyrighted material, spam, malware, and results that contain sensitive personal information like credit card numbers. Specifically, we don’t want to engage in political censorship. This is especially true in countries like China and Vietnam that do not have democratic processes through which citizens can challenge censorship mandates. We carefully evaluate whether or not to establish a physical presence in countries where political censorship is likely to happen.
Some democratically-elected governments in Europe and elsewhere do have national laws that prohibit certain types of content. Our policy is to comply with the laws of these democratic governments -- for example, those that make pro-Nazi material illegal in Germany and France -- and remove search results from only our local search engine (for example, www.google.de in Germany). We also comply with youth protection laws in countries like Germany by removing links to certain material that is deemed inappropriate for children or by enabling Safe Search by default, as we do in Korea. Whenever we do remove content, we display a message for our users that X number of results have been removed to comply with local law and we also report those removals to
chillingeffects.org
, a project run by the
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
, which tracks online restrictions on speech.
Platforms that host content
like Blogger, YouTube, and Picasa Web Albums have content policies that outline what is, and is not, permissible on those sites. A good example of content we do not allow is hate speech. Our enforcement of these policies results in the removal of more content from our hosted content platforms than we remove from Google Search. Blogger, as a pure platform for expression, is among the most open of our services, allowing for example legal pornography, as long as it complies with the
Blogger Content Policy
.
YouTube
, as a community intended to permit sharing, comments, and other user-to-user interactions, has its
Community Guidelines
that define its own rules of the road. For example, pornography is absolutely not allowed on YouTube.
We try to make it as easy as possible for users to flag content that violates our policies.
Here’s a video
explaining how flagging works on YouTube. We review flagged content across all our products 24 hours a day, seven days a week to remove offending content from our sites. And if there are local laws where we do business that prohibit content that would otherwise be allowed, we restrict access to that content only in the country that prohibits it. For example, in Turkey, videos that insult the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Ataturk, are illegal. Two years ago, we were notified of such content on YouTube and blocked those videos in Turkey that violated local law. A Turkish court subsequently demanded that we block them globally, which we refused to do, arguing that Turkish law cannot apply outside Turkey. As a result YouTube has been blocked there.
Finally, our
ads products
have the most restrictive
policies
, because they are commercial products intended to generate revenue.
These policies are always evolving. Decisions to allow, restrict or remove content from our services and products often require difficult judgment calls. We have spirited debates about the right course of action, whether it’s about our own content policies or the extent to which we resist a government request. In the end, we rely on the principles that sit at the heart of everything we do.
We’ve said them before, but in these particularly challenging times, they bear repeating: We have a bias in favor of people's right to free expression. We are driven by a belief that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual.
Posted by Rachel Whetstone, Vice President, Global Communications and Public Affairs
The Oxford Internet Institute @ Google EU: Legal Services and the Internet
Friday, April 16, 2010
The internet has brought change to almost every area of business and daily life. Amongst other things, it's a catalyst for economic reform, it gives consumers a more choice, it promotes competition on a global stage and it sees services - including professional services - delivered faster and more efficiently than ever before.
On 27th April, at 12:30, the Oxford Internet Institute will be holding its second seminar (details of the first are
here
) at the EU Googleplex, next to Park Leopold.
Tony Wales
will examine the changing role of the lawyer and legal services within corporations, and
Professor Richard Susskind, OBE
, will discuss the future role of lawyers and the administration of justice in a society.
You can find
more information on the OII's website
, including details on how to register.
We look forward to welcoming you to the Google office next week!
Posted by Simon Hampton, Director of European Public Policy
TechTalk: liberating data in the internet cloud
Friday, April 9, 2010
It's fair to say that the most popular applications and services that exist today are all to be found in the internet cloud - rather than actually on your computer, as installed applications. Think social networks, email, photosharing, online documents, blogs - and much more of course.
These services are constantly being improved, and new services appear all the time. Users switch services or try out new ones all the time too, perhaps because their friends are using a different service, because there’s better functionality or faster performance elsewhere, or because they just want better service.
So let’s imagine you’ve been using a particular service for a while, and - for whatever reason - you decide to switch to a different provider. A lot of your data is now stored in the service - your photo collection maybe, your status updates, your contacts, your emails and so on. Which raises the question:
How on earth do I get all of my data out of this service and transfer it the new one?
At Google, that’s a question we take very seriously, so seriously, that we have a special team of engineers who spend their time doing nothing else but making sure that it is easy to stop using Google services, and easy to take your data with you, using open standards and formats.
The name of that team is the Data Liberation Front (and yes, for anyone who had spotted the oblique reference, they are Monty Python fans).
On Tuesday 20th of April, Brian Fitzpatrick, the founder of the Data Liberation Front, will be in Brussels to give a Google TechTalk. He’ll explain what "liberating data" actually means, why he thinks it's so important for internet users, for the future of the Internet, and for Europe.
As usual, the TechTalk will take place over lunchtime (there will be food available of course!), at the Google office.
We hope you can make it along. If you’d like to attend, please register
here
.
When
: Tuesday, April 20, 12:15 - 13:45 hours CET (Sandwich lunch provided).
Where
:
Google Brussels
- Chaussée D'Etterbeek 180 - Steenweg op Etterbeek 180, 2nd floor, 1040 Brussels
Brian Fitzpatrick
started Google's Chicago engineering office in 2005. An open source contributor for over 10 years, Brian is the engineering manager for several Google products, a member of both the Apache Software Foundation and the Open Web Foundation, a former engineer at Apple and CollabNet, a Subversion developer, a co-author of "Version Control with Subversion", and a resident of Chicago.
Alain Van Gaever
Policy Manager - Google Europe
Working with European academics #2
Friday, April 9, 2010
At Google, whether you're in engineering, product marketing, accounting or public policy, we all try to be as innovative as possible in our work. So it was a real pleasure for us last week to work together with the University of Glasgow and co-host a meeting that took a new and innovative approach to debating and mapping "the impact of online information in the political, economic and social sphere". Too often, public policy is made on the back of politics rather than deep research and evidence - and we're keen to help reduce the gap between policy and research by bringing together some of the people in the UK for whom robust evidence is a way of life.
Academics from 13 different institutions across the UK gathered recently at the Google office in London to discuss their work. The new and innovative approach, according to several of the participants, was that the meeting brought together Googlers with academics from many different disciplines - social scientists, engineers and computer scientists - to debate each other's work. Although everyone brought different perspectives to the discussion, the common themes and areas of research were striking. Freedom of expression was one common area of research, examining whether new technology was really challenging traditional power bases or not.
Other big questions tackled included what values people attach to their personal data, the right level of Government intervention in improving digital inclusion and whether online campaigning is doing anything to change the nature of politics. We also uncovered a great deal of common ground between the academics and the Googlers about how we do our jobs. At Google we analyse data patterns to understand how to improve our search algorithims: at universities, data crunching is also at the heart of good research. We discovered we had more in common than we at first realised.
Professor Sarah Oates
from the Politics Department at the University of Glasgow curated the programme and invited the participants.
Professor Rachel Gibson
(University of Manchester) spoke about the Online Electorate and Web 2.0,
Ashley Lloyd
(Edinburgh Business School) presented on Bridging Technological Gaps and
Professor Angus Laing
(Loughborough) and
Dr Debbie Keeling
(Manchester) on how patients seek health information online.
As you'd hope from a gathering of Britain's top academics, the day generated much food for thought. For example, the research on health and the internet challenged many assumptions about how people use technology. We sometimes assume that technology offers people an emotionless, inhuman way of interacting, especially when compared with the 'real world' alternatives of doctors and nurses. But the research that Professor Laing and Dr Keeling presented suggests that people attribute all kinds of human characteristics to the technology tools they use when diagnosing and treating their own illnesses. Users often grow very attached, for example, to the chatrooms and online support groups they visit when they are ill. We shouldn't be too quick to dismiss technology as 'second best' when it comes to helping people cope with their conditions.
Of course, with only a day's discussion, we didn't manage to solve all the tricky questions raised. As everyone who thinks deeply about the future of the internet knows, the answers to the big policy questions are not easy. But we think proper, robust research has a crucial role to play in helping Governments and regulators try to find answers - and we look forward to hosting more multi-discipline academic debates in the future.
Posted by Sarah Hunter, UK Senior Policy Manager
European Court of Justice rules in Google's favour
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Google aims to provide as much information as possible to users so that they can make informed decisions. For this reason, we have been awaiting a series of decisions by the European Court of Justice that explore the extent to which trade mark rights can be used to restrict information available to users. The first of those decisions was delivered today.
The question before the court was whether advertisers should be allowed to choose keywords freely when reaching out to users on the Internet. In other words, if advertisers are allowed to show advertisements when another company's brand name is entered as a search query.
Trade marks are part of our daily life and culture, helping us to identify the products and services that we may be looking for. They are key for companies to market and advertise their products and services. But trade mark rights are not absolute.
We believe that user interest is best served by maximizing the choice of keywords, ensuring relevant and informative advertising for a wide variety of different contexts. For instance, if a user is searching for information about a particular car, he or she will want more than just that car’s website. They might be looking for different dealers that sell that car, second hand cars, reviews about the car or looking for information about other cars in the same category.
And, contrary to what some are intimating, this case is not about us arguing for a right to advertise counterfeit goods. We have strict policies that forbid the advertising of counterfeit goods; it's a bad user experience. We work collaboratively with brand owners to better identify and deal with counterfeiters.
Some companies want to limit choice for users by extending trade mark law to encompass the use of keywords in online advertising. Ultimately they want to be able to exercise greater control over the infomation available to users by preventing other companies from advertising when a user enters their trade mark as a search query. In other words, controlling and restricting the amount of information that users may see in response to their searches.
Today, the Court confirmed that Google has not infringed trade mark law by allowing advertisers to bid for keywords corresponding to their competitors’ trade marks. It also confirmed that European law that protects internet hosting services applies to Google’s AdWords advertising system. This is important because it is a fundamental principle behind the free flow of information over the internet.
Our guiding principle has always been that advertising should benefit users, and our aim is to ensure that ads are relevant and useful. We will study the decision as we move forward in order to make sure that we continue to deliver advertising that is perceived as both valuable and relevant by our users.
Posted by Dr. Harjinder S. Obhi, Senior Litigation Counsel, EMEA
Embracing disruption
Monday, March 15, 2010
How should the European Union approach innovation policy over the next five years? That was the fascinating question that I came to Brussels this month to discuss at the
Lisbon Council
. It’s not an easy question, but it is one that Europe as a whole needs to address, as innovation is vital for competitiveness.
We all talk about innovation, but what is it really? At a high level, it can probably be broken down into three broad categories. Firstly, there's the incremental innovations which improves an existing product or process. In the 70's & 80's it meant moving the tools closer to the workers, and that saved time and improved efficiency. All of which is useful. A more recent example is something like our own Gmail team, which operates Labs to showcase additional features to the core email product, such as
Mail Goggles
. This allows you to check check that you're really sure you want to send an email you might later regret.
The second order of innovation is similar to the first, but where the incremental innovation has a distinct side effect. Consider our Adsense programme. We’ve developed an system to match advertisements to the content of Publishers' websites. This makes it possible for people not only to tell their story in their local language but also get paid! Instead of a few big publishers being the only ones to benefit, the side effect enables anyone with an Internet connection can participate and has made the Internet an incredible platform for free speech.
Finally, there's the holy grail, and what most people think of as real innovation. Consider our data centre infrastructure. In the past data centres were built with expensive, ultra-reliable hardware. In contrast, most of our data centres run on cheap hardware; in fact, cheaper than the average game console. We’ve designed software that can recover when these machines fail, making the consumer experience just as reliable. We published a
paper
a while ago on costs compared to guaranteed reliable hardware, and claimed that our approach generated a 10x price per price increase on cost per Mb vs traditional approaches, a game changing number.
So what does this mean for policy makers? I shared the platform with Anthony D. Williams who presented his paper on
Wikinomics and the Era of Openness.
Much of the subsequent discussion of his emphasis on collabaratory innovation focused upon the consequences for intellectual property regulation.
Innovation Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn gave the
keynote speech
. She outlined an agenda that rightly embraced a broad definition of innovation. In addition to innovation by lab workers in 'white coats', she recognised that real innovation is possible outside of the R&D laboratory in all sort of industries.
For my part, I offered the following ideas for innovation policy:
Put the consumer first
: We have a core product philosophy within Google that goes like this: “Follow the user and all else will follow”. It turns out not to be a new idea, as Henry Ford learnt when he famously said: “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have asked me to build a faster horse”. The key is understanding user behavior and building and iterating products by ‘following the data’ on aggregated usage. (The Economist recently provided a excellent introduction to the
power of data
.)
Remove barriers to innovation
: Speed matters. Consider
Playfish
, the company behind the super popular Facebook App Animal farm. They started 2 years ago in UK, and built their entire service on Amazon’s ‘infrastructure as a service’ platform (that enables business to rent data centre capacity rather than build it themselves). They recently
sold to Electronic Arts
for $275m. We sometimes talk of a new ‘innovation without permission’ culture, and facilitating that would be a good goal to set for legislators.
Diversity in the hiring process matters
, as without multiple perspectives innovation will die because everyone sees the problem the same way. Europe’s universities must educate a
broad cross-section of students
in maths, science and computer science. In particular more women need to be encouraged to take careers in technology.
Risk taking is as important for large companies as for start-ups
: We encourage employees to take risks, and we tailor our compensation model to encourage risk taking. Otherwise people quickly learn that to get ahead they shouldn’t try anything new, especially if there is a risk of failure. The result: innovation dies.
We need a broad culture that truly embraces innovation. This may sound obvious, but innovation brings disruption that quickly mutes the enthusiasm. Embracing disruption is perhaps the new Commissioner's real political challenge.
Posted by Rian Liebenberg, Engineering Director
Securing online freedom
Thursday, March 11, 2010
More than ever, governments around the world are threatening online free expression. Forty countries have taken measures to limit this freedom, up from only a handful a few years ago. Google and YouTube services are or have been blocked in 25 of those nations.
On Thursday night in Paris, we took an important step to highlight this crucial issue by sponsoring the first Netizen Prize (or more elegantly, “Le Prix de Net Citoyen”) awarded by the Paris-based advocacy group
Reporters Without Borders
. And on Friday, March 12, we’ll be helping highlight the fight for Internet freedom by marking the group’s
World Day Against Cyber Censorship
on YouTube.
Fittingly, Reporters Without Borders chose to give the first Netizen Prize to the Iranian creators of the website
Change for Equality
, first established in 2006 to fight for changes in laws in Tehran that discriminate against women. That site has since become a well-known source of information on women’s rights in Iran, documenting arrests of women activists and becoming a rallying point for opponents of the regime.
Over the past year those leaders in Tehran have distinguished themselves — and earned the opprobrium of people all over the world — for their brutal crackdown on the rights of its critics to question their rule. Last year's killing of unarmed Neda Agha-Soltan during post-election protests in Tehran, seen around the world on amateur video, has become a symbol of the regime's ferocity — and the power of the Internet to reveal what governments do not want the world to see.
At the award ceremony in our Paris office, our Senior Vice President
David Drummond
said that we are at a critical point in the future of the Internet: "All of us have a choice. We can allow repressive policies to take flight and spread across the globe, or we can work together against such challenges and uphold the fundamental human right to free expression.”
David went on to praise the role of NGOs like Reporters Without Borders, the Obama Administration’s commitment to the promotion of Internet freedom and the efforts of all groups that have joined the
Global Network Initiative
. Under the initiative, major U.S. Internet companies, human rights group, socially responsive investors and academic institutions agreed to guidelines promoting free expression and protecting the privacy of their users around the world. “In the spirit of the undiplomatic American come to European shores," he said, "let me make a plea for European governments, companies and groups to rise to the occasion. Any effort that is limited to the United States is bound to fall far short of its global potential.”
Posted by Robert Boorstin, Director, Public Policy
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