Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Supporting free expression and privacy online: the Global Network Initiative comes to Brussels
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
All over the world – from the Americas to Europe to the Middle East to Africa and Asia – companies in the communications and tech sectors face increasing government pressure to comply with domestic laws and policies in ways that may conflict with the internationally recognized human rights of freedom of expression and privacy.
In response, a
multi-stakeholder group
of companies, civil society organisations (including human rights and press freedom groups), investors and academics has spent two years negotiating and creating a collaborative approach to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector, and have formed
the Global Network Initiative
to take this work forward.
Susan Morgan, the Global Network Initiative’s executive director, will be in Brussels on Wednesday 4 May to give an early evening briefing about the organisation’s work - and in particular, how it is seeking to attract European support and members.
Please join us at Google's office to hear Susan's briefing, find out about the important work the GNI does and enjoy a post-work drink.
Date
: Wednesday, 4 May 2011
Time
: 18:00-19:00
Where
: Google EU office at Chaussée d'Etterbeek 180, right next to Park Leopold. That's just a 5 minute walk from the Parliament and the Commission.
Registration
: Please
sign up here
if you’d like to attend.
Prior to joining the GNI in June 2010, Susan spent ten years working at British Telecom on corporate responsibility, communications and strategic relationships. She spent the first seven years of her career in the non-profit sector, and is a graduate of Durham University, UK.
Posted by Angela Steen, Policy Analyst, Google Brussels
Google to invest in German solar power plant
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Today, we agreed to make our first clean energy project investment in Europe - a €3.5 million (ca. $ 5 million) investment in a solar photovoltaic (PV) power plant in Germany. The transaction still requires the formal approval of the German competition authorities and is subject to other customary closing conditions.
The recently completed facility is located on 47 hectares (116 acres) in Brandenburg an der Havel, near Berlin. The power plant has a peak capacity of 18.65MWp, which puts it among the largest in Germany.
Google is always looking for new ways to encourage development and deployment of renewable energy across the world. This facility will provide clean energy to more than 5,000 households in the area surrounding Brandenburg. Until the early 90’s, the site was used as a training ground by the Russian military. We’re glad it has found a new use!
We agreed to jointly invest in this project with the German private equity company
Capital Stage
, which brings strong experience in the German photovoltaic and renewable energy market. Germany has a strong framework for renewable energy and is home to many leading-edge technology companies in the sector. More than 70% of the solar modules installed in Brandenburg are provided by German manufacturers.
After investing in
clean energy projects
in the U.S., we’re excited about making our first investment outside of the U.S. in Germany, a country that has long been a global leader in clean energy development.
Posted by Benjamin Kott, Clean Energy Advocacy Manager, Google
Real-time traffic graphs for the Transparency Report
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
When we
introduced
the
Transparency Report
last year, we promised to keep looking for new and useful ways to display data about traffic to our services. In response to your requests, today we’re adding graphs for each region that show traffic patterns for all products in aggregate. These graphs will show data with a five-minute delay.
In
this graph
, for example, you’ll see that all of our services in Egypt were down from January 27 to February 1:
Starting today, you won’t have to sift through every single product graph to figure out if one or more services are inaccessible. You’ll get a snapshot up front. We’ve also added annotations for historical anomalies that we’ve seen in the traffic to our services. To see the graph for each cited incident, just click on the corresponding link.
As the Transparency Engineering team lead, part of my job is to ensure that we find, uncover and visualise datasets within Google that can help inform research and analysis on important topics. We believe that providing the facts can spark useful debate about the scope and authority of policy decisions around the globe.
We’ll continue to iterate, and we hope that the Report will help shed light on the accessibility and patterns of traffic to our services around the world.
Posted by Matt Braithwaite, Transparency Engineering Team Lead
Breaking the language barrier for Europe’s innovators
Monday, March 28, 2011
Get ready for a tongue twister. You’re an Estonian entrepreneur who has just dreamed up a revolutionary new product. How do you find out if a Portuguese or Polish inventor - indeed any other inventor anywhere - has filed a patent on a similar idea in their native language? Locating and understanding a patent lodged in a foreign language can be a time-consuming and costly affair.
Last week, however, Google and the
European Patent Office
partnered to break down this linguistic barrier. Starting later this year, the Munich-based EPO will use
Google Translate
technology to offer translation of patents on its website between any of 28 European languages, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. The various languages will be added to the site gradually, and the project should be finalised by the end of 2014.
Pictured are: EPO President Benoît Battistelli (l) and Google's Head of Public Policy in Brussels, Antoine Aubert (r) at the signing of the agreement. Photo: EPO / Didier Vandenbosch
The EPO will provide Google with access to their complete corpus of patents on a non-exclusive basis, allowing us to optimise our machine translation technology for the technical language used in patent registrations. Machine translation technology analyses existing parallel texts (eg the same document translated into multiple languages) in order to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts. The more inputs, the better the translations. In return, Google will offer the improved translation service free of charge to the EPO.
The partnership is a big win for Europe’s entrepreneurs and inventors too, as they will benefit from free, real-time translation of millions of patents granted in European countries, China, Japan, Korea and Russia. Whilst the translations made by Google Translate will not be legally binding, they will offer a practical way for anybody to gain improved access to the technical information contained in patents across all EPO languages simultaneously.
We’re excited to be working with the EPO on this great example of how machine translation can improve access to important technical information across language barriers - and how public-private partnership can result in pragmatic solutions that support Europe’s innovators.
Posted by Antoine Aubert, Head of Public Policy, Google Brussels
Google TechTalk: Trusting the cloud
Monday, March 21, 2011
UPDATE 23/03/2011: Due to unforeseen circumstances, the date of this TechTalk is changing by one day. It will now take place on Wednesday 30th March, same time, same place. Our apologies for the inconvenience to those who have already signed up, we will be contacting you shortly to re-confirm your attendance.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of this year, Commissioner Neelie Kroes
stated
that she would like to “make Europe not just “cloud-friendly” but “cloud-active”. Being active in the cloud basically means moving every-day information, tools and processes online and the benefits of that shift are hard to deny: reduced costs, faster innovation and the convenience of accessing information virtually anytime and from anywhere.
As with any new technology shift, movement to the cloud is a subject of lively debate, in particular on the questions of data security, data governance and privacy. As a company “born in the cloud” - and one of the biggest corporate users of our own products - Google has always had a strong focus on engineering cloud services that deliver the highest possible standards of security, availability and resilience.
On March 29th, our Senior Global Trust PM, John Collins, will be in Brussels to give a Tech Talk on the theme of cloud security and privacy at Google. He’ll discuss our overall approach, and highlight some of the security features and privacy controls available to users of our cloud applications.
John has spent the past 10 years building and operating some of the world's biggest and most popular Internet services, and at Google, he leads our Enterprise's global trust effort.
When
: Tuesday, March 29th 12.30-14.30 CET
Where
:
Google Brussels
| Chaussée d'Etterbeek 180 | 1040 Brussels
Registration
: Please
register here
Need another reason to come?
There will be a delicious, Googley lunch (!)
About our Tech Talks
: Ever wondered how exactly Google is tackling the big technology problems that the online world faces? Want to take a look behind the curtain of our engineering operations and learn from the people who actually work on the Google products and services day-in, day-out? Here's your chance: The Google Brussels TechTalks.
Posted by Angela Steen, Policy Analyst, Google Brussels
Keeping counterfeits out of ads
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Thanks to the Internet, it’s never been easier to start a business and reach a huge audience, at an incredible scale. Unfortunately, some people misuse legitimate online services to try to market counterfeit goods. Of course, this isn’t a problem unique to the online world, but as the Web has grown, so have attempts to sell counterfeits online.
With over one million advertisers using AdWords in over 190 countries, how do we weed out the bad actors who violate our
clear policies
against advertising counterfeits? In the last six months of 2010 alone, we shut down approximately 50,000 AdWords accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods. But there’s no silver bullet here. Instead, it’s a cat-and-mouse game, where we are constantly working to improve our practices and tune our systems to keep out the bad guys.
That’s why today we’re announcing three improvements designed to further improve our collaboration with brand owners to address the problem and prevent counterfeiters from abusing our services:
We’ll act on reliable AdWords counterfeit complaints within 24 hours
. In 2009, we
announced a new complaint form
to make it fast and easy for brand owners to notify us of misuse. For brand owners who use this form responsibly, we’ll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less.
We will improve our AdSense anti-counterfeit reviews.
We have always
prohibited
our AdSense partners from placing Google ads on sites that include or link to sales of counterfeit goods. We will work more closely with brand owners to identify infringers and, when appropriate, expel them from the AdSense programme.
We’ve introduced a
new help centre page
for reporting counterfeits
. That way, we aim to make it easier for users and brand owners to find forms to report abuse.
These steps are our ways of facilitating co-operation with brand owners, which is absolutely essential in tackling the sale of counterfeits online. AdWords is just a conduit between advertisers and consumers and we can’t know whether any particular item out of the millions advertised is counterfeit or not.
Of course, we do more than simply respond to brand owners’ removal requests. We use their feedback to help us tune a set of sophisticated automated tools, which analyse thousands of signals along every step of the advertising process and help prevent bad ads from ever seeing the light of day. We devote significant engineering and machine resources in order to prevent violations of ads policies, including counterfeiting.
In fact, we invested over $60 million last year alone, and, in the last 6 months of 2010, more than 95% of accounts removed for counterfeits came down based on our own detection efforts. No system is perfect, but brand owner feedback has helped us improve over time - as our system gets more data about ads it has misclassified before, it gets better at counteracting new ways that bad guys try to cloak their behaviour.
While our systems get better over time, counterfeiting remains a complex challenge, and we keep investing in anti-counterfeiting measures. After all, a Google user duped by a fake is far less likely to click on another Google ad in the future. Ads for counterfeits aren't just bad for the real brand holder - they're bad for users who can end up unknowingly buying sub-standard products, and they're bad for Google too.
Posted by Kent Walker, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Google
Tunisian bloggers win annual Net freedom award
Monday, March 14, 2011
Last week we blogged about the
annual 2011 Reporters Without Borders Netizen Prize
, which recognises bloggers or Internet activists who defend freedom of expression on the Net. This year’s prize went to
Nawaat
, a group of Tunisian bloggers.
The independent jury of press specialists agreed that Nawaat’s online reporting played a significant part in helping to depose Tunisia’s longtime dictator, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. It chose Nawaat as the winner from a strong field of finalists from Bahrain, Belarus, Thailand, China and Vietnam.
Created in 2004, Nawaat.org is an independent collective blog operated by Tunisian bloggers as a platform for all “committed citizens.” The bloggers played a crucial role in covering the social and political unrest in Tunisia that began on December 17. Nawaat recently created a special page for the WikiLeaks revelations about Tunisia, and another one about the recent events in Sidi Bouzid, which were not covered in the traditional media. The site also warns Internet users about the dangers of being identified online and offers advice about circumventing censorship.
Photo © Mat Beaudet
Pictured above from left to right are: Jean-François Julliard, Secretary General of Reporters Without Borders; Former French Foreign Minister and founder of Doctors Without Borders,
Bernard Kouchner
; and Nawaat co-founder Riadh Guerfali, accepting the awards at a ceremony in Paris’
Salon des Mirroirs
.
“We are deeply honoured by this prize. It will help to strengthen the citizen journalism that we have been practising for years at Nawaat, despite all the risks involved,” Guerfali said in his acceptance speech. “This award is not only a tribute to Nawaat but to all our fellow journalists who often risk their lives to keep working in countries where freedom of expression is suppressed.”
Google sponsors the annual Netizen prize. First awarded in 2010, it forms part of our commitment to support the free flow of information and free expression online. Last year, Iranian women’s rights activists
Change for Equality
became the first recipient.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa
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