Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Boosting the UK's creative and cultural industries
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
What can a 22 year old on YouTube teach the the
Royal Shakespeare Company
about entertaining audiences? Quite a lot, it turns out, when the YouTubers are stars like
Danisnotonfire
, who has had a 90% growth in traffic in the last year, or
Michael Stevens
, who is fast approaching 500 million views for his channel
VSauce
.
More than 300 British leaders from the arts, creative and cultural sector packed our Central St. Giles office in London to learn from each other - and from some of the new YouTube upstarts - how best to reach and entertain a global audience online. Together with us, the
Arts Council
,
Creative England
,
Culture24
and the
European Creative Industries Alliance
organized the
two day celebration
. On the the first day, we focused on access to finance, and on the second, seizing online opportunities.
Two recurring big themes emerged:
Personality
- Art galleries and museums must engage online in a way that has authenticity, character and even intimacy. One great example was from
Whitechapel Gallery
, where young people at the gallery have set up their own blog,
Duchamp and Sons
, and
twitter feed
to talk about arts and their gallery in their own voice
Collaboration
- The
British Postal Museum
and
Imperial War Museum
explained how our own
Cultural Institute
online exhibitions has helped them not only reach new audiences but enabled collaboration with other institutions.
Every seat was taken for the two-day celebration
All too often, content industries have rushed to blame the Internet for hurting culture. It certainly is bringing change - but as this event shows, it also presents great opportunities for both traditional and new players.
Posted by Theo Bertram, Policy Manager, Google UK
Internet safety comes to the European Parliament
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
It was a cool way to launch a new book on an important subject. Teenagers and teachers from all over Europe recently converged at the European Parliament in Brussels to promote the educational handbook
The Web we Want
. The handbook for 13-16 year olds, developed by
European Schoolnet
in partnership with
Liberty Global
and us, outlines how teenagers can benefit from the web while staying safe. Click
here
to download.
For now, the book is only available in English. In 2014, our goal is to make the handbook available in eight additional languages.
The new handbook is just the latest of our educational materials. The
YouTube Digital Citizenship
Curriculum helps high school teachers educate their students on how to flag dangerous content. Classes from the
Google Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum
identify online tricks and scams. In Germany we’ve partnered with local NGO`s to publish a set of lesson plans to address topics like online reputation. The 250-page
curriculum
is available for free.
For updates on our efforts to support kids, students, teachers and parents exploring the web in a safe and confident way make sure to check our
education resources
and
Good to Know
page.
Posted by Sabine Frank, Media Literacy Counsel, Berlin
Moving Forward
Monday, November 25, 2013
For the past two years we’ve worked closely with the European Commission to settle their inquiry into our search and advertising businesses. We’ve put a lot of effort into addressing the Commission’s concerns, and earlier this year, after a good bit of back-and-forth with the Commission, we proposed a package of measures that the Commission felt comfortable testing in the marketplace.
The Commission subsequently asked us to go even further, including giving rival sites much more visibility in our search results. (The Commission has since
confirmed
that it seeks to promote visibility rather than to mandate where consumers click.) We addressed these requests with our revised offer, which broadens the scope of our offer and provides links to rival sites even more prominently in our search results. Specifically:
We will give links to rival sites much more real estate and visibility
We will include rival sites’ logos with these links for even greater prominence
We will accompany these links with dynamic text from rivals providing more information about their sites
This news was widely reported in the press and you can see screenshots of these proposed links
here
.
As European Commission Vice President
Joaquin Almunia
said in a recent
speech
, the issue is choice for consumers. We've worked closely with a knowledgeable and professional team at the Commission to deliver just that. Users will be presented with alternative specialized search options right in the middle of some of the most valuable and prominent space on our search page. It is hard to see how anybody could reasonably claim that this will not offer users choice.
These weren’t easy concessions to make. Within Google, many asked why we would agree to such unprecedented and far-reaching changes to our continuously evolving search results. But we didn’t want to spend a decade fighting over these issues. We wanted to move forward, letting our engineers continue to do what they do best: building products that help users in their everyday lives.
Of course, we will never satisfy some critics, especially those with a professional and financial interest in impeding a successful competitor rather than helping users. As
Upton Sinclair
once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Some in the anti-Google camp have lobbied for remedies that would help themselves at a cost to consumers. Others have worked to prolong the process to keep us in regulatory limbo, filing new complaints timed to disrupt our settlement negotiations. These complainants continue to recycle claims with no basis in law or fact, while failing to present constructive or realistic suggestions that would benefit consumers.
We’ve gone the extra mile to come up with a settlement that will resolve the Commission’s expressed concerns and allow everyone to focus on competing on the merits and creating innovative new services for consumers. We look forward to bringing this matter to a sound and reasonable conclusion.
Posted by Kent Walker, Senior Vice President and General Counsel
Celebrating Spain’s Influence on the United States
Monday, November 25, 2013
Spaniards were among the first explorers to reach the coasts of the future United States, leaving a deep legacy on our culture, cuisine and customs, from Florida to California. We’re celebrating this influence this year in
seven exciting new exhibitions
on our
Cultural Institute platform
.
Spain’s
Minister of Foreign Affairs Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo
and
Felipe, Prince of Asturias
, along with about 80 Spanish businessmen and officials, recently visited the Google headquarters in California to launch the exhibitions with our CEO Larry Page. The exhibits are timed to commemorate the the 500th anniversary of
Juan Ponce de León
landing in Florida and Vasco Nuñez de Balboa discovery of the the Pacific Ocean as well as the 300th anniversary of the birthday of
Father Junipero Serra
, who founded the first Catholic missions in California.
The exhibitions, curated by a historian appointed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tell the story of how the Spanish explorers arrived in America and what they did there in more than three centuries. In addition to Florida, Spaniards settled the entire U.S. Southwest: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. They built the region’s first cities and their missions, fortifications, and ranches left an indeliable mark on architecture. They build important roads. They brought new livestock and agricultural techniques. They even played a role in winning independence from the British.
Explore the Spanish legacy in the United States, and enjoy an example of how heritage and the Internet, old and new, can be combined to increase our understanding.
Posted by Barbara Navarro, Director, Public Policy, Madrid
Slovakia’s Eagle flies high with the Internet
Friday, November 22, 2013
It has been an audacious flight, monitored and protected by the Internet. Slovakia’s Lesser Spotted Eagle risked extinction until the
Slovak Ministry of Environment
and the
Tatra National Park
launched an ambitious preservation project. Under the seven year old program, young eagles are fitted with transmitters and systematically monitored. This year, we partnered with the Ministry and the National park, offering Google Earth to track an eagle named "Arnold" in an attempt to keep him safe on his its migration route to South Africa.
So far,
four million views
have been recorded tracking Arnold’s path south into Africa. National television broadcasts weekly updates headlined “Follow the Slovak Eagle.” Earlier this month, the bird vanished near the Kundelungu National Park in Congo. Arnold’s followers became increasingly worried that something bad had happened to him. But after 14 days of silence, Arnold’s transmitter signal reappeared
this week
from Zambia.
In less than a decade, the preservation project has managed to save 15 Lesser Spotted Eagles and stabilize their total population in Slovakia. Baby eaglets are collected from nests, carefully picked out in advance, when they are approximately five days old, in order to prevent their murder by parents. They then temporarily placed in a Rescue Station where a foster mother takes care of them and feeds them. When the young birds can feed by themselves and regulate their body temperature, they are released into the wild.
Now, thanks to the Internet, they can continue to be followed and protected. The Tatra National Park plans to reach out to other national park administrations in the European Union to speak about their lessons learned and promote the use of the internet in forestry
Posted by Ondrej Socuvka, Policy Manager Google Slovakia
Launching Project Link: improving Internet access in Africa
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Africa is home to more than a billion people and is also the fastest growing continent. But only 16% of people are connected to the Internet. That leaves a huge population without access to new opportunities, such as a reliable channel to the latest news, a tool to join in worldwide commerce, or a platform to create and contribute photos, video, and more. This is true even in Africa’s bustling cities, such as Kampala, Uganda.
For the nearly 3 million people living in and around Kampala, the Internet hasn’t been as fast and available as it could be; online activity often sputters on pre-broadband speeds or unreliable connections. That’s why today, we’re announcing
Project Link
, an initiative to build a super-fast, high-capacity fiber network to enable any local mobile operator or Internet service provider (ISP) to connect more people in Kampala to a faster, more reliable Internet.
Project Link’s network is available today to connect providers to long-distance fiber lines, equipping them with near-unlimited capacity to build and expand services to Ugandans. By making this connection, we’re strengthening a crucial piece of the Internet supply chain. Some parts of the chain are already strong: undersea cables are bringing data to Africa’s shores and mobile providers are expanding services across the continent. We’ve now built quality infrastructure in between these points to deliver the speed and capacity that supports the latest and greatest of the Web.
Project Link goes beyond basic access; it enables local providers to offer new mobile data plans or high-speed Internet for office buildings and universities, and support newer technologies as they come to market. For Kampala, we hope it’s a foundation to support the needs of a new crop of entrepreneurs and innovators: the media-rich projects of a successful musician, fast connections for local hospitals, or new digital learning tools for students.
As more of Africa comes online, the Web will grow stronger and richer from the contributions of a growing population. Project Link isn’t just about connecting fiber cables. It’s about connecting the people of Kampala and giving them an opportunity to contribute to a truly global Internet.
Posted by Kai Wulff, Access Field Director
Protecting children from sexual abuse
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Last week 348 people were arrested in Canada – and 386 young kids rescued – in one of the largest child sex investigations ever seen. It defies belief that anyone would sexually abuse children, especially teachers and doctors entrusted with their care.
But this awful case highlights the depths to which humanity can sink.
And while society will never wholly eliminate such depravity, we should do everything in our power to protect children from harm. That's why internet companies like Google and Microsoft have been working with law enforcement for years to stop paedophiles sharing illegal pictures on the web. We actively remove child sexual abuse imagery from our services and immediately report abuse to the authorities. This evidence is regularly used to prosecute and convict criminals.
But as the UK Prime Minister David Cameron said in a speech this summer, there's always more that can be done. We've listened, and in the last three months put more than 200 people to work developing new, state-of-the-art technology to tackle the problem.
Cleaning up search:
We've fine tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results. While no algorithm is perfect – and Google cannot prevent paedophiles adding new images to the web – these changes have cleaned up the results for over 100,000 queries that might be related to the sexual abuse of kids. As important, we will soon roll out these changes in more than 150 languages, so the impact will be truly global.
Deterrence:
We're now showing warnings – from both Google and charities – at the top of our search results for more than 13,000 queries. These alerts make clear that child sexual abuse is illegal and offer advice on where to get help.
Detection and removal:
There's no quick technical fix when it comes to detecting child sexual abuse imagery. This is because computers can't reliably distinguish between innocent pictures of kids at bathtime and genuine abuse. So we always need to have a person review the images. Once that is done – and we know the pictures are illegal – each image is given a unique digital fingerprint. Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for developing and sharing its picture detection technology. But paedophiles are increasingly filming their crimes. So our engineers at YouTube have created a new technology to identify these videos. We're already testing it at Google, and in the new year we hope to make it available to other internet companies and child safety organisations.
Technical expertise:
There are many organisations working to fight the sexual exploitation of kids online – and we want to ensure they have the best technical support. So Google plans to second computer engineers to both the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) here in Britain and the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). We also plan to fund internships for other engineers at these organisations. This will help the IWF and NCMEC stay one step ahead.
The sexual abuse of children is a global challenge, and success depends on everyone working together – law enforcement, internet companies and charities. We welcome the lead taken by the British Government, and hope that the technologies developed (and shared) by our industry will make a real difference in the fight against this terrible crime.
Posted by Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman
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