Opening an Internet Research Institute in Berlin

It was a demanding timetable. When Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt announced our intention to fund an Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin last February, we and four distinguished university partners aimed to launch by autumn. Together we made the deadline. More than 500 guests from politics, business, media and science this week packed the Auditorium Maximum of Berlin's Humboldt University for the opening the Alexander von Humboldt Institute.

The German government representative Birgit Grundmann, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice, spoke personally of the challenges of the digital world. This institution “interests me as the mother of two Internet addicted children," she said. “What are the information gaps and what must citizens be better informed about? The issue of transparency requires further research, as does data and consumer protection, and the question of the limits of anonymity on the net."

The Institute’s first academic activity is a three-day symposium “Exploring the Digital Future” running through Friday. We expected about 200 participants. At the first session today, we were pleased to see more than 300. The symposium is tasked with defining the issues for the Institute to address. The Institute itself will choose its subjects to study; potential topics include Internet privacy, freedom of expression and civil liberties.

Humboldt University will house the Institute’s offices. Alexander von Humboldt, the Institute’s namesake, was once described by Charles Darwin as "the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived". He is remembered as one of the founders of modern geography, thought leader of the Enlightenment and an explorer whose travels, experiments, and knowledge transformed science in the nineteenth century.



Our Senior Vice President David Drummond evoked Alexander von Humboldt, imagining how he would have worked today. David joked that "for his travels around the globe hopefully von Humboldt would also have used Google Maps.” He expressed hope that the institute “will be based on a philosophy of openness, open access, standards and an ability to innovation.”

He then handed over the new Institute's plaque to the academic leaders. If the opening ceremony gives any idea, the Institute looks set to enjoy a bright future.

Posted by Max Senges, Google Policy, Germany

More data, more transparency around government requests

Cross posted with the Official Google Blog

How do governments affect access to information on the Internet? To help shed some light on that very question, last year we launched an online, interactive Transparency Report. All too often, policy that affects how information flows on the Internet is created in the absence of empirical data. But by showing traffic patterns and disruptions to our services, and by sharing how many government requests for content removal and user data we receive from around the world, we hope to offer up some metrics to contribute to a public conversation about the laws that influence how people communicate online.

Today we’re updating the Government Requests tool with numbers for requests that we received from January to June 2011. For the first time, we’re not only disclosing the number of requests for user data, but we’re showing the number of users or accounts that are specified in those requests too. We also recently released the raw data behind the requests. Interested developers and researchers can now take this data and revisualize it in different ways, or mash it up with information from other organizations to test and draw up new hypotheses about government behaviors online.

We believe that providing this level of detail highlights the need to modernize laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which regulates government access to user information and was written 25 years ago—long before the average person had ever heard of email. Yet at the end of the day, the information that we’re disclosing offers only a limited snapshot. We hope others join us in the effort to provide more transparency, so we’ll be better able to see the bigger picture of how regulatory environments affect the entire web.

Posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst

A startup café for French entrepreneurs

Not everyone can go to business school and be trained to start a successful company. Not everyone grows up in entrepreneurial centers such as Silicon Valley. Yet many of us, no matter where we are born or our education, have an entrepreneurial streak just waiting to be released.

In order to encourage entrepreneurs, Google France recently launched a Startup Café, an online platform offering information and tools required by entrepreneurs to launch a business. Several business schools and the Agency for the Creation of Entrepreneurs have joined us in this exciting venture.

David Drummond, Google’s Senior Vice President, recently gave Eric Besson, French Minister in charge of Industry, Energy and Digital Economy a first-hand view of the cafe at the recent Summit A New World 2.0. He also met with some French entrepreneurs to understand their challenges in starting a business in France.



While all countries could benefit from a startup boost, we started this “café” first in France because it has a lower level of entrepreneurial activity than in the European Union average, according to a report from the European Commission. Some studies point three main reasons for the lagging French performance: inadequate education and information (fewer than a fifth of French students receive business training), widespread fear of failure (while a third of employees express a desire to start their own company, more than half of them cite fear of bankruptcy for not proceeding) and finally, the significant amount of time required to obtain the legal and practical information required to launch one’s own business.

The French start-up café attempts to respond to these three weaknesses. It features high quality video content produced by business schools designed for entrepreneurs. It includes a toolbox of IT products helpful in starting a business. Finally, the café promotes the best organizations, institutions, programs that are available for entrepreneurs through a geo mashup: enter your location, the type of support you need, and find the information you need to grow your company.

Cafés are convivial places where friends and colleagues gather for a drink and conversation. Our start-up café also is designed to promote networking. So try out the site - and since you are in a café, sip of a strong espresso and launch a great business.

Posted by Elisabeth Bargès, Public Policy Manager, Google France

Celebrating Privacy at Google

We always try to put our users first when we create products at Google - and that means we’re thinking about privacy all day, every day, in everything we do. With so much happening in this important area, it’s nice to take a step back and look at the big picture every once in a while.

We just did that from 10th-14th October with our first-ever Google Privacy Week. This was a company-wide series of events designed to ensure we continue to adhere to strong privacy standards and practices, and share the lessons we’ve learned and progress we’ve made over the past year. Google Privacy Week featured more than two dozen talks and training opportunities, with Googlers from around the world participating live or via videoconference.

Alma Whitten speaks to Google engineers around the world.

Key topics included:

• the design philosophy behind some of the privacy tools we’ve built, such as Circles in Google+, Ads Preferences Manager and Me On the Web
• the strengthened internal controls and review process we’ve developed over the past year that ensure we design products with privacy in mind
• how our Privacy Principles guide our approach to protecting users and giving them transparency and choice
• insights from our User Experience and Enterprise teams on what our users and customers are asking for in terms of privacy

We also welcomed some special guests, including Trevor Hughes, president and CEO of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP); Chris Hoofnagle of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology; and Bob Warner and Fiona Lennox of the Ofcom Consumer Communications Panel.

Author Jeff Jarvis gave a thoughtful and provocative talk about his new book Public Parts:



Google Privacy Week was a great opportunity to evaluate our progress and prepare for the work we have in front of us. It’s inspiring to see the amount of attention Googlers around the world are putting into building products, tools and options that help our users better control their privacy - both on Google products and as they browse the web.

Posted by Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering

Launching an Internet & Society Research Institute

In February of this year, our Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt announced that we would support the establishment of an Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin. This Tuesday, we’re thrilled to announce the Institute’s official opening at the Humboldt University. Federal Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger and Google Senior Vice President David Drummond will speak. More than 400 politicians, academics and civil society representatives are expected to attend.



We are proud to have attracted four renowned partners from German academia for the Institute: the Humboldt University, the University of the Arts, and the Social Science Research Center Berlin. The Hamburg Hans Bredow Institute joins as a co-operation partner. Each institution is seconding a distinguished academic.

Humboldt’s Prof. Dr. h.c. Ingolf Pernice will study constitutional aspects of the Internet. The Social Science Research Center’s Dr. Jeanette Hofmann will probe Internet policy, while the University of the Arts’s Prof. Dr. Thomas Schildhauer will look at the Internet and innovation and Hamburg’s Dr. Wolfgang Schulz will weigh in on the Internet’s impact on media.

Humboldt University will house the Institute’s offices. Alexander von Humboldt, the Institute’s namesake, was once described by Charles Darwin as "the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived". He is remembered as one of the founders of modern geography, thought leader of the Enlightenment and an explorer whose travels, experiments, and knowledge transformed science in the nineteenth century.

From October 26-28 the Institute will host an international academic symposium "Exploring the Digital Future." Distinguished academics from all around the globe will appear, including the Director of the Harvard’s Berkman Center Urs Gasser, St. Gallen University’s Oliver Gassmann, Haifa University’s Niva Elkin-Koren, and many others.

This week’s symposium will discuss the initial research agenda for the Institute. The goal is to carry out “hands on” research rather than just analysis and reflection. The Institute will seek solutions to today’s challenges, using insights from policy makers, netizens, users, as well as technology companies like Google.

Importantly, the Institute will not advocate a simplistic “pro-Internet” stance. Instead, it will critically review current practices. For example, how can we foster the use of the Internet to advance civil liberties? Experts will pose questions like these about free expression as well as privacy and democratic processes.

This is not a "Google Institute.” It is an independent academic body. Google will not interfere with the research. Of course, Google is keenly interested in better understanding the interaction between the web, academia and society. But we need experts to help us all understand how the web is changing our world. We have found great institutions and great personalities as partners. We now look forward to seeing the first scientific papers from the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society.

UPDATES: 25/10/2011, 10:30 PM:

• Photos from the opening event posted below.
• Minister Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger was unfortunately unable to attend the opening event due to urgent negotiations ahead of the Euro Area Summit in Brussels, but Secretary of State Dr. Birgit Grundmann kindly stood in for the Minister and gave an excellent, inspiring speech.

The Auditorium Maximum of Berlin's Humboldt University, packed with 500 guests from politics, business and science.

David Drummond welcomes our guests and makes his opening remarks.

The four academic directors of the institute Prof. Ingolf Pernice, Dr. Jeanette Hofmann, Prof. Thomas Schildhauer and Dr. Wolfgang Schulz (from left to right) with David Drummond.

Posted by Max Senges, Google Policy, Germany

Tunisia talks on YouTube

Cross posted with the Official Google Blog

The Arab Spring started in Tunisia, and it’s appropriate that Tunisia is now leading the way to a full democracy with their landmark free elections scheduled to take place on October 23. To help in this process, we recently partnered with startup news portal Tunisia Live to offer a training workshop in Tunis on Google tools and social media for politicians.

The turnout was fantastic; members from more than 40 parties and independent coalitions attended. The same day, Tunisia Live launched the Tunisia Talks channel on YouTube, channeling the enthusiasm of politicians to leverage social media and engage with voters. In this project, Tunisians are encouraged to submit and vote for top questions to the candidates, and many did so—for a flavor, see this example or this one. So far, more than 400 questions have been submitted.



This outreach is all the more exciting because YouTube was blocked for so many years in Tunisia. But when the regime collapsed last January, the site was unbanned and quickly became popular. Many Tunisian media outlets have set up channels to organize their video libraries on YouTube.

In this weekend’s elections, Tunisians will choose a constitutional council to write a new constitution for the country. Voters will select from lists of party members and independents. The Tunisian electoral committee has set up an official site www.isie.tn and is actively using social media to encourage voter registration—check their channel YouTube.com/isietn.

This is an exciting time in Tunisia. The media landscape—once limited and government-controlled—is now opening up to online platforms. Tunisians finally have access to a free Internet—and it’s playing a key role in building an encompassing political environment.

Posted by Samir ElBahaie, Regional Policy and Government Affairs Manager, Middle East and Northern Africa

UPDATE: More Hack4Transparancy for everyone

A few weeks ago we told you about the Hack4Transparancy event, bringing techies together November 8th and 9th in the European Parliament for an all-expenses-paid good time eating, talking, and making important data


Well, now we’ve got more exciting news. We’ve broadened the scope of the event and extended the application deadline for those wishing to make data on Internet performance visible and meaningful.

What’s changed?

• The application deadline for the Internet Quality track has been extended through noon, CET, Friday October 21st (that's this coming Friday).
• To diversify the skill-set of interested hackers, we’ve added a data visualization option to the Internet Quality track.
• We’ve expanded the criteria -- now, eligible hackers from anywhere in the world can apply.
• And, we’ve increased the prize money. One winning team or individual on each track will now receive €5.000,00.

Now, sharpen your coding and data visualization skills, and send in your application! Winners will be notified the week of October 24.

Posted by Marco Pancini, Google Sr. Policy Counsel, Brussels

Good to know

Today in the UK we launched Good To Know, a consumer advertising campaign designed to give people practical guidance on staying safe online. Companies and developers that build online services are often dismissed as playing fast and loose with privacy. No doubt some bad actors do so, but most of them, including Google, understand that the viability of our businesses relies on people and their information being safe online. That safety encompasses both security and privacy.

While people want to stay safe online, many of them don’t feel equipped to do so. Our goal with the Good To Know campaign is to provide people with practical guidance, from selecting safe passwords to keeping their online accounts secure. Google and the Citizens Advice Bureau are working together to educate and empower consumers across the UK.

Today we’re also launching a new section of the Google website that makes learning about security and privacy easier for the average consumer. We know that in-depth resources like privacy policies and terms of service are often too long, complex and legalistic. In the past few years, we’ve tried to make it easier to learn about privacy by creating short videos and by working to reduce the length and complexity of our privacy policy. The new Good to Know website builds on this commitment to explaining things in simple language. The in-depth resources are still there, but we hope a more layered approach will make this information more accessible for everyone.

Keeping people safe and providing them with the services they want requires both careful engineering and sensible public policy. It also requires that consumers understand both the benefits and the potential dangers of using new technologies. Improved media literacy will be essential to the ongoing success of the Internet, and we look forward to continuing to engage in this discussion.

Posted by Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering

Sizing and seizing the Internet economy

Strange as it might sound, given all the buzz about the digital economy, few concrete numbers exist measuring the Internet’s economic impact. The scarcity of hard data has allowed many to portray the Internet (at worst) as a negative force, destroying jobs, or (at best) as marginal to a country’s economic success.

In the past year Google has worked with a variety of partners to begin filling in this data gap. The Boston Consulting Group researched a series of country-specific reports. The first found that the digital economy accounts for more than seven percent of GDP in the UK. BCG, McKinsey, and Deloitte followed up by analyzing the impact of the Internet on local economies for instance in France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Israel, Hong Kong and Australia.

BCG partners David Dean and Paul Zwillenberg recently were in Brussels to present a new study - not commissioned by Google - called Turning Local: From Madrid to Moscow, the Internet is Going Native. It builds on the previous country reports, and adds additional BCG research, to describes the Internet's impact on 50 economies around the globe. BCG drew up an e-Intensity IndexTM which measures countries' Internet infrastructure, the amount of online expenditure and how enthusiastically businesses, consumers and governments engage with new technologies. By 2015, BCG projects, the Internet will contribute 7.3 percent of Danish GDP. Other countries will experience even bigger jumps during the next years. By 2015, the Internet will account for four percent of Spanish GDP, almost double 2009’s figure of 2.2 percent.




If anything, these GDP measures may underestimate the Internet’s true impact—something BCG, McKinsey and Deloitte all acknowledge. For example, in many countries between five and 10 percent of retail sales are researched online before the consumer makes an informed purchase in a physical store, and the cost savings from shopping on the web can be substantial, amounting to almost £1,000 per household in the UK. Similarly, consumers benefit from using free, advertising supported services like email that they would otherwise have to pay to enjoy. McKinsey and IAB Europe found consumers enjoy €100 billion in consumer surplus—almost three times the revenue online advertising companies receive—none of which traditional GDP measures captures.

Earlier this year, McKinsey specifically researched the externalities around Internet search, with collaboration and support from Google. Their independent report, Impact of Internet Technologies: Search, states that search technologies—including but not limited to Google—create over $780 billion of value for the global economy, of which only four percent accrues to the search engines themselves.

Google and other members of the Business and Industry Advisory Committee BIAC last month participated in an expert roundtable at the OECD exploring current and future methods for measuring the impact of the Internet on the global economy. The roundtable will be followed by a report sponsored by Google that will measure the impact of the Internet on OECD member countries.

For BCG, their studies represent only a first step. The goal is to help jumpstart a global conversation on the economic value of the Internet. In Brussels, Dean and Zwillenberg were clear in presentations made to European think tank Bruegel (of which Google is a member) that SME’s are one of the biggest groups of beneficiaries in Europe. Their research, which included a survey of over 9,000 companies, concludes that businesses using the web intensively grow significantly faster than businesses that don't. That’s a theme that we, and BCG, will be revisiting in coming weeks and months.

Posted by Patricia Wruuck, Policy Analyst and Betsy Masiello, Policy Manager

Picking a free expression logo

Every movement needs a logo. As writer Seymour Chwast says, “peace groups have their doves and black nationalists had their panther.” Similarly, the cause of Human Rights needs a symbol. So when the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Institute for Human Rights in Berlin started a process to develop a "A Logo for Human Rights" on May 3rd this year, we were keen to get involved. The result was an exciting contest with more than 15,000 submissions worldwide.




Members of the jury included Nobel Peace Prize laureates Aung San Suu Kyi, Jimmy Carter, Muhammad Yunus and Shirin Ebadi, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and Colombian musician Juanes. TV presenter Ann Curry and US actor Robert de Niro hosted the recent award ceremony in New York. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, patron of the initiative, unveiled the winning logo "FREE AS A MAN."

We contributed actively to this exciting project. A special YouTube channel was launched. In addition, we provided funding through our Google Grants and a campaign on YouTube extending the reach and visibility of the initiative.

Throughout the world, governments are attacking Internet freedom. A decade ago, only two governments imposed controls on the net. Last year, more than 40 governments imposed controls. Hopefully, the new logo will help drive interest in preserving the human right of free expression.

Posted by Carsten Grueber, Industry Manager, Google Germany

Celebrating culture on the net in Europe and Africa

At Google, we are excited about the opportunities the Internet provides to preserve and promote local culture around the world. The Hay Literary Festival, whose organisers share this interest, has grown from its origins in Wales into a international organisation that now hosts festivals around the globe, most recently in Nairobi and Segovia. We were pleased to be a sponsor of these events.

During 15-18 September, in downtown Nairobi, we joined teams from Hay and Kenyan publisher partner Storymoja, alongside numerous internationally-acclaimed authors, poets, journalists and local entrepreneurs. We participated in speaker panels on ‘Online Entrepreneurship’ and ‘the Power of Free Expression in the Digital Age’.

Many young children showed up and showed their enthusiasm through dance performances. It was thrilling to see how older Kenyan entrepreneurs are looking to use the Internet to bring African culture and business to their peers and indeed the wider world. Companies such as Eat Out Kenya, the Can-Do! Company and Fluid presented great examples. We also took the opportunity to highlight our own Google initiative to help get Kenyan Business Online.

Segovia’s festival took place 22-25 September. The medieval Spanish city, about an hour north of Madrid, boasts a famous 2,000 year old Roman aqueduct, a stunning Gothic cathedral, a medieval old town, and a fairy-tale castle, the Alcazar. Yet the Hay Festival brought modern intellectual firepower to these ancient stones - everything from an exhibition by German artist Anselm Kiefer to a talk on leadership from the Spanish national football team coach Vicente del Bosque.

Google’s presence focused on free expression. The Internet has given all of us, every single individual, the possibility of expressing ourselves. However, the audience seemed surprised to learn also that the number of attempts by governments around the world to crack down on and restrict such free flow of information is also growing. We talked at length about our Transparency Report, which sheds light on requests for information we receive from governments.

The Hay Festival organisers are keen to bring their culture and literary festivals to more countries around the world, and we look forward to further partnerships.

Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression EMEA in Segovia, and Susan Pointer, Director of Public Policy and Government Relations, Europe, Middle East and Africa, in Nairobi.

Bringing German history online

It’s a new way of writing history. Today, we are joining with Germany’s public TV broadcaster, ZDF, German weekly magazine "Stern", and other leading German brands such as Bertelsmann, Robert Bosch, Daimler and Gruner+Jahr, to launch “Memory of the Nation” (“Gedächtnis der Nation”) - a video platform dedicated to presenting the “collective memories” of German people throughout the 20th and the beginning of the 21st Century.



The project takes inspiration from the Shoah Foundation in Jerusalem, which records the experiences of Holocaust survivors. Similarly, "Memory of the Nation" provides more than a traditional historical archive. Thousands of prominent and ordinary people are being interviewed, and their personal accounts turn abstract history into real, emotional experiences.

This project is special, not just because of its content, but also because it is universally accessible via the Internet. Viewers would be unable to peruse their personal histories via traditional media in their own time, and on their own terms. Here, viewers choose what they want to watch - and are able to add personal details and observations to the stories.

Both young and old are invited to contribute. A ZDF team criss-crossing Germany in a "century bus” already has recorded more than 8000 hours of video interviews with eyewitnesses of historical events. Viewers are encouraged to upload their own videos through a second YouTube channel “Our History” (“Unsere Geschichte”). This interactivity ensures the platform will become a living resource for disseminating and learning about German history.

Google Germany and YouTube are excited to support this unique project. We have created a special interface for this channel that allows users to view the videos on a timeline, as well as search by topic, eyewitness or personality as well as specific keywords.

A non-profit group called "The Memory of the Nation" is spearheading the project. Germany’s Federal President Christian Wulff is patron. The Board of Trustees includes personalities such as the Federal Government Comissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs Bernd Neumann, former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and literary critic icon Marcel Reich-Ranicki. We’re delighted that so many prominent players in German society have come together and embraced the Internet to increase understanding of German history and culture.

Posted by Kay Oberbeck, Director of Communications and Public Affairs Germany, Austria, Switzerland