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