Author Archives: European Public Policy Blog

Gathering advice on the Right to be Forgotten

In just under two weeks, the Advisory Council to Google on the Right to be Forgotten will start its public consultations in cities across Europe to gather views from a wide spectrum of experts. The first meeting will be in Madrid on September 9, and the Council will then head to Rome on September 10.

A limited number of seats will be available for members of the public at each Council meeting. We’re opening up the online registration process today — and you can sign up for the Madrid meeting and the Rome meeting. Registration will remain open until five days before the event. There is no charge to attend.

After Madrid and Rome, the Council heads to Paris (September 25), Warsaw (September 30), Berlin (October 14), London (October 16) and Brussels (November 4). Registration for these meetings will start approximately two weeks before each event, and we’ll post details on this blog and on the Advisory Council website in due course.

At each meeting, the Council will listen to statements from invited experts, ask questions of the experts and discuss matters of law, technology, and ethics. The public portion of each Advisory Council meeting will last around two and a half hours, with an intermission and the whole meeting will also be live-streamed on the Advisory Council’s website.

During the event, members of the audience can submit questions to the Council and invited experts. The Council invites members of the public to share their thoughts on the Right to be Forgotten via the form at www.google.com/advisorycouncil - all contributions will be read and discussed. Individuals or organizations with subject matter expertise can submit attachments such as research papers at www.google.com/advisorycouncil/comments on an ongoing basis.

We look forward to seeing you at one of the meetings.

Posted by Betsy Masiello, Google Secretariat to the Advisory Council

Inspire kids to create our future: Apply for a 2015 RISE Award

Technology has the power to change the world for the better, but today far too few have access to the education or encouragement they need to become creators, not just consumers. We know that pre-university exposure to Computer Science education is critically important for inspiring kids to pursue a career in computing.

That’s why Google offers the RISE Awards -- grants of $15,000 to $50,000 USD -- to organisations across the globe working to promote access to Computer Science education for girls and underrepresented minorities. Our RISE partners are changemakers: they engage, educate, and excite students about computing through extracurricular outreach.

In 2014, 42 organisations received RISE Awards—with projects ranging from coding clubs in Europe to web development camps in Sub-Saharan Africa. In April, we brought all of our partners together for a Global Summit that sparked resource sharing and collaboration amongst organisations.

We’re looking for more partners in 2015. Submit your application by September 30, 2014 in English, French, Japanese, Russian or Spanish. All eligibility information is listed on our website.



Posted by Roxana Shirkhoda, K12/Pre-University Education Outreach

Bletchley Park’s rebirth and why it matters

Twenty five years ago, Bletchley Park was facing demolition. Last month’s opening of the newly restored Block C by the Duchess of Cambridge — including the discovery that her grandmother Valerie Glassborow had worked as a duty officer and managed the interception of enemy signals for decryption at Bletchley — cements its reversal of fortune.
Photos copyright Shaun Armstrong

Now reborn as one of England’s most evocative museums, Bletchley Park is a fitting place of pilgrimage for both history and technology fans alike. The extraordinary code-breaking feats that took place in its spartan wooden huts were crucial to the Allied victory, and helped lay the foundations for the computer age. We were honoured to have been invited to create this new film for the visitors centre:


Bletchley Park is where Alan Turing’s theories were first put into practice, in the Bombe machines used to break Enigma, operated by women like 93 year old veteran and grandmother of one of our colleagues in Google London, Jean Valentine. It was also home to Colossus, the world’s first electronic programmable computer.

As important as what was achieved at Bletchley Park are the lessons we can learn from the way it was done.

Bletchley Park was a melting pot of brilliant minds set free by an atmosphere of tolerance. Societal norms were swept aside because of extreme need and circumstances. What mattered was what a person could do — not their gender, sexual orientation, religion, national origin or any supposed eccentricity. By removing these artificial constraints, Bletchley Park brought out the best in the fullest range of talent.

In this sense, Bletchley’s codebreaking success came not in spite of people’s differences, but because of them. It’s a compelling role model for the power of diversity that resonates still today.

Overall, at Bletchley Park thousands of talented people, more than half women, made heroic contributions that were kept secret until the 1970s. To borrow Keira Knightley’s line playing code breaker Joan Clarke in upcoming movie “The Imitation Game”: “Sometimes it’s the people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things no one can imagine.”

Google has long championed saving Bletchley Park together with Dr. Sue Black, Stephen Fry, Sir John Scarlett and many others. We’ve donated money, hosted events, created videos to help preserve and promote its story, including this . But nothing beats the experience of visiting this hallowed place in person — it’s just 45 minutes by train from London Euston — do go if you can. We promise you will be inspired by these technical heroes and early founders of our industry.

Posted by Lynette Webb and Megan Smith, Google

Searching for the right balance

In May, the Court of Justice of the European Union established a “right to be forgotten." Today, we published an op-ed by David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer, in the U.K.'s The Guardian, Germany's Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, France's Le Figaro and Spain's El Pais, discussing the ruling and our response. We're republishing the op-ed in full below. -Ed.

When you search online, there’s an unwritten assumption that you’ll get an instant answer, as well as additional information if you need to dig deeper. This is all possible because of two decades worth of investment and innovation by many different companies. Today, however, search engines across Europe face a new challenge—one we’ve had just two months to get our heads around. That challenge is figuring out what information we must deliberately omit from our results, following a new ruling from the European Court of Justice.

In the past we’ve restricted the removals we make from search to a very short list. It includes information deemed illegal by a court, such as defamation, pirated content (once we’re notified by the rights holder), malware, personal information such as bank details, child sexual abuse imagery and other things prohibited by local law (like material that glorifies Nazism in Germany).

We’ve taken this approach because, as article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “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."

But the European Court found that people have the right to ask for information to be removed from search results that include their names if it is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive.” In deciding what to remove, search engines must also have regard to the public interest. These are, of course, very vague and subjective tests. The court also decided that search engines don’t qualify for a “journalistic exception.” This means that The Guardian could have an article on its website about an individual that’s perfectly legal, but we might not legally be able to show links to it in our results when you search for that person’s name. It’s a bit like saying the book can stay in the library, it just cannot be included in the library’s card catalogue.

It’s for these reasons that we disagree with the ruling. That said, we obviously respect the court’s authority and are doing our very best to comply quickly and responsibly. It’s a huge task as we’ve had over 70,000 take-down requests covering 250,000 webpages since May. So we now have a team of people individually reviewing each application, in most cases with limited information and almost no context.

The examples we’ve seen so far highlight the difficult value judgments search engines and European society now face: former politicians wanting posts removed that criticize their policies in office; serious, violent criminals asking for articles about their crimes to be deleted; bad reviews for professionals like architects and teachers; comments that people have written themselves (and now regret). In each case, someone wants the information hidden, while others might argue it should be out in the open.

When it comes to determining what’s in the the public interest, we’re taking into account a number of factors. These include whether: the information relates to a politician, celebrity, or other public figure; if the material comes from a reputable news source, and how recent it is; whether it involves political speech; questions of professional conduct that might be relevant to consumers; the involvement of criminal convictions that are not yet “spent”; and if the information is being published by a government. But these will always be difficult and debatable judgments.

We’re also doing our best to be transparent about removals: for example, we’re informing websites when one of their pages has been removed. But we cannot be specific about why we have removed the information because that could violate the individual’s privacy rights under the court's decision.

Of course, only two months in, our process is still very much a work in progress. It’s why we incorrectly removed links to some articles last week (they have since been reinstated). But the good news is that the ongoing, active debate that’s happening will inform the development of our principles, policies and practices—in particular about how to balance one person’s right to privacy with another’s right to know.

That’s why we've also set up an advisory council of experts, the final membership of which we're announcing today. These external experts from the worlds of academia, the media, data protection, civil society and the tech sector are serving as independent advisors to Google. The council will be asking for evidence and recommendations from different groups, and will hold public meetings this autumn across Europe to examine these issues more deeply. Its public report will include recommendations for particularly difficult removal requests (like criminal convictions); thoughts on the implications of the court’s decision for European Internet users, news publishers, search engines and others; and procedural steps that could improve accountability and transparency for websites and citizens.

The issues here at stake are important and difficult, but we’re committed to complying with the court’s decision. Indeed it's hard not to empathize with some of the requests we've seen—from the man who asked that we not show a news article saying he had been questioned in connection with a crime (he’s able to demonstrate that he was never charged) to the mother who requested that we remove news articles for her daughter’s name as she had been the victim of abuse. It’s a complex issue, with no easy answers. So a robust debate is both welcome and necessary, as, on this issue at least, no search engine has an instant or perfect answer.

Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Google Ventures invests in Europe

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

Wander through the excellent Science Museum in London, and you’ll see inventions that transformed history. Like Puffing Billy, one of the world’s first steam locomotives; or Charles Babbage’s difference engine, a Victorian predecessor to the modern computer; or penicillin, the wonder drug that revolutionized the treatment of disease. These marvels from the past still influence our lives today, and are tangible examples of how fearless exploration and entrepreneurship can literally change the world.

To help support the next generation of European entrepreneurs, today Google Ventures is launching a new venture fund, with initial funding of $100 million. Our goal is simple: we want to invest in the best ideas from the best European entrepreneurs, and help them bring those ideas to life.

When we launched Google Ventures in 2009, we set out to be a very different type of venture fund. Startups need more than just capital to succeed: they also benefit from engineering support, design expertise, and guidance with recruiting, marketing and product management. Five years later, we’re working with more than 250 portfolio companies, tackling challenges across a host of industries. For example, the team at Flatiron Health is improving the way doctors and patients approach cancer care, SynapDx is developing a blood test for the early detection of Autism in children, and Clean Power Finance is making solar energy affordable for homeowners.

We believe Europe’s startup scene has enormous potential. We’ve seen compelling new companies emerge from places like London, Paris, Berlin, the Nordic region and beyond—SoundCloud, Spotify, Supercell and many others.

We can’t predict the kinds of inventions the Science Museum might showcase 10+ years from now, but we do know European startups will be essential to this future, and we can’t wait to see what they create.

Posted by Bill Maris, Managing Partner, Google Ventures

The world is a canvas: introducing the street art project

Here today, gone tomorrow. The transient nature of street art means it can be at risk of being scrubbed out and lost forever to its legions of fans. But long after the paint has faded from the walls, technology can help preserve street art, so people can discover it wherever and whenever they like. In a new project launching today, we’ve partnered with street art experts to bring you 5,000+ images and around 100 exhibitions in the Google Art Project—telling a story of street art around the world.

Starting today, you can immerse yourself in a world of prowling foxes frogs on lonely walls, supernatural symbolism, murals on a grand scale, tiny hard-to-spot icons, or trompe l’oeil techniques that use physical details of the wall itself to trick the eye.

From Poland to Portugal; London to Vienna, the styles of work vary considerably. There are stickers in France, sculptures in London and portraits of rappers on the streets of Malaga. It’s not just about spraypaint either—other exhibits demonstrate the signature style of the artist, like JR’s large-scale and evocative photo-portraits, Roa’s animals, Vhils’ acid etching or Os Gemeos' surrealism.

Regg and Violant, Centro Comercial Alegro, Setúbal, Galeria de Arte Urbana

Vhils using the texture of the wall as a canvas

Using Street View, you can also explore buildings with street art that are closed to the public, or that have already been demolished - such as the famed Paris 13 tower.


Agrandir le plan

Explore all nine floors and 450 square meters of painted ceilings and walls of the now-demolished Tour Paris 13 building, immortalized with Street View.

In a series of fascinating exhibitions by our partners, you can also learn about the origins of the street art movement or see how Street Art is being used in Poland to revitalize its cities. Take a tour through the work of artists from the infamous Bristol graffiti scene and get wild about nature in Portugal.

Street art may be temporary on our walls and sidewalks, but its beauty and vibrancy live on, on the web. Take a look— you’re sure to be bowled over by the variety of the urban canvas.

Posted by Lucy Schwartz, Programme Manager, Google Cultural Institute & Julie Pottier, Marketing Manager, Google Cultural Institute

Settlement with the European Commission

Following three rounds of negotiations and significant concessions, we are glad to have now reached an agreement with the European Commission that addresses its competition concerns.

Commissioner Almunia laid out the details of that settlement at a press conference last week, including:
  • Changes to our AdSense terms to make it even easier for publishers to place ads on their sites from multiple providers;
  • Changes to our AdWords API terms to make it even easier for software providers to build tools for advertisers to manage campaigns across platforms;
  • New rules regarding how we will use website content in vertical search services; and
  • Changes to our UI that will give rival services significant prominence (and valuable screen space) on our search results pages. You can see what this looks like here.
In addition, our suggested changes have (unusually) been through two separate “market tests” which enabled the Commission to hear directly from a number of our competitors, as well as third parties. In response to their feedback, we made two rounds of significant further changes to our initial proposals. Today, to ensure that everyone understands the wide-ranging nature of this settlement, we are taking the (again unusual) step of publishing the full text of the agreement.

While this process has been challenging, we are pleased to have a resolution of these issues and look forward to a continued focus on providing new generations of great services for our users.

Posted by Kent Walker, Senior Vice-President and General Counsel

The real story behind high-tech jobs

We’ve all heard the damning indictment - technology destroys jobs. While it is true that the digital revolution disrupts the workplace - just as the Industrial Revolution swept away many artisan professions such as weavers - a new report by University of Leuven researchers tells a fascinating story of how the high tech revolution is, surprisingly, creating an explosion in non-high tech jobs in Europe. Indeed, for every one high-tech job created, more than four additional non-high tech jobs are created in the same region.

That’s not the only good news, either. Across the European economy, the high-tech sector is showing impressive signs of growth. The new research shows that high-tech employment grew 20 percent in the EU-27 between 2000-2011, while total employment increased by just eight percent.

Growth in high-tech jobs also has a positive spillover effect in local economies. The presence of high-tech workers in a region is likely to create additional work for a wide range of occupations - from lawyers, doctors and school teachers to taxi drivers, waiters and technicians.

This spillover is not limited to Europe’s biggest economies. While Germany contributed the most to total high-tech employment in Europe, it is relatively unexpected regions in Europe that saw the fastest growth in high-tech jobs. For example, Bratislava, Slovakia is one of the fastest growing regions for high-tech employment, growing at nearly 56 percent from 2000-2011. This contributes to the region’s high level of per-capita income and contrasts with assumptions that high-tech jobs are only in traditional hubs.

Not only is the high-tech sector outperforming other sectors in total employment growth, but its workers enjoy high rates of employment, a substantial wage premium (over 65% in some countries, like Portugual and Romania) and higher wage growth. With many economies struggling with stagnant wages, a vibrant high-tech sector makes a strong contribution to these countries.

So what lessons should we take from these findings?

First, that the EU’s pursuit of high-tech and digital job growth is worthwhile. The Europe 2020 strategy and recent agreements at the European Digital Council provide the opportunity to build on the success of the past ten years to support this vibrant part of the economy.

Second, we know that supporting high-tech jobs will benefit the wider economy. The high-tech sector is generating faster, higher-paying job growth across the EU-27, the knock-on effect of which is positive across the economy.

Third, investing in high-tech and digital skills will pay dividends. The difference in wages between STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) jobs and non-STEM jobs is high right across Europe. And with the high-tech jobs multiplier, supporting skills development in high-tech fields should create benefits beyond traditional high-tech industries.

As these jobs spread across the continent, it is clear that supporting high-tech industries will benefit the whole economy and make a substantial contribution to resolving the unemployment crisis facing many economies.

Posted by Jon Steinberg, Google Public Policy team

More Swedish wind power for our Finnish data centre

We’re keen to make sure that our data centres around the world use as much renewable energy as possible. By entering into long-term agreements with wind farm developers over the past few years, we’ve been able to increase the amount of renewable energy we consume while helping enable the construction of new facilities.

Today we announced that we’ve signed a new power purchase agreement (PPA) in Sweden (our second such agreement there in less than 12 months). We will buy the entire electricity output of four as-yet-unbuilt wind farms in southern Sweden, at a fixed price, for the next ten years.

Windfarm developer Eolus Vind will build four wind farms, in Alered, Mungseröd, Skalleberg and Ramsnäs, Sweden. The 29-turbine project, with a total combined capacity of 59MW, already has all relevant planning approvals and permits and will become fully operational in early 2015.


Picture: Our seawater-cooled data centre in Hamina, Finland

Once completed, the wind farms will provide Google’s Hamina, Finland, data centre with additional renewable energy as the facility expands in coming years.

Buying renewable energy in Sweden and consuming it in Finland is possible thanks to Europe’s increasingly integrated power markets, in particular the Nord Pool spot market. This allows Google to buy renewable energy with Guarantee of Origin certification in Sweden, “retire” the certificates and then consume an equivalent amount of power elsewhere in Europe.



This marks our sixth long-term agreement to purchase renewable energy. We keep signing these contracts for two main reasons: they make great financial sense for us, and increase the amount of renewable energy available in the grid, which is great for the environment too.

Posted by Francois Sterin, Director, Global Infrastructure Team