Google Public Policy Blog

Call credits for military families this holiday season

Friday, December 3, 2010

Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager(Cross-posted from the Google Voice Blog) video chatfree calls to the U.S. and Canada$10 calling creditGoogle VoiceGmailBlue Star FamiliesSesame Street

Photo by Sesame Workshop, 2010

Be a member of either Blue Star Families or Sesame Street Family Connections — registration is free for all military families

Provide their Gmail address

Enable calling in Gmail and accept the terms of service OR have an existing Google Voice account

Complete this registration form by December 22, 2010

Making Copyright Work Better Online

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Posted by Kent Walker, General Counsel1 trillion unique URLsmore than 35 hours of video uploadedthinklaughlearn new things

We’ll act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours. We will build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rightsholders to submit DMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and web Search). And for copyright owners who use the tools responsibly, we’ll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less. At the same time, we’ll improve our “counter-notice” tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests.

We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. While it’s hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we’ll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose.

We will improve our AdSense anti-piracy review. We have always prohibited the use of our AdSense program on web pages that provide infringing materials. Building on our existing DMCA takedown procedures, we will be working with rightsholders to identify, and, when appropriate, expel violators from the AdSense program.

We will experiment to make authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results. Not surprisingly, we’re big fans of making authorised content more accessible on the Internet. Most users want to access legitimate content and are interested in sites that make that content available to them (even if only on a preview basis). We’ll be looking at ways to make this content easier to index and find.

Content ID

New in Public Data Explorer: Visualize the US Budget

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Posted by John Lyman, Public Data PartnershipsPublic Data ExplorerCensus BureauEnergy Information AdministrationBureau of Labor StatisticsBureau of Economic Analysis

Safe Shopping with Google’s Privacy Tools

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Posted by Will DeVries, Policy Counsel

106 million other AmericansGoogle’s Privacy Tools

‘Hawaii vacation'

Google Chrome’s Incognito modeWilliams-Sonoma.com

YouTube Unlisted and Private video optionsKinect

encryptionFTC’s safe browsing tipsTiffany.comPrivacy Tools pageArs Technica

Our thoughts on the European Commission review

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Udi Manber, Vice President, Engineering(Cross-Posted from the European Public Policy Blog)

Answering users' queries accurately and quickly is our number one goal. Sometimes the best, most relevant answer to a query is our traditional “ten blue links”, and sometimes it is a news article, sports score, stock quote, video, or a map. Today, when you type in “weather in London” or “15 grams in ounces” you get the answers directly (often before you even hit Enter). In the future, we will need to answer much more complex questions just as fast and as clearly. We believe ads are information too, which is why we work so hard to ensure that the advertisements you see are directly relevant to what you are looking for;

We built Google for users, not websites. It may seem obvious, but people sometimes forget this -- not every website can come out on top, or even appear on the first page of our results, so there will almost always be website owners who are unhappy about their rankings. The most important thing is that we satisfy our users.

We are always clear when we have been paid for promoting a product or service. Before we launched Google, many search engines took money for inclusion in their results without making that clear to users. We have never done that and we always distinguished advertising content from our organic search results. As we experiment with new ad formats and types of content, we promise to continue to be transparent about payments.

We aim to be as transparent as possible. We provide more information about how our ranking works than any other major search engine, through our webmaster central site, blog, diagnostic tools, support forum, and YouTube channel. We give our advertisers information about the ad auction, tips on how to improve their ad quality scores, and the ability to simulate their bids to give them more transparency. And we’re committed to increasing that transparency going forward. At the same time, we don’t want to help people game our system. We do everything we can to ensure that the integrity of our results isn’t compromised.

product listing adscost-per-action

An update on our investment in O3b Networks

Monday, November 29, 2010

Posted by Larry Alder, Business Operations Principalwe announcedO3b Networksannounced universally accessible

Google D.C. Talk November 30 - Tim Wu: "The Master Switch"

Monday, November 29, 2010

Posted by Jenna Wandres, Public Policy Communications

Brilliant. Imaginative. Explosive. These are just some of things people are saying about Columbia professor Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.

Part history part crystal ball, The Master Switch analyzes the cycle of innovation to consolidation seen in the telephone, radio and television markets and what that could mean for the Internet. Join Professor Wu tomorrow to discuss the future of regulation in information economies.

He’ll explain what the “Master Switch” is and what it could mean for you. He’ll tell us what role the government plays in “the Cycle.” And he’ll explain why the Internet is in danger - and what we can do to save it.

Google’s Pablo Chavez will talk with Professor Wu about his book. Please RSVP and submit questions for the Professor at www.googledctalks.com**

Google D.C. Talks Presents:

Professor and Author Tim Wu

on his new book,

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Tuesday, November 30, 2010, 10AM - 12PM

Google D.C. Office

1101 New York Avenue, NW, 2nd Floor

Washington, DC

**Google's use of this data is governed by our privacy policy found at http://www.google.com/privacy.html

Apply for a 2011 Google Policy Fellowship

Monday, November 22, 2010

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Director of Public PolicyAmerican Library AssociationCitizen LabCompetitive Enterprise InstituteAOL NewsAdAgecan apply starting todayAmerican Library AssociationCanadian Internet Policy and Public Interest ClinicCato InstituteCenter for Democracy and TechnologyThe Citizen LabCompetitive Enterprise InstituteCreative CommonsElectronic Frontier FoundationFuture of Music CoalitionInternet Education FoundationJoint Center for Political and Economic StudiesMedia Access ProjectNational Hispanic Media CoalitionNew America FoundationPublic KnowledgeTechFreedomTechnology Policy Instituteprogramhost organizationsGoogle Public Policy Fellowship

Senate Hearing on Digital Trade Protectionism

Thursday, November 18, 2010

posted by Heather West, Policy AnalystInternational Trade in the Digital Economytrade white paper we released earlier this weekSubcommittee’s website

Promoting Free Trade for the Internet Economy

Monday, November 15, 2010

Posted by Bob Boorstin, Director, Public Policywhite paper [PDF]one study

Forrester analyst: Google-ITA Software deal “legitimate and fair”

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Posted by by Adam Kovacevich, Senior Manager, Policy Communications Google-ITA Software acquisition...In the end, Google has made a legitimate and fair claim to buy ITA Software, and I think there’s a little bit of sour grapes on the part of some of the companies that are not the companies buying ITA.