Posted by Richard Sargeant, European Public Policy Manager

Here in the UK, government consultations that involve the public in the process of making new laws and regulations are two a penny, but it's unusual for them to come with £20,000 of prize money attached.

The Minister for the Cabinet Office in the UK Government recently launched such a competition -- called Show Us a Better Way -- which has already received over 200 entries.

The government's site is designed to illustrate potential web applications using public sector information, such as statistics, maps, or event listings. Through these examples, the Government will crystalise the case for improving the accessibility of that information. This is vital because, while the aim is noble, the technical means of achieving such accessibility are usually difficult to explain, and quickly induce glazed expressions on the faces of citizens and politicians alike. See, for example, issues like marginal cost pricing and XML schemas.

In contrast, many of the suggestions on the site are both useful, and rooted in the everyday experience of citizens, like bus arrival times on your phone, house prices correlated with commuting maps or better information about crime hotspots.

This is the latest innovative step in the international efforts to demonstrate the value and power that public information has when it is combined with the enterprising and open spirit of the web -- a spirit which Google wholeheartedly supports.

Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Analyst

It may sound strange, and it's certainly not what we're used to. Today we have a "carrier-centered" model; phone and cable companies spend billions to build, operate, and own the "last-mile" connection -- the copper, cable, or fiber wires that come into your house. Individual consumers then pay for particular services, like phone service or Internet access.

In turn, we tend to think about broadband deployment in carrier-centric ways. If we want to see super-fast fiber connections rolled out to consumers, the main question appears to be whether carriers have appropriate incentives to invest.

But there's no law of nature that says this is the only possible model. Many businesses, governments, universities, and other entities already own their own fiber connections, rather than leasing access to lines. It may also be possible to find ways for consumers to purchase their own last-mile strands of fiber.

Here, as anywhere, there would be certain advantages that come with ownership over renting. No one necessarily needs to own skis or a car, but many of us do. If you owned your own fiber, you'd be able to connect it to a service provider of your own choosing. Over time, you might save money, and it could make your house more valuable to have a fiber "tail."

This may all sound rather abstract, but a trial experiment in Ottawa, Canada is trying out the consumer-owned model for a downtown neighborhood of about 400 homes. A specialized construction company is already rolling out fiber to every home, and it will recoup its investment from individual homeowners who will pay to own fiber strands outright, as well as to maintain the fiber over time. The fiber terminates at a service provider neutral facility, meaning that any ISP can pay a fee to put its networking equipment there and offer to provide users with Internet access. Notably, the project is entirely privately funded. (Although some schools and government departments are lined up to buy their own strands of fiber, just like homeowners.)

The main challenges with this model are economic, rather than technical. Most importantly, ownership has to be made appealing and affordable to consumers. The construction company is using conservative estimates that only 10% of homeowners will sign up and there will be a per-customer cost of $2700. If you assume 50% take-up, then the per-customer cost drops to $1100. Both figures might seem like a lot, but people pay for a variety of improvements to their home -- like remodeled kitchens, or a deck -- that also cost large sums.

This model faces other significant obstacles as well and it may only be possible in certain circumstances, if it's practical at all. But the only way to really figure that out is to experiment. Cable television started out as CATV -- community antenna television, an experiment by individual entrepreneurs and rural towns to deliver broadcast signals across longer distances. The Internet started as an experiment in the research community before becoming the worldwide network we know today.

It's also worth considering that, as recently as a few decades ago, personal telephones were unheard of -- the telephone was owned by Bell and simply part of the network. Similarly, the very idea of a "personal" computer used to seem ridiculous, and people relied on sharing access to mainframes. Sure, there are differences between owning your own computer and your own Internet connection, but perhaps one day we may see that the differences weren't as great as we thought.

Even if this experiment fails, it can be a worthwhile data point in discussions about broadband deployment. We need as much creative thinking as we can get to determine how to deliver fast, open Internet for everyone.

The Ottawa trial was driven forward by Bill St. Arnaud, Chief Research Officer at CANARIE, a nonprofit research group devoted to promoting advanced network infrastructure in Canada. If you want to learn more about this idea, check out his presentations here.

Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Analyst

The FCC's public hearing today in Pittsburgh, on "Broadband and the Digital Future," raises the question: what does the future of broadband have in store for us?

The most important answer is that we don't know, and that's a good thing. Unanticipated innovation is what makes the Internet extraordinary.

The past and present of broadband has demonstrated this point time and again. In his testimony today, Google's Vice President for Content Partnerships David Eun pointed up the fact that, just three years ago, no one could have predicted the rise of YouTube, as well as other online video platforms, and the pervasive effect they would have on creativity, politics, education, and our daily lives. It was an unanticipated innovation that has given rise to previously unimagined forms of discourse and commerce. That's true not only of YouTube, but of Google, Skype, Facebook, eBay, the Web itself, and myriad other innovations.

In turn, the future of broadband is about more than the "convergence" of voice, video, and data onto one platform, or simply improved version of services we already know, like higher quality streaming video. Faster, bigger broadband pipes can certainly bring us that, but they can also enable novel creations that we cannot yet imagine. In other words, more broadband doesn't just mean more of the same -- more is different.

As David noted, we ought to take stock of how the open Internet has catalyzed new ideas and technologies to flourish. While we can't predict what innovations may lie around the corner, we can clear a path today for a bright broadband future tomorrow.

Posted by Joe Sexton, Google Public Policy Team

With high fuel prices and a troubled credit market dragging down the U.S. economy, why is now the right time for more investment in breakthrough energy technology?

Earlier this week, Google.org's Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, Dan Reicher, offered an answer to that question at a hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The session examined important legislation aimed at making it easier for clean and energy efficient technologies to get the funding they need to make it from the drawing board to the mainstream, where they can make a real impact on our economy and energy security.

Dan's testimony focused on two points. First, he argued that legislation aimed at spurring clean technology deployment must focus on financing promising high-risk projects in their early stages, so that they make it through the investment "Valley of Death" between the pilot project stage and full-scale commercial implementation. Second, he explained that a secondary market for energy project loans, and government-sponsored loan guarantees would make lending in this space more attractive.

Dan proposed that the two current pieces of legislation, offered separately by Chairman Jeff Bingaman and Ranking Member Pete V. Domenici, could be combined to move this issue forward.

Posted by Johanna Shelton, Policy Counsel

With all the twists and turns in the online advertising space since the beginning of this year, it's no surprise that Members of Congress would be interested in looking at the issue of competition in that space.

Today, our Senior VP for Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, will join officials from Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as advertisers, publishers and others, for a morning hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, followed by an afternoon hearing in the House Judiciary Committee. These hearings will focus on competition in online advertising -- an arena that we believe is competitive, robust and dynamic -- and our recent advertising agreement with Yahoo.

Because of its founding principles of openness and interoperability, the Internet is an extraordinarily competitive environment, where competition and choice are only a click away. Our advertising agreement with Yahoo! will maintain and expand that competition. Among the key points David will make today are:

• This agreement will be good for Internet users (who will see ads that are better targeted to their interests); advertisers (whose ads will be better matched to users' interests, allowing them to reach potential customers more efficiently), and website publishers (who will see increased revenue from better-matched ads on their websites).
  
  
• Google and Yahoo! will remain vigorous competitors, and that competition will help fuel innovation that is good for users and the economy. As we've said before, commercial arrangements between competitors are commonplace in many industries. Antitrust regulators in the US have recognized that consumers can benefit form these arrangements, especially when one company has technical expertise that enables another company to improve the quality of its products.

• Our agreement will not increase Google's share of search traffic, because Yahoo will continue to run its own search engine and compete in online search.
  
  
• We're particularly excited that as part of the agreement, Yahoo! will make its instant messaging network interoperable with Google's. This will mean easier and broader communication among a growing number of IM users, and enable users to choose among competing IM providers based on the merits and features of the services.
  
  
• We have taken a number of steps in the Yahoo! agreement to protect user privacy. As Google supplies ads to Yahoo! and its partners, personally identifiable information of individual Internet users will not be shared between the companies. Yahoo! will anonymize the IP address of a searcher's computer before passing a search request to Google.
  

Here is some additional resources about our agreement with Yahoo:

• David Drummond's prepared Senate testimony
• Our blog post and press release announcing the agreement
  
• Advertisers and online publishers' support for the agreement
• What experts have been saying about the agreement

UPDATE: Check out video of David's testimony below.



UPDATE (7/16): Here's some additional video of David contrasting the competitive effects of our agreement with a possible Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition:

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet and Ari Bezman, Product Managers

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

In this U.S. election year, what information could be more important than the candidates' own words to describe their views, actions and platforms?

Our teams have been working to develop tools to make it easier for people to track election-related information. A few months back, YouTube encouraged everyone to participate in the discussion process through the CNN/YouTube debates, Google Checkout offered an easy and fast way for individuals to make contributions to political candidates, and the Geo team created maps and layers to inform voters during elections.

Today, the Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find. Here's a look:


In addition to providing voters with election information, we also hope to find out more about how people use speech technology to search and consume videos, and to learn what works and what doesn't, to help us improve our products.

The gadget only searches videos uploaded to YouTube's Politicians channels, which include videos from Senator Obama's and Senator McCain's campaigns, as well as those from dozens of other candidates and politicians. It usually takes less than a few hours for a video to appear in the index after it has been published on YouTube. Candidates can control the videos that appear in the gadget by managing the content they upload to YouTube. While some of the transcript snippets you see may not be 100% accurate, we hope that you'll find the product useful for most purposes. Speech recognition is a difficult problem that hasn't yet been completely solved, but we're constantly working to refine our algorithms and improve the accuracy and relevance of these transcribed results.

To try it out, just visit our iGoogle gadget page. We welcome your feedback, so please feel free to leave a comment while you're there.

Posted by Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said today that the Commission is wrapping up its investigation of Comcast's network management practices. Chairman Martin is recommending that his fellow commissioners find that Comcast violated the FCC's September 2005 principles that broadband networks be "widely deployed, open, affordable and accessible to all consumers."

For our part, we believe that such a Commission order will provide useful clarity on what types of practices are acceptable under the agency's Internet freedom principles, and help ensure that today's broadband networks remain open platforms to the Internet. No broadband company, including Comcast, should be allowed to employ traffic management practices that harm the interests of consumers, and the Internet itself, by failing to deliver fair access to all of the Net’s resources.

By the same token, let's give credit to Comcast for its willingness to discuss, debate, and adjust its process for managing Internet traffic. As far as we can tell, Comcast undertook its network management practices out of an intention to reduce congestion on its local network, and the company's recent agreements with BitTorrent, Pando, and Vonage are early signs of a productive ongoing dialogue within the Internet community. We're also glad that Comcast has committed to a protocol-agnostic approach to network management, and we look forward to its prompt implementation.

Posted by Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy Counsel

The Senate Commerce Committee is taking a look at privacy issues surrounding online advertising, and I'll be testifying at their hearing this morning about Google's own privacy practices. Although the focus of the hearing is likely to be on the emerging issue of ad targeting at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level, I'm looking forward to talking about Google's commitment to protecting the privacy of our users.

The most important point I plan to make to the committee is this: Google makes privacy a priority because our business depends on it. If our users are uncomfortable with how we manage their personal information, they are only one click away from switching to a competitor’s services.

As part of my testimony, I'll be offering a few policy and technology recommendations, for both the private sector and government:

• First, Google supports the passage of a comprehensive federal privacy law that would enhance consumer trust and protections; establish a uniform framework for privacy; and put penalties in place to punish and dissuade bad actors;
• Second, we have participated in the Federal Trade Commission’s efforts to develop principles relating to online privacy and behavioral advertising, and our hope is that revised principles will be adopted widely by the online advertising industry;
  
• Third, we believe that the private sector and government should provide more education for consumers about what kinds of personal information are collected by websites, how such data is used, and what steps they can take to better protect their privacy. Too often, web site operators view their online privacy policy as the beginning and end of their privacy obligations;
• And finally, we believe that industry should provide greater labeling of online display ads -- as we currently do with text ads -- and give consumers mechanisms to opt out of behaviorally targeted advertising.
  

UPDATE: Check out video below of Jane's testimony.

Posted by Silvia Fukuoka, European Policy Analyst - London

We are passionate about protecting the Internet as a platform for free expression, and recently we helped send thirteen bloggers and activists from around the world to a forum where they discussed how they put their belief in freedom of expression into practice on a daily basis.

The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest, Hungary was a chance for 200 of these prominent bloggers, citizen journalists and NGO activists to share their experiences promoting transparency and political reform, and to discuss crucial topics like internet filtering, censorship, the role of social media and the multilingual web. I was lucky enough to join the dialogue and was moved by many of the voices and stories I heard throughout the Summit.

These bloggers are critical to the promotion of free expression and transparency on the internet. They engage in political debate and expose issues often ignored by more traditional information sources in their countries. Sometimes this entails great risks. In Egypt, for example, blogger Wael Abbas, one of the recipients of Google's travel scholarship, was harassed after exposing police corruption on YouTube. Oiwan Lam, another recipient, may face a fine and jail term for displaying nudity in art on her blog.

These bloggers received Google travel scholarships so that they could share their advocacy practices:

• Razan Ghazzawi - Blogger and activist (Syria/Lebanon)
• Oiwan Lam - Journalist, blogger and activist (Hong Kong)
• Isaac Mao - Founder of CNBlog.org (China)
• Wael Abbas - Blogger and activist (Egypt)
• Alaa Abdel Fatah - Blogger and activist (Egypt)
• Daudi Were - Blogger and founder of Kenya Unlimited blogring (Kenya)
• Adil Nurmakov - Blogger and researcher (Kazakhstan)
• Renata Avila - Blogger, attorney and activist (Guatemala)
• José Murilo - Blogger and technologist (Brazil)
• Ory Okolloh - Activist, blogger and co-founder of Mzalendo parliamentary watchdog site (Kenya)
• Awab Alvi - Blogger and activist, founder of Don't Block the Blog (Pakistan)
• Andrei Abozau - Activist and co-founder of LuNet (Belarus)
• Amine - Entrepreneur, activist and co-founder of DigiActive (Morocco)

Sometimes bloggers find technical ways to circumvent censorship and internet filtering, but it is not always easy. Low internet penetration rates, poor connectivity and court orders also play a role in deterring online freedoms, Daudi Were and Onnik Krikorian reminded us.

Responsibility in reporting news and the prevalence of self-censorship by bloggers and citizen journalists was also discussed. Au Waipang from Singapore says:

"... 40 years' experience of a heavy-handed government that controls all mainstream media … has conditioned a society to avoid speaking up and participating in civic and political affairs. The resulting self-censorship is more insidious and intractable than overt censorship by other, less subtle, governments."

New media tools are also a harbinger of social change. Sameer Padania, from the human rights video group Witness, says:

"Bloggers have already won important, high-profile victories in the human rights sphere and have been crucial in recent humanitarian situations … the distinctive qualities of this new kind of mini-media ... complement perfectly the strengths of civil society and existing media to advance human rights."

As the founder of the Malagasy citizen media group FOKO showed, the internet makes communities visible to the world. Christina Quisbert, an indigenous Bolivian, shared with me:

"I started a blog … to write about the history and the different aspects of life of indigenous peoples in Bolivia… about the events that take place in El Alto, which is a city from Aymara indigenous origin … [creating the] possibility of sharing the knowledge of our ancestors."

Google is proud to be a supporter of Global Voices and their network of passionate citizen activists who inspire us all to continue advocating for freedom on the internet. It is one of the many activities Google supports in pursuit of these goals, including research into how to circumvent censorship regimes.

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Senior Policy Counsel

Google values our users' privacy first and foremost. Trust is the basis of everything we do, so we want users to be familiar and comfortable with the integrity and care we give their personal data.

So, today, we're making a homepage change by adding a link to our privacy overview and policies. We added this link both to our homepage and to our results page to make it easier for users to find information about our privacy principles. The new "Privacy" link goes to our privacy center, which was revamped earlier this year to be more straightforward and approachable with videos and a non-legalese "Privacy Overview" to make sure users understand in basic terms what Google does, doesn't, will, and won't do in regard their personal information.

You can read more about it on the Official Google Blog.

Carolyn Dalton, Head of Government Affairs and Public Policy, Australia and New Zealand

The other day, we blogged about the importance of a national broadband policy in the U.S.  In fact, this is a critical issue confronting countries around the globe.

Take Australia, which is embarking on a bold strategy to build a new national broadband network.  Australia's Government has committed AU$4.7 billion to subsidising the rollout of a fiber network accessible to at least 98% of the population.  Along with inviting bids from private parties to build and operate the infrastructure, it invited comment on what regulatory safeguards are necessary to maximise the public benefit.  Significantly, the Government has recognised that the network should be not only fast and ubiquitous but also open, promoting consumer choice, competition, and innovation.

Earlier this week, Google Australia offered some comments to the Government on the key issues it should consider. Broadband access is an essential platform for its users to build upon -- to develop new technologies and businesses, engage in new forms of communication, entertainment, and education -- and in the optimal regime, the network operator would build the network and its business model around maximising its benefit as an innovation platform. As we discuss in our submission, unlocking the network's full potential depends on policies that maintain an open Internet.

National broadband policy isn't a one-size-fits-all matter, and different choices will be more appropriate for different contexts.  But other countries should take note of Australia's proactive approach.  Maintaining open, non-discriminatory broadband access is too important to assume that it can be bolted on to a regulatory regime at a later date.  Instead, countries need to seriously consider how to build openness into next generation networks from day one.

For the full scoop from down under, see our post at our Google Australia Blog and read the submission.