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Posted by Elliot Schrage, Vice
President of Global Communications and Public Affairs

Over the years, we've built tools and offered resources to help
kids and families stay safe online. Our href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=searchguides.html&ctx=preferences&hl=en"
>SafeSearch feature, for
example, helps filter explicit content from search results.

We've also been involved in a variety of local initiatives to
educate families about how to stay safe while surfing the web. Here
are a few highlights:

• In the U.S., we've worked with href="http://www.commonsensemedia.org/"
  >Common Sense Media to promote awareness about
  online safety and have donated hardware and software to improve the
  ability of the >National Center for Missing and
  Exploited Children to combat child exploitation.
  • Google UK has collaborated with child safety
    organizations such as href="http://youtube.com/user/Beatbullying"
    >Beatbullying and href="http://www.childnet.com/kia"
    >Childnet to raise awareness about cyberbullying
    and share prevention messages, and with law enforcement
    authorities, including the href="http://www.ceop.gov.uk/"

    >Child Exploitation and Online Protection
    Centre, to fight online exploitation.

    • Google India initiated "Be NetSmart," an
      Internet safety campaign created in cooperation with local law
      enforcement authorities that aims to educate students, parents, and
      teachers across the country about the great value the Internet can
      bring to their lives, while also teaching best practices for safe
      surfing.
      • Google France launched child safety education
        initiatives including href="http://www.tousconnectes.com/"
        >Tour de France
        des Collèges and >Cherche Net that are
        designed to teach kids how to use the Internet responsibly.
        • And Google Germany worked with the national
          government, industry representatives, and a number of local
          organizations recently to launch a href="http://www.fragfinn.de/"
          >search engine for children.

          As part of these ongoing efforts to provide online safety resources
          for parents and kids, we've created

          href="http://www.google.com/familysafety" >Tips for
          Online Safety, a site designed to help families find quick
          links to safety tools like SafeSearch, as well as new resources,
          like a video offering online safety pointers that we've
          developed in partnership with Common Sense Media. In the href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=kUyQI0USNSY"
          id="d.sk" >video, Anne Zehren, president of Common Sense, offers
          easy-to-implement tips, like how to set privacy and sharing
          controls on social networking sites and the importance of having
          reasonable rules for Internet use at home with appropriate levels
          of supervision.

          Users can also download our new href="http://services.google.com/blog_resources/google_family_safety_guide.pdf" >
          Online Family Safety Guide (PDF), which includes useful Internet
          Safety pointers for parents, or check out a quick

          href="http://kids.getnetwise.org/tools/searchsafe/google-search"
          >tutorial on SafeSearch created by one of our
          partner organizations, GetNetWise.

          We all have roles to play in keeping kids safe online. Parents need
          to be involved with their kids' online lives and teach them how
          to make smart decisions. And Internet companies like Google need to
          continue to empower parents and kids with tools and resources that
          help put them in control of their online experiences and make web
          surfing safer.

          Tags: , Communications, Elliot, Global, Posted, President, Schrage, Vice

Posted by Rachel Whetstone, Director of
Global Communications and Public Affairs, EMEA

Our world would be a very boring place if we all agreed all the
time. So while people may strongly disagree with what someone says,
or think that a particular newspaper article is total nonsense, we
recognize that each of us have the right to an opinion.

We also know that letting people express their views freely has
real practical benefits. Allowing individuals to voice unpopular,
inconvenient or controversial opinions is important. Not only might
they be right (think Galileo) but debating difficult issues in the
open often helps people come to better decisions.

While most people agree in principle with the right to free
expression, the challenge comes in putting theory into practice.
And that's certainly the case on the web, where blogs, social
networks and video sharing sites allow people to express themselves
- to speak and be heard - as never before.

At Google we have a bias in favor of people's right to free
expression in everything we do. We are driven by a belief that more
information generally means more choice, more freedom and
ultimately more power for the individual. But we also recognize
that freedom of expression can't be — and shouldn't be –
without some limits. The difficulty is in deciding where those
boundaries are drawn. For a company like Google with services in
more than 100 countries - all with different national laws and
cultural norms - it's a challenge we face many times every
day.

In a few cases it's straightforward. For example, we have a
global all-product ban against child pornography, which is illegal
in virtually every country. But when it comes to political
extremism it's not as simple. Different countries have come to
different conclusions about how to deal with this issue. In Germany
there's a ban on the promotion of Nazism — so we remove Nazi
content on products on href="http://www.google.de/" >Google.de (our domain for German
users) products. Other countries' histories make commentary or
criticism on certain topics especially sensitive. And still other
countries believe that the best way to discredit extremists is to
allow their arguments to be publicly exposed.

All this raises important questions for Internet companies like
Google. Our products are, after all, specifically designed to help
people create and communicate, to find and share information and
opinions across the world. So how do we approach these
challenges?

It should come as no surprise to learn people have different views
about what should appear on our sites. How and where to draw the
boundaries is the subject of lively debate even within Google. We
think that's healthy. And partly because of this, we realize
that creating a flawless set of policies on which everyone can
agree is an impossible task.

Google is not, and should not become, the arbiter of what does and
does not appear on the web. That's for the courts and those
elected to government to decide. Faced with day-to-day choices,
however, we look at our products in three broad categories: search,
advertising and services that host other people's
content.

Search is the least restricted category. We remove results from our
index only when required by law (for example, when linked to
content infringing copyright) and in a small number of other
instances, such as spam results or results including unauthorized
credit card and social security numbers. Where feasible, we tell
our users when we remove results.

At the other, most restrictive, end of the spectrum, we have what
might be called commerce products –- the text of the advertisements
we carry, which are subject to clear href="http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=guidelines.cs&topic=9271&subtopic=9279" >
ad content policies.

The most challenging areas are where we host other people’s content
– offerings like Blogger, Groups, orkut and video. On the one
hand, we're not generating the content and we aim to offer a
platform for free expression. On the other hand, we host the
content on our servers and want to be socially responsible. So we
have terms that we ask our users to follow. (See href="http://www.blogger.com/content.g" >Blogger and href="http://help.orkut.com/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=57444" >orkut
for examples.)

So the question becomes: how do we enforce those terms? In general,
Google does not want to be a gatekeeper. We don't, and
can't, check content before it goes live, any more than your
phone company would screen the content of your phone calls or your
ISP would edit your emails. Technology can sometimes help here, but
it's rarely a full answer. We also have millions of active
users who are vocal when it comes to alerting us to content they
find unacceptable or believe may breach our policies. When they do,
we review it and remove it where appropriate. These are always
subjective judgments and some people will inevitably disagree. But
that’s because what’s acceptable to one person may be offensive to
another.

We also face the added complication that laws governing content
apply differently in the different parts of the world in which we
operate. As we all know, some governments are more liberal about
freedom of expression than others. These legal differences create
real technical challenges, for example, about how you restrict one
type of content in one country but not another. And, in extreme
cases, we face questions about whether a country's laws and
lack of democratic processes are so antithetical to our principles
that we simply can't comply or can't operate there in a way
that benefits users.

But it's not only legal considerations that drive our policies.
One type of content, while legal everywhere, may be almost
universally unacceptable in one region yet viewed as perfectly fine
in another. We are passionate about our users so we try to take
into account local cultures and needs — which vary dramatically
around the world — when developing and implementing our global
product policies.

Dealing with controversial content is one of the biggest challenges
we face as a company. We don’t pretend to have all the right
answers or necessarily to get every judgment right. But we do try
hard to think things through from first principles, to be as
transparent as possible about how we make decisions, and to keep
reviewing and debating our policies. After all, the right to
disagree is a sign of a healthy society. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Communications, Director, Global, Posted, public, Rachel, Whetstone

Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Policy
Communications Team

Yesterday Senator Obama became the latest U.S. presidential
candidate to visit Google headquarters in Mountain View for href="http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2007/11/candidates-at-google-barack-obama.html" >
a talk and then Q&A. We're heartened to see how most
every candidate is taking full advantage of the Internet, by making
good use of YouTube together with their own websites, blogs and
social networks to inform voters of their positions and share more
of their thinking than traditional campaigns ever allowed.

The next big event we're looking forward to is the November 28
href="http://www.youtube.com/republicandebate?utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-na-us-google&utm_medium=ha&utm_term=political debates" >
CNN/YouTube Republican debate. Stay tuned for that, and if
you'd like to watch the talks other candidates have given at
Google, href="http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/search/label/Politicians at Google" >
here they are. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Communications, Ginny, Hunt, policy, Posted, public, TeamYesterday

Posted by Elliot Schrage and Karen
Wickre, Global Communications & Public Affairs

Just about 3 years ago, we href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2004/05/is-this-thing-on.html" >
launched this blog as a fast and direct way to reach Google
users, friends and anyone else interested in our goings-on. Even
though it's a blog from Google, it's by Googlers, not from
a single executive (or founder). We've encouraged hundreds of
people to write about news and ideas from all their respective
corners of the company. A lot of the posts you read are news and
updates about products, because that's what the bulk of
Googlers work on. But with an eye towards transparency, we also
share our positions on issues — for example, our href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/google-in-china.html" >role
in China, our href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/point-of-google-print.html" >
perspective on digitizing books, our href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/update-lanes-gifts-v-google.html" >
comment on a lawsuit. And occasionally we're keen to share
snippets of our href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/snakes-in-plain-old-office-building.html" >
culture or highlight href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/health-care-information-matters.html" >
industry developments we find noteworthy.

Our communications team manages the blog, but consistent with our
grassroots way of doing things, it's Googlers who propose
content and write the posts (and likewise, develop new blogs). When
it comes to editing copy, we aim for a very light touch — focusing
mainly on clarity of information, not sanitizing style.

Since this blog first appeared, another 52 Google blogs have also
launched. At present, 18 of them are not in English, and we expect
that number to grow as we expand around the world. All of these
other Google blogs (the href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com" >full list is on the
righthand side of the main blog) have smaller readership because
they are more tightly focused on the details of a specific product
(like AdWords or href="http://adsense.blogspot.com/" >AdSense or they represent
Google in a country (including href="http://googlepolska.blogspot.com/" >Poland and href="http://adwords-br.blogspot.com/" >Brazil), or they speak
to a niche audience, like href="http://librariancentral.blogspot.com/" >librarians or href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/" >webmasters.
Typically they don't feature the same topical expanse we think
will be of interest to most Google users.

In short, we're relying as always on the power of the Internet
– in this case, the incredibly easy-to-use publishing platform
known as the blog — to help interested folks understand how we
work, and what we do. As new resources and media tools come into
being, we want to make use of those too. One of these is the href="http://youtube.com/google" >Google Channel on YouTube,
where it's a priority to post videos and presentations by
Googlers, including our executives, as quickly as we can following
public events.

Through all of these means and others — podcasting, video blogs,
forums — we plan to continue being as direct as possible with you
concerning our news and views. So thanks for reading, and stay
tuned.

Tags: , Communications, Elliot, Global, Karen, Posted, Schrage, Wickre