Today Wednesday March 11 2015 at 6:45pm EDT Intelligence Squared will host a debate - The U.S. Should Adopt the “Right to Be Forgotten – at the Kaufman Center in NYC. In 2014, the European Union’s Court of Justice determined that individuals have a right to be forgotten, “the right—under certain conditions—to ask search engines to remove links with personal information about them.†It is not absolute, but meant to be balanced against other fundamental rights, like freedom of expression. In a half year following the Court’s decision, Google received over 180,000 removal requests. Of those reviewed and processed, 40.5% were granted. Largely seen as a victory in Europe, in the U.S., the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. Was this ruling a blow to free speech and public information, or a win for privacy and human dignity? For: Paul Nemitz, Dir. of Fundamental Rights & Citizenship, DG Justice & Consumers, EU Commission; Eric Posner, Professor of Law, University of Chicago. Against: Andrew McLaughlin, CEO, Digg and Instapaper & Fmr. Dir. of Global Public Policy, Google; Jonathan Zittrain, Professor, Harvard Law & Co-Founder, Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The vent will be webcast live via fora.tv
What:Â The U.S. Should Adopt the “Right to Be Forgotten
Where: Kaufman Center in NYC
When: Wednesday March 11 2015 at 6:45pm EDT | 00:45 UTC
Webcast: http://library.fora.tv/event/the_us_should_adopt_the_right_to_be_forgotten_online/watchlive
Twitter: #RightToBeForgotten
On February 20 2014 the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (CIS) presented The Fight for Internet Freedom with Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond discussing threats to the Internet, especially from Governments, and the critical importance for us all that we overcome them. The event was co-hosted by the Stanford Program on Liberation Technology. Moderator was Jennifer Granick – Director of Civil Liberties – Stanford CIS. Video is below:
View on YouTube: http://youtu.be/lDiLgWHCIzw
Transcribe on AMARA: http://www.amara.org/en/videos/shj0jMmGIhpI/
Twitter: @StanfordCIS | #netfreedom
On Friday November 1 2013 the Internet Society Washington DC Chapter presented a forum – Wireless 2020: Spectrum Crisis or Broadband Abundance? – at the Microsoft Innovation & Policy Center, Washington, DC. The event focused on the future of United States spectrum policy. The panel is Michael Calabrese of the Open Technology Institute, Charla Rath of Verizon, Preston F. Marshall of Google, and Afzal Bari of Bloomberg Government. Also speaking are Michael Nelson & Paula Boyd of Microsoft. The archived webcast is below. Click through to YouTube for an index.
View on YouTube: http://youtu.be/qIBJqGsVaug
Transcribe on AMARA: http://www.amara.org/en/videos/97J2D9Ayah4V/
Agenda: http://www.isoc-dc.org/2013/10/wireless-2020-spectrum-crisis-or-broadband-abundance/
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/381220748678556/
Twitter: #isocdc | #spectrum
Google Online Courses will this month present Introduction to Web Accessibility – a course that introduces tools and techniques for web developers to easily ensure that websites are more accessible to users who are blind or have low vision. The free course comprises text lessons, supplemental videos, practice code exercises and a hands-on project.  There is no requirement to do all the coursework so it’s ok just to lurk and look. Basic familiarity with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is recommended, and a Chrome browser, as the course uses the Google Chrome extensions ChromeVox and Accessibility Developer Tools.  A preview of Lesson 1 is available. An introductory video is below.
- View on YouTube: http://youtu.be/qSzHhDE4pH0
On Wednesday July 31 2013 Google will host the Geek Street Fair in the 14th Street Park at West St. NYC. The Fair is a public event to highlight the City’s technology community and inspire New Yorkers of all ages to take interest in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. Participants include New School students presenting their Gadgiteration projects.
What: Google Geek Street Fair
Where: 14th Street Park NYC
When: Wednesday July 31 2013 noon – 6pm
Twitter: #geekstreetfair
Reuters has published its recent interview with Susan Crawford, author of “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Ageâ€. Reuters notes that, since the interview, Google has announced an expansion of its Kansas City fiber project. Video is below. No captions.
The Google Policy Fellowship program offers undergraduate, graduate, and law students interested in Internet and technology policy the opportunity to spend the summer contributing to the public dialogue on these issues, and exploring future academic and professional interests.
Fellows will have the opportunity to work at public interest organizations at the forefront of debates on broadband and access policy, content regulation, copyright and trademark reform, consumer privacy, open government, and more. More information about the host organizations and the areas of focus for the fellows are outlined here.
Fellows will be assigned a lead mentor at their host organizations, but will have the opportunity to work with several senior staff members over the course of the summer. Fellows will be expected to make substantive contributions to the work of their organization, including conducting policy research and analysis; drafting reports and analyses; attending government and industry meetings and conferences; and participating in other advocacy activities.
Who should apply?
Google are looking for students who are passionate about technology, and want to spend the summer diving headfirst into Internet policy. Students from all majors and degree programs who possess the following qualities are encouraged to apply:
- Demonstrated or stated commitment to Internet and technology policy
- Excellent academic record, professional/extracurricular/volunteer activities, subject matter expertise
- First-rate analytical, communications, research, and writing skills
- Ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously and efficiently, and to work smartly and resourcefully in a fast-paced environment
Fellows will receive a stipend of $7,500 for 10 weeks during the summer of 2013(June-August). Exact dates of the fellowship will be worked out by the fellow and host organization.
The deadline to apply is March 15 2013.
On January 9, 2012 at Google NYC, the New York Technology Council presented a “Cutting-Edge Technology Showcase” to demonstrate “awe-inspiring technologies available today”. These included augmented reality games, body-imaging health applications, instant language translation and object recognition in cellphones, and on-demand 3D printed product marketing.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas, debate the role that connection technologies will play in statecraft and foreign policy, and how governments and businesses in the West should foster the spread and use of these technologies in places such as China and Iran. Posted by the Council on Foreign Relations on Nov 4. Associated essay: Digital Disruption.
The Copyright Society of the U.S.A. New York Chapter Panel: Why Viacom v. YouTube Matters (Besides the $1 Billion) at the Princeton Club NYC on Nov 18 2010. While YouTube won a summary judgement in this case, it is under appeal. The panel was tasked, rather than making appellate cases, with discussing the implications of the decision. Nevertheless much of the meat of the arguments was chewed at this lunchtime event.
Panel: Cliff Sloan (Partner, Skadden Arps), Daniel Blackman (Co-founder, Howcast, and formerly of Google), Michael Kwun (Of Counsel, Keker & Van Nest), Thomas Sydnor (Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Property at The Progress & Freedom Foundation), Moderated by Professor James Grimmelmann (New York Law School)
In a February 2010 Â Washington Post Op-Ed Google CEO Eric Schmidt called on US Government to recognize bottom-up solutions to the “innovation deficit“.
Now this week, warming to his theme, he criticized the policy making process. “”The average American doesn’t realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists” to protect incumbent interests, he said at the Washington Ideas Forum. “It’s shocking how the system actually works.”
Google and Verizon’s joint policy proposal for an open Internet is causing an ongoing public discussion. See details and links to commentary here.
Google and Verizon have issued a statement A joint policy proposal for an open Internet to address last week’s furor over network neutrality. The companies have published a proposal to the FCC, see below.
A teleconference with the CEOs of both companies is live-blogged here and here.
A Robert X Cringely op-ed in today’s New York Times suggests that the Verizon-Google deal that caused so much of an uproar last week is simply an arrangement, in a practice common to CDNs known as edge-serving, to place data servers in the ISP’s premises. Cringely notes that in Google’s case ‘data server’ takes on a whole new meaning with the utilization of a modular system of multiple blade-laden shipping  containers. Here’a video guide to a Google data center built on the system:
More:
- Google Public Policy blog: Net neutrality and the benefits of caching
- Google presentation to IETF Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems
- Doc Searls Nothing happening here. Move along.
On July 30 2010 Vint Cerf provided the closing remarks at the sixth Google North American Computer Science Faculty Summit. He talked about the need for IPv6 adoption and the coming “Internet of Things”.
A video of micro-trench race filmed on Google campus April 16, 2010. Congrats to the winners! Bring on the fiber Olympics!
On May 14 Google invited all students to appl for Google Voice accounts.
To get an invite, just visit http://google.com/voice/students and enter an email address that that ends in .edu.
NewTeeVee reports Google will soon make its VP8 video codec open source. The company is scheduled to officially announce the release at its Google I/O developers conference next month, a source with knowledge of the announcement said
Date: Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Time: 8:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Location: National Press Club, First Amendment Lounge, Washington DC
The Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy and the Technology Policy Institute have convened experts from industry, academia and government to provide an early reaction to the FCC’s  National Broadband Plan, scheduled to be released on March 17. The participants will focus on the following major questions:
What are the plan’s effects on innovation and investment?
What are the plan’s effects on penetration to underserved populations?
via Technology Policy Institute – The FCC’s National Broadband Plan: The Early Reaction.
Quoting from Larger Threat Is Seen in Google Case – NYTimes.com.
ROME — Three Google executives were convicted of violating Italian privacy laws on Wednesday, the first case to hold the company’s executives criminally responsible for the content posted on its system.
In Milan, Judge Oscar Magi sentenced the Google executives in absentia to six-month suspended sentences for violation of privacy. Prosecutors said Google did not act fast enough to remove from the site a widely viewed video posted in 2006 showing a group of teenage boys harassing an autistic boy.
But Judge Magi, who has 90 days to issue his reasoning, cleared the Google executives of defamation charges. The three were Peter Fleischer, chief privacy counsel; David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer; and George Reyes, a former chief financial officer. A fourth defendant, Arvind Desikan, charged only with defamation, was acquitted.
A spokesman for Google, Bill Echikson, called the ruling “astonishing†and said the company would appeal. In its blog, Google added that the ruling “attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built.â€
Prosecutors said Google waited to remove the video until after complaints to the police by Vivi Down, an Italian group representing people with Down syndrome, whose name was mentioned by the boys in the video.
Google said it removed the video within two hours of receiving a formal complaint from the Italian police, two months after the video was first posted.
The boys, all minors, were not charged by prosecutors, but were sentenced by a different judge to community service. Prosecutors named the Google executives because Italian law holds corporate executives responsible for a company’s actions.
Google maintains that the ruling contradicted a European Union directive on electronic commerce that gives service providers safe harbor from liability for the content they host.
But prosecutors argued that because Google handled user data — and used content to generate advertising revenue — it was a content provider, not a service provider, and therefore broke Italian privacy law. It prohibits the use of someone’s personal data with the intent of harming him or making a profit.
The Google ruling comes amid other proposed legislation that would seek to bureaucratize the Internet in Italy, including the highly contested Italian version of a European directive that would compel online broadcasters to seek the same licensing agreements as broadcast television. Google lobbied for changes to the proposal.
Paolo Romani, a deputy communications minister who sponsored the measure, said the issue was copyright protection. “It has nothing to do with the fact that our prime minister also owns television stations,†he said. “It’s in Berlusconi’s interest not to be accused of conflict of interest.â€
Another proposal pending in Italy, tucked into a bill on wiretapping, would require blogs to publish corrections within 48 hours, as newspapers are required to do, while a third would make sites responsible for anonymous comments posted on them.
Google today announced the launch of its new social media platform Google Buzz.
Plenty of coverage on ReadWriteWeb and ArsTechnica
As part of a Jan 7 2010 Churchill Club forum What’s Next with the Internet: Vint Cerf Looks Ahead, Vint noted the need for intercloud communication protocols, and remarked that individual devices – ‘cloudlets’ – might themselves make use of such protocols
Rebecca Mack writes:
In any place where governance and rule-making happens – whether through software code or written laws enforced by police – inhabitants have a choice. We can be subjects who submit to governance without consent, or we can be citizens who grant and withhold consent – and who are ultimately responsible for whether the government we’ve consented to fosters an open, free and just society or not. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as mere users of a service and start thinking of ourselves of inhabitants of a place called the Internet. We are Netizens. Time to get more proactive about shaping the Internet’s future – and pushing its most powerful players in the direction we want them to go.
Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have taken a first step toward recognizing that they are fallible and require greater ethical oversight than shareholders, boards of directors, and markets alone can provide. Last year they helped launch the Global Network Initiative, a multistakeholder effort together with human rights groups, socially responsible investors, and academics, in which they’ve pledged to uphold basic principles on free expression and privacy, committed to independent evaluations, and agreed to public accountability mechanisms. (Disclosure: I am a founding member and on the GNI board.) It’s hard to know at this point whether the GNI will succeed – it’s still very much an early-stage experiment. But it’s at least a recognition that new forms of public oversight, transparency and accountability are required to make sure that the companies who hold so much power over so many people’s lives do not abuse this power. It’s an early attempt to figure out what shape those mechanisms need to take.
Google and Verizon have made a joint FCC filing on Net Neutrality:
Google and Verizon Joint Submission on the Open Internet
The Google Settlement — What it means for writers
A FREE workshop will be held for writers in mid-town New York, Wednesday, Jan. 20 from 2-4:40 p.m.
Are you out or in? Come get your questions answered.
Hear the best-informed, best-known authorities on what the second version of the Google Book Search Settlement would mean for writers if it is approved by the court. The second opt-out deadline is coming up a week after this seminar, so there is still time to figure out what’s best for you, personally, and then to act. This workshop will focus on the settlement and writers — just writers.
Much of the public debate has settled on other aspects, like orphan books, yet we writers are still confused about what the proposed, new Book Rights Registry would mean for us.
Sponsored jointly by the American Society of Journalists and Authors, ASJA, the National Writers Union, NWU, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, SFWA.
FREE but please tell us if you’re coming, either by calling 212-997-0947 or a quick e-mail to asjaoffice AT asja.org. (Put “Google settlement†in the subject line.)