Announcing the 2011 Google Policy Fellows

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Director of Public Policy

We’re excited to announce the 2011 class of Google Policy Fellows, and we’re expecting great things from the 16 students selected for the fourth summer of the Google Policy Fellowship. Our host organizations selected the 2011 fellows from over 900 impressive submissions – nearly double the number of applications from 2010. The 2011 class includes undergrads and graduate students from 15 schools, studying computer science, economics, information policy, intellectual property, international affairs, law, library sciences, and public policy.

Congratulations to the 2011 Google Policy Fellows!

• Adam Weinberg, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies - Technology Policy Institute
• Avonne Bell, The George Washington University Law School - Public Knowledge
• Casey Fiesler, Georgia Institute of Technology - Creative Commons
• Colin Rhinesmith, University of Illinois - New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative
• Corey Carpenter, George Mason University School of Law - TechFreedom
• Corey Walker, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies - Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
• Daniel Kent, Haverford College - Internet Education Foundation
• Elizabeth Allen, University of Michigan Law School and University of Michigan School of Information - Future of Music Coalition
• Elizabeth Ruiz, University of North Carolina School of Law - Media Access Project
• Fabiola Rivas, American University Washington College of Law - National Hispanic Media Coalition
• Jennifer Simpson, University of Western Ontario - Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic
• Jessie Mannisto, University of Michigan School of Information - American Library Association
• Jon Penney, Oxford University - Citizen Lab
• Josephine Wolff, Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Center for Democracy & Technology
• Luke Pelican, University of Nebraska College of Law - Competitive Enterprise Institute
• Oscar Montezuma, The George Washington University Law School - Electronic Frontier Foundation

The 2011 Fellows will spend 10 weeks this summer at our host organizations in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Toronto, and Ottawa working on Internet and technology policy issues including free expression, privacy, security, and intellectual property.

Thank you to everyone who applied. Each year brings more and more outstanding applicants, and we hope everyone will stay engaged, involved, and consider applying again for future programs. Please sign up here to receive program announcements, and visit google.com/policyfellowship for more information.

Our House testimony on combating copyright infringement

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Director of Public Policy

This morning the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet will take up an issue of critical importance to Google and the entire information economy: how to combat copyright infringement online and the sale of counterfeit goods.

Kent Walker, our senior vice president and general counsel, will testify before the subcommittee and will offer recommendations for how to punish rogue foreign websites that violate copyright while protecting legitimate technologies and businesses. He’ll also share several ways Google combats infringement including our Content ID system on YouTube, our efforts to make copyright work better online, and our work to keep counterfeiters our of our ads system.

The hearing will be live-streamed on the committee’s website at 10:45 am EDT. You can read Kent’s full testimony here.

Real-time traffic graphs for the Transparency Report

Posted by Matt Braithwaite, Transparency Engineering Team Lead

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.)

When we introduced the Transparency Report last year, we promised to keep looking for new and useful ways to display data about traffic to our services. In response to your requests, today we’re adding graphs for each region that show traffic patterns for all products in aggregate. These graphs will show data with a five-minute delay.

In this graph, for example, you’ll see that all of our services in Egypt were down from January 27 to February 1:

Starting today, you won’t have to sift through every single product graph to figure out if one or more services are inaccessible. You’ll get a snapshot up front. We’ve also added annotations for historical anomalies that we’ve seen in the traffic to our services. To see the graph for each cited incident, just click on the corresponding link.

As the Transparency Engineering team lead, part of my job is to ensure that we find, uncover and visualize datasets within Google that can help inform research and analysis on important topics. We believe that providing the facts can spark useful debate about the scope and authority of policy decisions around the globe.

We’ll continue to iterate, and we hope that the Report will help shed light on the accessibility and patterns of traffic to our services around the world.