Examination of Witnesses (Questions 560
- 579)
THURSDAY 26 OCTOBER 2006
GOOGLE
Q560 Mr Sanders: The ability for
a government to prevent its citizens from accessing information
is actually limited?
Mr McLaughlin: It is not perfect.
Q561 Helen Southworth: And, in fact,
the ability of a government to prevent any other nation's citizens
from accessing information through Google could be limited in
due co-operation with that process. The reason I was asking what
your role as a very powerful search tool internationally is in
terms of the relationship with government, because I think this
is one of the key points that people, certainly that I have been
speaking to, have been asking me about; what right does Google
have to censor my access to information at the request of another
nation's government. The other thing is what right does Google
have to tell my government or another government if I am accessing
sites that that government does not wish me to see, not things
that are criminal, but things that that government does not wish
me to see.
Mr McLaughlin: I see the direction
that you are going at. We do not think that a government in one
part of the world should be able to control what citizens of another
country in another part of the world can do, which is why I was
very careful to say that Google.de is where you implement the
restrictions that are placed on us by the German Government and
Google.co.uk is the place where you implement the restrictions
placed on us by the UK Government. We should just say, the internet
presents a tremendous challenge to governments, it really does.
It makes it very difficult to exercise control over the territorial
jurisdiction that you are used to implementing in the case of,
say, broadcast television, radio or newspapers. It is not an insoluble
problem, but it is one where governments have to talk to each
other if they are going to really get things done. Take the issue
of gambling, which I know is a hot issue right now, as long as
there is an Aruba, governments are going to find it difficult
to restrict gambling within their borders. They can try, they
can make it very difficult, they can punish in various and sundry
ways, but from Google's perspective we think that the information
that we provide in a given country (in the UK) should not be determined
by some other government, and so our default position is access
to information and then, when restrictions are placed, we implement
those restrictions as narrowly as possible to meet the local requirements,
meet the local law, but not have them extend to citizens in other
parts of the world. That is very important to us.
Q562 Alan Keen: Can I make almost
a philosophical point. Hopefully the internet will teach politicians
of all nations—I am not restricting it to China—that
in the long run it is always better to tell the truth, it is less
painful to tell the truth straightaway. There was one question
that Helen asked earlier in the first session, a question which
I do not think you answered about the criminal elements, people
producing information which you would regard as criminal. I think
she was asking, do you have a direct line to the police, the authorities,
and do you tell them about it or do they have to find out about
it through the system, which I approve of very much?
Mr McLaughlin: It is a little
of both. As I said, we are participants in the Internet Watch
Foundation, which does in fact provide a direct line for direct
reporting of criminal content and, in addition, we co-operate
with law enforcement when they come to us.
Q563 Alan Keen: We have talked about
the baddies most of the time. Moving on to the goodies, how do
we protect them, the creators of rightful and classical novels
within the last century and things happening nowadays? There is
a market for books and anything else. Everything in the world
that has ever been produced can be put onto Google now and even,
you said, onto iPods, everything that has ever been created, every
bit of music. How do we go about protecting the creators of great
stuff? Where are we now, and where are we going to move on to
to look at it even further?
Mr Arora: I think the existence
of the internet and the cost of production going down is creating
more of an opportunity for people who are creators of content
to take their work and distribute it to the end consumer with
a lot less middlemen involved. There are recent examples of artists
like Teddy Geiger or Gnarls Barclay who have actually used the
internet to put their music up there and make it hugely popular
without having to go through four different sets of middlemen
(a production company, a talent scout and a distribution company)
who all take their piece, and they have been able to go directly
to the consumer. I think Crazy, from Gnarls Barclay, was number
one in the UK Charts purely because he promoted his music on the
internet. There are examples. I think WH Smith has launched a
programme where anybody who has a book that they have published
can come to them and, for £3,000, they can put it in the
Oxford Street Store and sell it on the internet. Clearly what
you are finding is that a lot of the people who were traditional
middle men in the process, from the creative content person to
the end consumer getting the content and who are all taking their
piece, are sometimes being bypassed by the existence of this distribution
mechanism, which I think is a huge thing for a content producer
because at the end of the day we all understand the price war
that will occur: if you can price it cheaper to the end consumer
more people are likely to consume it and the fact that this distribution
allows it to get to the consumer a lot more cheaply than traditional
methods of production, we think, is going to be very positive
for the whole computer process.
Q564 Alan Keen: Can I ask a very
specific question which I found, even yesterday, slightly annoying.
There are very clever people who want us to access their system.
I was looking for hotel prices and availability. I would like
to be able to get straight to that hotel's home site and it is
not always easy to do that because people use very clever words
for us to go to their site. I clicked twice on a site which, trying
to work quickly, I thought was the home site and it was not, and
that really infuriated me. What can we do about that? What can
you do about it?
Mr Arora: I think that is a constant
challenge because of the way the algorithms are, they are also
based in terms of consumer relevance and popularity; so sometimes
aggregator sites that take a lot of hotels together and put them
into their site end up ranking better than individual hotel sites
because a lot of people go to the aggregator sites than individual
sites. We are constantly working on algorithms to try and make
that information more and more relevant. Hopefully, as we crack
those things, you will continue to find it more and more relevant.
Mr McLaughlin: We say as a company
that we devote 70% of our resources to our core search and advertising
services. To a lot of people this sounds a little boring. They
say, "You have already got the search engine. Why are you
continuing to put 70% of your resources, your people, your hours
and your investments into search?" The answer is that we
have to constantly work to keep our results relevant in the face
of people who would like to jerry-rig and gain the results in
order to get their sites higher up the search rankings. I am a
constant traveller and I have the same frustration with hotels.
For Google it is a never ending struggle to try to solve exactly
that problem, and that is why we devote so many of our resources
to that core service.
Q565 Alan Keen: On security, is it
going to improve? Are we going to be able to stop the baddies
or will they always be able to beat the system and others have
to come in later on and block that channel?
Mr McLaughlin: The protocols of
the internet were not designed with much thought about security,
it was designed to be a very open network, and responsibility
for security in the internet has traditionally resided at the
edge. In other words, your laptop itself needs to be secure against
threats. In some cases ISPs now are doing a very powerfully effective
job of detecting viruses, spam and worms and these kinds of threats
on the internet. I think that the broad story, if you look at
the last eight years, is that as an industry, as a network, the
internet has become significantly better. The spam problem is
largely under control for most people. They are not seeing 50%
of their inbox filled with spam, and if you are you are probably
not taking advantage of the tools that are out there, for example
GMail. It is the same thing with worms and viruses. If you remember,
a few years ago there was a constant drum beat of worms and viruses
hitting companies and shutting down systems. It has been a while
since we have seen an incident like that, and part of it is that
we are getting a lot better at locking down systems, detecting
threats when they come. There is a network now of CERTS (Computer
Emergency Response Teams)—there is one in the UK, there
is one in the US, they are all over Europe. They co-ordinate very
well, they spread information about threats as they come out and
ISPs take action. I definitely would not say that we have got
the upper hand over the baddies or they are on the run, but the
security of the internet is actually a lot better that it used
to be and, for most users who run a basic anti-virus programme
on their computer, they can be relatively assured of protection,
not 100% sure but significantly more secure than they were a few
years ago, and I would expect that trend to continue. It is in
everybody's interests.
Q566 Alan Keen: Somebody has already
asked you the same question but I would like to ask it again.
I was one of those who worked on mainframes in the late sixties
and early seventies when central core storage was vastly expensive.
We had to sort everything going in sequentially off-line before
we could access and do something with it. I am staggered by the
progress which has been made. I worked commercially on using the
first Apples that came out. I have seen wonderful progress in
my life. Can I ask you again, what is going to happen next? You
said you could not say what would happen in five years with Google,
but taking the industry or the technology as a whole and leaping
ahead, what can happen?
Mr Arora: We came from the days
of the mainframe—I learnt programming on a mainframe many
years ago myself—whereas your personal computer now today
can do most things that a mainframe could do about 15 years ago,
and we have come into a client server type environment. The reason
it came through a client server type environment is because you
have to have very big pipes if everything was to go through the
server because of all the computing power and all the different
applications. Now, because broadband is becoming so prevalent
all over the world, the notion of being able to store your information
on the net or on this cloud out there is reappearing, so you can
actually put your information out there. If you think about the
big shift that has happened, people are using their computers
to do a lot more multi-media things than they used to in the past—videos,
movies, music, all this stuff is coming back—so there is
a trend going towards more and more evaluating whether you want
to store your information on the network and you want to use the
application on the network or you want to have it in your client.
The second trend that we are also seeing is a lot more open systems
type development, the Linux type stuff, which is out there, which
is open source, where a whole community of programmers can design
different widgets to make it more and more efficient and more
and more useful, so it is not just owned by any one company, any
one particular operator or exiting developer, you can have hundreds
of thousands of really smart technical people who can say, "Guess
what? I found a new way to make this thing more efficient."
You are seeing more and more an adoption of open source type stuff,
whether it is from Sana, or even Java Protocols or Ajax Protocols
and stuff like that. So we believe that you are going to get more
of a cloud computing type scenario as we go along, but all three
of them are in the market at the same time right now.
Q567 Paul Farrelly: I want to go
off at a completely different tangent for a moment. I have accidentally
missed out Google Mail from my previous list of your category
killer products and services. If I were to sign up to Google now
(and it is not just a question for you but for any internet service
provider and the likes of Yahoo), how could I be sure that the
CIA, MI6, the Bundes Nachrichtendienst or the Chinese Politbureau,
for all I know, is not reading my emails, possibly with the help
of search technology pioneered by the likes of yourselves?
Mr McLaughlin: One thing you have
to keep in mind (and this is just to set the stage) is that when
you send your emails out over the network they are traversing
through various ISPs, various backbone providers, and it is often
said that your email is about as secure as sending a postcard
through the postal system. Because of the vast volumes of information
that fly over the internet, the odds that any individual email
is going to be stopped, blocked, reviewed, seen, are approximating
zero. It turns out to be an incredibly secure system, if what
you are concerned about is eavesdropping, but you have to be aware
that the emails that you send, whether they are from your desktop,
through Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, whatever service, they are
going across a network and at various points in the network it
is, under British law, under US law, possible for intelligence
agencies to go through formal legal process, get court orders,
and for those emails to be subject to eavesdropping. I cannot
say anything more than that. We all have written laws that give
our law enforcement and intelligence agencies those capabilities
and they do exist, and I think it is appropriate for people to
be aware of that.
Q568 Paul Farrelly: So it is not
an issue for companies like yourself to provide a privacy guarantee?
Mr McLaughlin: We cannot guarantee
what your laws would not allow us to guarantee. We handle email
with as much security as can be baked into the kind of service
that we offer. At the same time, when governments and their agencies
follow formal legal process, we respect that formal legal process.
I should also say that we are conscious about where we host our
services. It is not that we have our servers sitting in every
country in the world. We try to pay attention to make sure that
we feel our users are being adequately protected by the rule of
law and formal legal process that they expect.
Q569 Paul Farrelly: A separate question
on a similar them, if I were, for instance, a Nigerian fraudster
and set myself up on Google Mail to produce all these letter of
credits scams, would you have a policy of shutting me down?
Mr McLaughlin: Yes, if you were
using Gmail to do spams. We have automated ways to try to detect
where that is happening. We shut accounts down, we will also kick
out the subscriber if we think that he or she is doing that.
Q570 Paul Farrelly: So you have your
own search techniques applied to users?
Mr Arora: We have spam folders.
Mr McLaughlin: Yes, we have spam
folders. If an individual is sending out 10,000 emails over the
course of 20 minutes, our systems are pretty smart about detecting
that.
Q571 Paul Farrelly: And for people
generally who might not be dealing in such volume whom you would
deem inappropriate users of your service, you would proactively
shut them down rather than wait for complaints?
Mr McLaughlin: Either could happen,
depending. As you said, for spam that is pretty straightforward
for us to detect, but we also would respond to complaints.
Q572 Chairman: Can I return to the
subject Alan raised, which is the protection of the creator's
content. We have heard evidence in this inquiry from the music
industry, from the film industry, all of whom are clearly suffering
considerable damage from the distribution of illegal pirate material.
To give an example, the British Record Industry flagged up a particular
site in Russia—I think it is "ALLOFMP3"—which
is distributing copyright material. Why can you not block access?
Why can you not ensure that your search engines do not flag up
sites which are clearly distributing illegal material?
Mr McLaughlin: Let me say this.
If you think about Google as basically the table of contents or
may be the index at the back of the book. Taking something out
of our index does not take it off of the internet. People say,
"Well, but you are very important and you would make it harder
for people to find." That is true, but, of course, finding
out about the existence of something that is in fact really out
there is not necessarily an indication that you are going to be
downloading illegal music. For our purposes, we focus on things
that are illegal, we leave it to governments to define the things
that are illegal and we respond to it. It points out this problem
of transnational co-ordination. If the site is hosted in a country
where that site is perfectly legal—gambling is the example
I mentioned earlier, but it is a good case, legal in some places
illegal in other places—it is very difficult to try to shut
off all access to something you do not like as long as it is legal
somewhere else. I think we take these complaints from copyright
owners very seriously. There are some kinds of sites that we do
take out of the search index because they violate our policies
and sometimes they are copyright-related, they host infringement
themselves. There are sites, for example, that will republish
credit card numbers or national ID numbers, and we take those
out of our search index. I do not want to make it sound like every
time we think that something bad is going on in the internet we
will just erase any mention of it from our search index, because
that does not solve the underlying problem. The underlying problem
for the content industry is that these sites are out there and
they exist. Fundamentally, government to government co-operation
is going to be essential if those sites are going to be taken
care of.
Q573 Chairman: It does not solve
the problem, because there will always be countries which are
much more lax in enforcing copyright law, so providers of illegal
content will go and base themselves in countries where they are
not going to get cracked down on, but if you were to make it much
harder for the teenager in his bedroom to find those sites, obviously
that would be a major contribution. You accept your responsibility
to tackle other types of criminal activity. Many people think
copyright is the one which is not getting nearly enough attention
and yet it is and the illegal distribution of copyright material
which is doing tremendous damage to our creative industry.
Mr McLaughlin: I have to say,
I hear the point and from Google's perspective we take the needs
of copyright owners very seriously. As a company that connects
people to information, it matters to us that content companies
feel comfortable generating information and putting it on the
internet, making it available to people. We want to help them
make money; we also want to help them fight piracy. Part of that
is providing avenues for people to buy and sell stuff at prices
that they are willing to pay and that contact providers are willing
to offer, but, to be honest, Google is not a major engine for
people finding copyright infringement material. Peer-to-peer services
and services like BitTorrent, which is a form of peer-to-peer,
are vastly more important, frankly, than Google is. What is tricky
is that technologies like BitTorrent, for example, can be used
for copyright infringement absolutely; they can also be used for
perfectly good purposes as well. For example, on BitTorrent you
can find historical speeches, documents, war-time documentaries,
old news reels that are out of copyright. It is not that everything
available through that service is copyright infringement. So,
just erasing the service from our search index or references to
the service from our search index would not really change anything
and would also have collateral damage on the side. We are certainly
willing to co-operate, and we are constantly talking to the content
industries to figure out ways that we can help them make money,
ways that we can help them combat piracy, but I do not want to
give you the answer that I think that simply erasing a troubling
site out of our search index is going to solve the problem. We
just do not think it will.
Q574 Mr Sanders: Am I right in thinking
that on YouTube you are not allowed to have a piece of content
for more than 10 minutes and that what you see happening is people
posting a half-hour episode in three ten-million chunks? Will
you not take action against that to protect the copyright holder's
interest?
Mr McLaughlin: I have to give
you an answer for Google Video, because, as I said, we have not
done the YouTube acquisition yet. We do not have time limits on
Google Video, but let us suppose we did. If copyright infringement
is copyright infringement, it does not matter if it is ten-minute
chunks, or 30-minute chunks, or whatever. If it is infringing
content, then it is against our policies and we will want to take
it down.
Q575 Mr Sanders: So the YouTube policy
of not acting on threats you would alter in the future? That is
quite significant, because a lot of people go to YouTube because
they can get all the episodes of some obscure soap operas and
things?
Mr McLaughlin: I cannot speak
to anything that we would do with YouTube because we are a month
away from completing that acquisition. For Google Video, it does
not matter to us whether the copyright infringement is short or
long; if it is infringement then we will take it down.
Q576 Mr Sanders: The point is that
YouTube seems to have a rule that it does not enforce. What you
seem to be doing is not to have a rule at all?
Mr McLaughlin: I guess I find
myself giving the same answer. If is copyright infringement, we
take it down and it does not really matter to us what the chunk
is. I cannot say anything about YouTube since they are not our
company.
Q577 Chairman: Can I press you slightly
on YouTube, because although you have not yet completed the acquisition,
nevertheless you are clearly intent on doing so. It was suggested
that one or two others of the potential purchasers of YouTube
backed off because they were concerned about the potential liability
for copyright infringement. It has certainly also been suggested
that until now people did not think it was worth suing YouTube,
but if Google is the owner it suddenly becomes worth doing so.
Are you putting aside a very large pot of money to settle copyright
infringement cases when you take it on?
Mr Arora: As Andrew said before,
there is not a lot we can say about what we will do with YouTube
because it is still in the process of due diligence and we have
not closed the acquisition, but I will repeat what Andrew has
said. We intend to uphold copyright, we believe it is very important
as far as the creative process, and it is evident from our policies
as Google Video or Google News or Google Books, and any acquisition
in the future is not going to change Google's view on copyright.
Q578 Chairman: You said in your submission
that Google News is a good example of how Google protects copyright
in practice. You are also subject to quite a number of law suits
in relation to the content on Google News, so clearly that is
not a universally held view. How do you respond to the fact that
actually what you are doing is taking the creation of newspapers
and making it available in breach of copyright?
Mr Arora: Let me talk about our
view of Google News and then Andrew will jump in and talk about
the copyright part. As I mentioned earlier, Google News is a service
which allows people to be able to search for where the news is
as opposed to reading the news on Google News. We believe it is
an important function. It is almost like if you go to a library
and there is no index of where to find what is in the library,
a library would be of very little use if you had to walk through
all the aisles to find out where the thing that you are looking
for is. So, from our perspective, Google News is sort of an index
where if you look for something it very quickly will tell you
where the original content is and where you can find what you
are looking for. As regards that not being held as a universal
view and the lawsuit part, Andrew can jump in and talk about.
Mr McLaughlin: Google really is
a good example of how you can strike the right balance. Most newspapers
and news sites want people to come to their site, they want people
to find their stories, they want people to see their advertising,
they want people to come. What Google News does, it basically
says, okay, for these 5,000 news sources we will be constantly
checking their home pages to see what is there, and then we present
it to people who come to Google News so that they can see the
headlines, very short snippets of what the story is about, and
then, if they really want to read the story, they have to click
through and go to the underlying site. Our experience with newspapers
is that, generally speaking, they find that Google News drives
significant amounts of traffic, and the way that we protect copyright
is any newspaper that does not want to be included in Google News
we will take out, we will not include them. The same thing, by
the way, I should say, is true for Google's search index in general.
We do not believe that we have to search every single thing that
is out there on the web. Generally speaking, people putting their
content on the web want it to be found; so in general people want
it to be searchable, they want it to be in Google, they want people
to be able to find it, but if they do not, that is their choice,
and, even if we were legally entitled to keep them in our search
index, we do not, we respect their wishes anyway. The same thing
is true for Google News. We think it is a nice way to present
news content, we think we drive significant amounts of users and
eyeballs and traffic to their web sites and, if you talk to the
newspapers that have got experience with Google News, I would
venture to guess that they would say that they are pleased because
a lot of traffic comes their way thanks to Google News that they
were not getting before the existence of Google News. Again, we
drive the traffic, they get to have the users come to their site
and, if they do not want to be part of this, they just have to
tell us and we will take them out.
Q579 Chairman: Are you going to appeal
against the Belgian court judgment?
Mr McLaughlin: Yes.
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