Examination of Witnesses (Questions 580
- 588)
THURSDAY 26 OCTOBER 2006
GOOGLE
Q580 Helen Southworth: On a separate
issue, taking us back to futurology that you were speaking about
to Alan, I think perhaps we missed a bit of what you were going
to say.
Mr McLaughlin: I was just going
to say if you are looking for things to get excited about, things
to get enthusiastic about in the next generation of where we are
going, one thing that I think I would like to highlight is one
of the big barriers to access to information on the internet is
language. Much of the world's information is in languages other
than English. One of the things that we have talked about publicly,
and so I can talk about it here, is Google has been working on
a new approach to translation on the internet which is called
"statistical machine translation", but what is means
is that you take the Google computer system and you unleash it
on professionally translated documents that have been translated
across multiple languages—UN documents, EU documents, and
so forth—and, if you can get enough documents and your computers
are smart enough to do statistical estimation—
Q581 Helen Southworth: It is there
to stay?
Mr McLaughlin: Exactly. It is
like that. So, one of the big changes that we think will be coming
in the next couple of years is that it will be much, much more
powerful, much more accurate and much easier to be able to find
things that are not written in your language and be able to read
them in a reasonably well translated way in your language. This
is very powerful, it is very cool, lots of people have done work
in translation, it is a mature field, but one of the things that
Google can contribute to that process is the large scale of our
computing power that we are able to throw at the problem. One
of the things that I am very excited about is that last year,
I am proud to say, we scored first at a university level competition
among translation technologies, and this was with a very early
iteration of our technology. We think that, as we are able to
keep working on it and improve it, it will be the case that if
the thing that is most relevant to you happens to be in Finnish
or in Arabic or in Chinese, you will be able to see it and you
will be able to click on a translation link that will then show
you that page in a reasonably comprehensible version of your language,
which would be very cool. It would be very neat to start to break
down language barriers worldwide no matter what your language
of origin is, no matter what the language of the materials is.
Q582 Helen Southworth: Can I ask
you to apply a little thought to something else that the Committee
is giving a lot of thought to, which is digital switchover in
the UK, particularly with reference to what you have been saying
about broadband. We have been struggling a little with what the
interrelationship is of broadband in the future and straight digital
switchover that we are working on at the moment?
Mr McLaughlin: The only thing
I can say intelligently about that is one of the great benefits
of digital switch over will be freeing up spectrum. The limitedness
of spectrum has inhibited other potential useful services that
could make use of the spectrum. So, as your broadcast airwaves
are switched over to digital and free up a lot of spectrum, I
think one of the tough problems for government is what to do with
that spectrum, and one of the things that you ought to keep in
mind is for various wireless mechanisms for delivering broadband
connectivity, the more spectrum that is available the cheaper
it will be for businesses to offer those services and the sooner
you can get meaningful, high-speed broadband to people wirelessly.
So, I would think, just on a personal capacity, that if all of
the spectrum that is freed up from the digital switchover is re-auctioned
to other kinds of single-use licence holders, you will have missed
an opportunity to unlicence some portions of spectrum that could
be used by any broadband provider to reach citizens with more
connectivity wirelessly, which I think is a very cool thing, a
very potentially powerful way to deliver broadband connectivity.
To me, anyway, that is the relationship between the two.
Q583 Helen Southworth: I notice that
you have a relationship with developing nations on a personal
level on IT. Have you got any sort of ideas for us about how we
make sure that we do not get excluded people during that process?
I am thinking particularly of perhaps older people or more vulnerable
adults.
Mr McLaughlin: This is clearly
a challenge for the industry. However easy we think we are making
broadband and connectivity now, we are clearly missing significant
chunks of the population. From the Google side, we try to provide
an incredibly simple interface, something which is very easy and
which people of every age and income level find pretty easy to
use. On the access side, though, it is still the case that for
many people, due to cost, due to the sort of generation gap around
uses of technology, we have not reached a lot of people. To be
honest, I am not a fan of big planning, I am a fan of small implementalism
and unleashing entrepreneurs and business people in local communities
who can find ways to make money serving the elderly, the poor
and so forth. I think a great lesson from Africa, to go up to
30,000 feet for a second, people for a long time were thinking:
"There is so little money. People have got needs for clean
water and food and so forth. Who cares about telephones and technology,
it is so outside the realm of their day-to-day needs". But
if you look at these fantastic African telecom companies that
are delivering cell phones and data connections nationwide in
Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa—MTM, just to name
one, is a fantastic company, Celltel, a central African company—they
make very good money and they provide excellent service to the
people in those countries, and people there are finding cell phones
and information to be just as indispensable as we are in this
country. I think it is an interesting example that if you were
to try to do a top-down development programme to provide cell
phones, you would probably not have succeeded but by unleashing
entrepreneurial power in these countries, limiting the power of
monopolies, opening markets, breaking up traditional telecom monopolies,
by doing those things they have seen that people are eager and
willing to pay for these services and they find they are useful
to their lives, to generating income, to accumulating capital,
all of those kinds of powerful things that technology can do.
But I would say that probably similar lessons apply to the poor
and disenfranchised in developed countries. Supply side subsidies
will probably not be as effective as entrepreneurial business
models that can provide services and have this kind of feedback
loop at the bottom. You want your elderly to be able to play a
role in deciding what services are good and bad and useful or
not useful, and so, without being too ideological about it, a
competitive open market place would probably be your best friend
in delivering services to those people. On our side, I do not
see those sorts of fully mature services targeting the elderly
or those recent immigrants who might have language issues or whatever.
I would still like to see more effort in that area, but I think
it can be done within the context of a competitive market place.
Q584 Helen Southworth: If a foreign
government, say the US Government, asks you to provide data on
the UK citizens' use of your services, would you do it or would
you resist it?
Mr McLaughlin: That is a complicated
legal analysis, to be honest. Our general policy is where we are
located and where we have operations, we are subject to the laws
of those governments. However, it is a little more complicated
than that, because other factors, like the physical location of
weather centres and data. As you know, you have data protection
rules in the EU that place limits on the transfer of data in and
out of Europe, and we respect those rules. We are part of the
Safe Harbour Agreement that has been established between the EU
and the US, and so anything we would do in that area would be
subject to those laws and those rules which have been negotiated
by the EU to provide reasonable amounts of protection of EU citizens.
We are subject to that, we are part of that and it will be those
rules that would apply to how we would respond.
Q585 Paul Farrelly: I used to work
for newspapers and an agency called Reuters. In newspapers
it would be a badge of honour if you got thrown out of Moscow,
for example, because you had irritated the authorities so much.
At Reuters it would be an absolute capital crime as a correspondent
to get thrown out of Moscow because Reuters had other business
interests. Are you a Guardian or a Times or are
you a Reuters?
Mr McLaughlin: I think we are
a principled company and we are also a company that tries to do
business; so we see our primary obligation as being to our users,
to the individuals who use our services, and we make commitments
to respect their privacy, to protect them. As I said before, we
have got a track record of going to court to protect our users
when we think that the Government is overreaching or going beyond
the bounds of what it is legally entitled to. I would say we are
unafraid to do that. At the same time we are not eagerly looking
for ways to get thrown out for the greater glory of our reputation;
instead we try to respect the promises that we make to users,
we hold governments to the formal legal process that is established
within the context of their laws.
Q586 Chairman: Can I ask one last
question then. You will be aware of the discussions taking place
in the Commission between Member States about the proposed Audio
Visual Media Services Directive. How do you see that potentially
affecting you and do you have any observations about the wisdom
of the Commission in attempting to extend regulation in this area?
Mr McLaughlin: It is a very important
question. I have to say that from Google's perspective we look
at that proposed directive with considerable concern. The project
of applying TV rules to the internet strikes us as a misguided
project. The distinctions that that directive tries to draw between
linear and non-linear services strike us as impossible to apply
in any sensible way to video content on the internet. The idea
is if it feels like a television program, you regulate it as a
television programme. Even if it is over the internet, if it feels
like a user selected video that feels like the internet, then
you do not apply TV style regulations, but l have got to tell
you, on the internet that makes no sense. We have said, "Well,
what happens if I watch the MTV Video Music Awards in real-time,
I click on that link and I am getting it." They say, "That
feels like a scheduled TV programme. That would be subject to
the TV style regulations that we are proposing." We say,
"What if I wait 10 minutes and then I click on the link and
I start doing it 10 minutes later?" They say, "Well,
it started off as a linear programme, so probably it is always
a linear programme." We say, "Really. So then it is
stored. Four days later you click on it. Still linear?" And
they say, "Well, that is kind of hard." Then we say,
"What about if we break it into little pieces?" On the
internet video is all going to be self-selective, it is going
to be chosen by the user. We would think that a much more productive
way to think about this is how you give control to the end user
over what they want to watch, and, in particular, if the goal
is to enable parents to protect their children, that is much more
powerfully done by providing tools to the parents to do that than
providing broad content regulations across the entirety of all
video content on the internet. What is appropriate for a nine-year
old is different from what is appropriate for a 12-year old is
different from one family to another family. There are categories
like violence and sexually explicit content, and so forth, on
which parents may have wildly diverging views. Our thought would
be, let us embrace the internet as an amazing step forward in
parental control that allows parents to make individuated decisions
for their children in ways that have never been possible in the
past. Because you have got a blanket one-size-fits-all rule that
says from 9 am to 9 pm you cannot have this kind of stuff and
then from 9 pm to 9 am you can have other kinds of stuff. Those
kinds of rules simply do not work on a global borderless network.
I would say, in view of the concern, we sincerely hope that the
Commission will ultimately take a different direction. We are
urging Member States to look very carefully at it and to try to
steer it in a direction which will be appropriate to the internet
and effective rather than the broken model applying old style
rules for one technology to a radically different technology,
especially if doing so would squander many positive opportunities
to do something much more powerful and effective for parents.
Q587 Paul Farrelly: I sense, merely
because my briefing tells me, that we are going to come on to
the BBC and public services, but before we do, can I throw in
one more tangent. Years ago in a former life I advised the shareholders
of a smashing little company called Media Audits Limited on selling
their business. TV companies and advertising agencies hated that
company because what it did was audit for advertisers the effectiveness
of campaigns. It audited the figures that advertising agencies
and television companies gave them as to the exposure that they
were paying for. How do advertisers (your clients), who are responsible
for your fantastic revenue stream, audit what you tell them they
are getting?
Mr Arora: That is part of advertising
on the internet, because we can show them the efficacy of every
click and every cent that they spend on Google. So, on a real-time
basis, they can keep track of how many clicks they receive, what
the clicks cost them, how many of those clicks produced results.
Their tool is called Google Analytics, which if we apply it to
your site we can track it all the way to how many customers they
acquired and how many customers paid for what they bought. We
can literally track them from the point that somebody searched
for, let us say, a mobile phone to the point that they are using
the Google Analytics site and actually somebody bought the phone.
The internet provides tremendous amounts of tools for ROI calculations
and it is a very, very well measured industry.
Q588 Paul Farrelly: It is well developed?
Mr Arora: It is fantastic.
Mr McLaughlin: If you are running
an online website, you have got a server and you can match up
the statistics that you get on your server, because you can tell
how many people are coming and where they are coming from, to
the statistics that we give you as an accounting matter. That
is an incredibly powerful part of the online advertising world.
You do not need to take our word for it, you can look at your
own server's experience and verify whether what we are telling
you is right.
Chairman: Given the time, I think we
should probably draw to a close. Can I thank you for what has
been an absolutely fascinating session. Thank you very much.
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