– Wei Gu is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own —

Google’s former China head Kai-Fu Lee wants to create China’s next internet giant in a factory. He believes that by combining the smartest entrepreneurs, the shrewdest businesspeople and the brightest business ideas, he will be able to create five highly sellable companies a year. That sounds like an ideal model for venture capital, but is he being realistic?

Lee’s plan, formulated while he spent time in hospital over the summer, follows a battle with Beijing regulators who wanted to censor Google searches that lead to pornographic sites. It has drawn strong support from investors.

Lee has managed to raise $115 million in just one month, winning support from YouTube Inc. co-founder Steve Chen, as well as Foxconn Electronics Inc., Legend Group, New Oriental Education and venture firm WI Harper Group.

They believe that as China embraces a start-up culture, Lee’s business, which is a mix of venture capital and development lab, will be well positioned to capitalize.

Lee’s plan is to hire 100 to 150 young engineers, help nurture their ideas, then spin off 50 to 75 of them a year with funding from his venture, whiling hiring new people to make up for the loss. However, it looks like his company, called Innovation Works, has yet to line up ideas or engineers.

This kind of “incubator” model became popular in the U.S. and Europe during the dot-com boom, but most of them just burned through a lot of money and then folded. Lee and his backers believe that China’s market is more favorable, as it is at a crucial point regarding “cloud computing” and mobile technology, and there is a strong need for early-stage funding.

The new fund is still starting off, but Lee plans to expand from its base in Beijing to places such as Taiwan, the Asian hardware manufacturing base.

Investors are attracted by Lee’s reputation as the single largest magnet for talent in China. Lee, who grew up in the United States, has won a loyal following from Chinese students through his numerous coaching books, public speeches and blogs, although critics say he has spent too much time promoting his personal brand.

An expert in speech recognition technology, he founded Microsoft’s China research lab in the late 1990s. When he left to join Google, Microsoft sued him for violating a promise not to join a competitor.

Nimbler local rival Baidu now dominates China’s search market with 75.7 percent in terms of total search queries, dwarfing Google’s 19.8 percent share, according to iResearch. At Google, Lee was caught between the Beijing authorities who insist that foreign web companies censor the Internet and his U.S. bosses who demanded he drum up more business in China.

He has wanted to break away from his corporate role to start his own company for a decade, but it looks as if he is stuck in the corporate mindset. Lee is adopting an almost a planned economy approach to an industry that has always relied on markets to determine who is the fittest to survive. Indeed, he is even promising to tailor-make companies for interested foreign investors.

A factory model lowers the risk for investors as they will enjoy more control, but that also means less incentive and ownership for entrepreneurs, since their roles are reduced to that of employees. Why would young people take their ideas to Lee rather than make a go of it themselves?

Unlike Silicon Valley, China does not have an ecosystem where start-up companies can easily find angel investors. Even though China is a hotspot for venture capital, with $50 billion chasing mid- to late-stage projects, less than $1 billion in total is earmarked for early-stage projects.

Lee prides himself on his doggedness in chasing after talent. One year while at Google he made offers to graduates, only one of which was initially rejected. He called the student, found out that his girlfriend thought Google was a bit of a start-up, then asked for his girlfriend’s number and called her up. That year he achieved a 100 percent offer acceptance rate.

Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether Lee can retain his ability to attract and inspire the best young people now that he is no longer at Google. He needs a lot of them to make his dream come true.

– At the time of publication Wei Gu did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. She may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund —

– Aron Cramer is president and CEO of BSR, a global business network and consultancy focused on sustainability. The views expressed are his own. —

As the World Economic Forum’s “Summer Davos” meeting in Dalian, China, gets underway, it is a bit chilling to think back to how the financial crisis was unfolding in real time during last year’s event.

As the 1,000 leaders gathering for this year’s event spend three days debating how to restore economic growth and social stability, the need to focus on a long-term transition to a more sustainable economy is clearer than ever.

Doing this will require unprecedented cooperation among businesses and consumers. The companies that build new business models and innovative products and services will win in the reset world, and shape an economy that avoids disruptions like the one that erupted last fall.

At this year’s meeting, I am chairing two workshops, where we will explore how to build new models of production and consumption that hold the potential to create not only a return to growth, but to a more sustainable model of growth.

Arising from an interlocking set of crises, three immense challenges stand before us. We must:

1. Return to economic growth while deleveraging massive debt.
2. Transition to a low-carbon economy that uses natural resources more efficiently.
3. Create new social contracts both inside and between nations.

These simultaneous challenges present a turning point for the world comparable in scale to the one we faced in the aftermath of World War II.

The good news is that the “reset world” currently under construction contains a multitude of opportunities just waiting to be captured by innovative companies ready to collaborate.

We are already starting to see a new wave of collaboration that will be the foundation of renewed economic growth. GE and Google are teaming up to build smart energy systems that radically reduce the reliance of consumers and business on carbon-based fuel. Nike is pioneering a collaborative R&D model called “Green Xchange,” which will create an open-source model for product development focused specifically on environmentally friendly products.

It’s heartening to see that this collaboration now includes the entire business “value chain”—which extends from a product’s development to its distribution and use—where companies are exploring ways products can be developed more efficiently, from design to assembly to distribution.

One of the meetings I’ll be running this week is a workshop with 50 CEOs and experts who are designing new production models that will deliver economic growth for the post-crisis era. The redesign of value chains, while somewhat invisible to the general public, is crucial to our economic future. Virtually all products, from a simple T-shirt to Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, rely on a dense web of companies focusing on a single step in the production process.

Tomorrow’s solutions won’t be built behind the towering ramparts of single companies. Instead, they rely on collaboration across the spectrum, ranging from design firms like IDEO to well-known brands like Pepsi, and from logistics providers like Jordan’s Aramex International to retail giants like Wal-Mart.

The ultimate challenge all companies face is creating products that meet a global class of consumers without requiring several planets’ worth of water, fuel, and other natural resources. This means products must satisfy the needs of 600 million Indian villagers as well as they do for the 500 million citizens of the European Union. This means greater coordination of transportation, just as sea carriers like Maersk have done by partnering with their clients to use slow (and therefore more fuel-efficient) shipping to get products from Asian factories to American ports. This means innovative packaging to reduce, if not eliminate, waste. And this means developing new ways to communicate with consumers so that they can better understand the social and environmental implications of their consumption habits—and find ways to save money in the bargain.

At this year’s Summer Davos—a year after the onset of the Great Recession—we know not only what the challenge is, but also what the answers look like.

This week’s event is dedicated to companies the World Economic Forum has designated as “New Champions.” There is little doubt that many of these companies will come from Brazil, China, India, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the developing world. But new champions will be determined more by mindset than by geography. Companies that keep their eyes on long-term trends, that meet people’s needs within environmental limits, and that look at innovative collaboration will shape the future. Companies that don’t will find that the financial crisis was only the beginning of their problems.

- Mic Wright is Online News Editor at Stuff. The views expressed are his own -

Google juice – it sure isn't tasty but it is vital for anyone writing news online. The slightly irksome term refers to the mysterious combination of keywords and linking that will drag a webpage to the top of Google's search pages.

While the exact way Google's search algorithm works is largely a mystery to outsiders, news sites know it's vital to write headlines stuffed with the keywords that the search engine seeks out.

Online, the perfect punning headlines created by The Sun newspaper's super sub-editors just won't cut it. News stories on the web are all about the facts and the most successful sites are constantly checking to see what keywords will send you soaring up the Google search rankings. If you story isn't on the front page, it's not getting clicks, the less clicks you get the less likely it is that your advertisers' ads are going to get seen.

Now Google has announced that it's been working on a brand new version of its search engine and it's likely that online headlines are about to get even more straight forward. The new iteration of Google's most profitable invention is codenamed Caffeine thanks to its speediness. It has already been made available for users to test and besides the noticeable increase in speed, it appears to make search a more real time experience than we've previously seen.

The move to real time search, showing web pages in search results as soon as they appear, is a response to the instantaneous nature of Twitter which has recently got the jump on Google when it comes to breaking news. Currently there is a slight but noticeable lag with Google results – its search crawlers (programmes that scour the web to see what sites have been updated) don't grab changes immediately. But with the new version of the search engine they will.

This slight change in approach will make the way news organisations write their headlines even more important. It will also be like pressing the fast forward button. News writers will need to get their stories up faster and add new information swiftly to ensure that they remain high in the Google search rankings. A test by Mashable found that the new Google Search algorithm rewarding news gatherers for adding new information to their stories by placing them higher in the search results.

The new Google relies even more on keywords than the old version. Headline writers jobs have just got a lot harder. For readers, it'll mean more and more matter of fact headlines carefully crafted to include the keywords that Google's crawlers are after rather than created to entertain you. The days of the pithy, pun packed headline are over, at least online.

LONDON, Aug 3 (Reuters) - The resignation of Google CEO Eric Schmidt from Apple's board should come as no surprise to anyone with an inkling of what corporate governance means.

But then Silicon Valley's idea of corporate boards has long consisted of cozy, interlocking directorships which would be considered collusion in most other industries.

Google's CEO is not leaving Apple's board voluntarily. He is only stepping down in response to the increased government scrutiny of obvious potential conflicts of interest between the two companies.

Yet regulators shouldn't be content with Schmidt's departure. The truth is that Apple and Google have been heading into the same markets for years. A veritable chain of overlapping business ties remain in place even if the most obvious formal link is now broken.

The chairman of Apple's board, former Genentech CEO Art Levinson, remains on Google's board. Another Google board member, Ann Mather, is the former chief financial officer of Steve Jobs' former animation company, Pixar Studios.

Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel Corp, Apple's main chip supplier, also sits on Google's board. Al Gore remains on Apple's board, but in his new turn as venture capitalist he has many business ties to Google and its founders. Gore is a partner of Google board member John Doerr at legendary Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins.

For months, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has been examining Schmidt's participation on the boards of the tech world's two most dynamic companies. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission said it was looking into Apple's decision to reject a Google phone application to run on the iPhone.

Google's CEO says he has consistently recused himself from Apple board discussion of the iPhone. There's no reason not to take him at his word. But that's largely a distraction from the bigger issues at stake here,

Schmidt need not have participated actively in iPhone discussions. By taking part in discussions of the rest of Apple's strategy, Schmidt was in a position to steer Google's own strategies around the Apple juggernaut. Rivals need not cooperate directly to divvy up markets.

Anyone following the industry knows that Apple and Google have been moving in similar directions since well before Schmidt joined Apple's board three years ago. As computers become more like phones and the Internet becomes more mobile, the competition has become only more obvious.

By August 2006, both companies were hard at work on their plans to enter the mobile phone market. In September 2005, Apple made its first failed foray into the market with a joint development effort with Motorola that led to the introduction of the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone.

A month before -- and a year before Schmidt joined Apple's board -- Google had acquired mobile device start-up Android, forming the genesis of its own push into mobile phone markets.

Six months after Schmidt became a director, Apple unveiled its ground-breaking iPhone, in January 2007. Fevered speculation mounted throughout 2007 that Google was working on its own so-called GPhone.

In November of that year, Google introduced its Android software for mobile phone development. In September of 2008, the first Android-powered phone built by Taiwan phone maker HTC for T-Mobile was introduced.

So far, Apple has been content to attack the high-end of the smartphone market. Google is aiming at the mid-priced phone market and new mini-notebook computers with Android. But the conceit that the two companies aren't competitors is wearing thin.

Reforming corporate boards has never been easy in Silicon Valley. Recall the boardroom battles that cost former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina her job. They pitted H-P's old guard against corporate governance advocates who were Fiorina's allies. The decline of Yahoo is another obvious example of failed board governance.

Independent corporate governance is an afterthought in the go-go corporate culture of Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs backed by venture capitalists launch start-ups. Even years after an IPO, the founders and their VC backers typically keep disproportionate control over "their company."

Investors bear no small part of the blame. Most care only in retrospect, once rocket-fueled growth subsides and the shares of former high-tech stars fall back to Earth.

For now, both Apple and Google shares are moving higher, as the tradition of weak corporate governance looks set to survive a while longer.

(Photo: Reuters/Kimberly White)

-Tom Dunmore is Brand Director & Editor-in-Chief at Stuff magazine - Stuff has over 1 million readers worldwide. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Google announced on Wednesday that it was developing its own computer operating system. It will be secure, fast, lightweight and - most of all - free. And it presents the biggest challenge yet to the long-standing dominance of Windows.

The idea behind Google ChromeOS is nothing new - it's built on a Linux foundation and will no doubt share many of the features of other open-source operating systems. But Google is the only computing brand with more might than Microsoft: it's trusted, and has a proven track record of building brilliant, free services, from search to instant messaging.

Indeed, Google has been busily chipping away at Microsoft's market for some time, with the Google Docs suite of in-browser applications providing a decent (and free) alternative to Microsoft Office, while the Android mobile phone software has pulled the rug from under Windows Mobile.

Microsoft's attempts to strike back by stealing some of Google's lucrative internet search advertising market have had little success - hence the rebranding of MSN as Live search, and the subsequent replacement of Live search with Bing.

But Microsoft's core business is the Windows operating system that powers nine in ten of the world's computers. By launching against Windows, Google is declaring out-and-out war - and doing so when Microsoft is at its weakest.

Windows market share has slumped from 91percent to 88 percent in just one year, according to Net Applications. The failure of the latest version of Windows, Vista, has been so catastrophic that, well over two years after its release, many Windows PCs are still sold the previous version, XP. Why? Because Vista is simply too demanding for the new generation of cheap, low-powered - and immensely popular - netbooks.

And while the Mac market share has risen from 8 percent to 10 percents in the last 12 months, Apple's high prices ensure that it will never truly challenge Microsoft for the mainstream.

So it's no surprise the Google is will be targetting its ChromeOS at netbook users when the operating system is released in 2010. And if ChromeOS works as Google promises – making the most of free web services, but totally secure and immune to viruses - it will quickly pick up support within cash-strapped businesses too.

Meanwhile Microsoft's Windows 7, due in October, promises to be faster and less processor intensive - but it's still built on foundations that predate the internet. And it still costs hundreds of pounds.

Windows isn't about to be eradicated - inertia and conservatism will stop many corporate environments from switching to ChromeOS. But Microsoft's near-monopoly on the operating system could be ending. But be warned: a bigger, Google-flavoured monopoly awaits.

– Leslie Harris is the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, DC. The views expressed are her own. —

In the wake of troubling reports as recently as last year that Western companies were assisting China with Internet censorship and the unmasking of cyber-dissidents, governments around the world seemed poised to regulate the conduct of Internet companies. Lawmakers appear to have stepped back from those efforts, but the challenges of advancing global Internet freedom remain.

The Global Online Freedom Act, drafted in the U.S. Congress, would have made it a crime for Internet companies to turn over personal information to governments in cases where that information could be used to punish dissent. The bill produced a firestorm of controversy. Human rights groups campaigned for swift passage, while the tech industry scrambled to stop the bill, which they viewed as a global eviction order from many difficult but emerging markets. At the same time, several members of the European Parliament proposed a European version of the measure, taking the accompanying controversy global.

Now policymakers seem far less certain that global Internet freedom will be served by imposing harsh mandates on Internet companies that provide crucial services to customers in repressive regimes. The bill has not been reintroduced in the U.S. Congress this year, and earlier this month, a top European regulator, European Union Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding, dismissed the notion of Europe passing its own Global Internet Freedom Act, saying that she was not convinced that “hard law” was the best way to address the issue.

For Internet executives who feared that hard-line regulatory mandates might force them out of many countries, Reding’s comments came as welcome relief. But celebration is premature. Threats to Internet freedom are growing and lawmakers’ concerns about industry’s role remain rightly high.  Those who choose to misconstrue Reding’s remarks as a free pass on this important issue do so at their peril.

Now is the time that Internet and technology companies must step up and take on the very challenges that the Global Internet Freedom Act was intended to address in order to ensure that their services and technologies do not become tools for surveillance and oppression.

Lest companies argue that the problem is too big and complex for any one company to make a difference, there is a responsible way forward. Late last year, a diverse coalition of leading information and communications companies, major human rights organizations, academics, investors and technology leaders launched the Global Network Initiative, which seeks to provide a framework to help information and telecommunications companies chart an ethical and accountable path forward through the growing demands from countries to take actions that infringe on the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users.

Equally important, the initiative promotes collective action to uphold the rule of law and the adoption of public policies that protect and respect freedom of expression and privacy on the global network. Three technology giants – Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! – have shown critical leadership by committing to the Global Network Initiative. Now, others in the industry need to step up and make that commitment as well.

Companies that join the initiative will find its requirements both rigorous and fair. Signatories will have two years to implement a range of commitments including conducting human rights risk assessments, training employees, increasing transparency with users and employing a high degree of push back when government restrictions or demands appear to be inconsistent with fundamental rights. Members also commit to encouraging their joint venture and business partners to abide by the same principles.

The collective goal is not to provide the definitive rulebook for companies doing business in hundreds of countries with countless different legal regimes. Rather, the initiative provides a framework that allows companies to stand up for their customers, wherever they are in the world, and to draw support from a powerful community of business leaders and human rights advocates.

Now is a critical moment for this initiative. As regulators shift their focus away from immediate legislative action, the test for the Internet industry will be the extent to which it commits itself to addressing the challenge on its own. The Global Network Initiative provides a path toward responsible action. But its value depends in part on expanding participation from the companies in the sector and building a global identity.

One thing is certain: the challenge of upholding global Internet freedom is not going away. The next time a foreign government uses American Internet technology to spy on citizens, censor democratic materials or otherwise oppress users, the world will ask what the Internet industry is doing to address the problem.

Ignoring the issue was never a viable alternative. The world is on notice about these practices, and the next attempt to legislate the issue is always just around the corner. Companies that participate in the Global Network Initiative will be prepared to do the right thing regardless of whether or not there is a legal mandate to do so. At the end of the day, this is about leadership on a fundamental issue of human rights that will not go away.

– Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Academics, family researchers and even baseball history nuts have noticed recently how some important archives of older newspapers from around the world have vanished off the Web.

The problems have surfaced since PaperofRecord.com, a collection of more than 20 million newspaper pages of papers ranging from the Toronto Star to Mexican village periodicals to newspapers as far as Perth, Australia, merged into Google News Archive.

The problem, researchers discovered, was that Google has had trouble reformatting the newspaper images and gaining rights to display some of the older publications. It has, at least, temporarily removed some of the archives from public view.

There is an idealized view of the Web that sees it as a storehouse of human knowledge, and in the sense of the breadth of what I can find with a random Google search, this is true.

But for all its openness, the Web has proven to be a leaky vessel for historical preservation, with much of its treasure trove lost in a maze of altered Web pages, broken links and deleted sites.

The head of the British Library recently warned in The Observer newspaper that if this digital memory loss is not fixed, we “are in danger of creating a black hole for future historians and writers.”

Archives of The Sporting News, founded in 1886, and nicknamed the Bible of Baseball, is among the publications that has fallen victim in the transition of PaperofRecord.com to Google ownership. Some older Mexican newspapers are also offline, academics complain.

Preserving history on the Web is a struggle even for Google, whose stated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

“We’re doing our best to find a solution to include as much of the acquired content as possible,” a Google spokesman says of the newspaper archive transition.

But as more and more of our collective memory is hosted online, the danger grows that we lose the content and context of events that happened just days ago, let alone weeks, months or decades back.

Try retracing the links to old scandals or unflattering images on the Web, say to Enron or Parmalat or other fallen corporate names. Most of them are gone, despite the best efforts of sites like Wikipedia or Smoking Gun or the combined energies of the blogosphere to ferret out and preserve such history.

Where is the global sense of outrage that followed the looting of Iraq’s National Museum as U.S. troops stood by in the turmoil following the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003? While hard to measure, I think it’s a safe bet that the world suffers the loss of a museum full of artifacts every day by depending upon the Web to host our precious cultural memories.

That’s not to neglect the enormous value of the Web as temporal medium for sharing information. The latest celebrated example of this is how independent analyst Alex Dalmady used financial data from the Stanford Group’s own website to uncover the unlikely financial returns promised by the bank.

His Web detective work is the exception that proves the rule. It was all information hiding in plain site and Dalmady simply had the courage to say the emperor had no clothes.

“One does not have to be a detective, or even a financial expert, to spot financial institutions that may prove insolvent, or worse, with the passage of time,” Dalmady crowed in a report he wrote. “As the saying goes, if it looks like a duck…”

Examples like Dalmady’s are, sadly, the exception.

The World Wide Web as it has evolved over the years has made it almost purpose-built for obscuring or deleting uncomfortable facts. That wasn’t the intention of Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, whose vision was that every address would point to a discreet page of data. Instead, Web designers have found it convenient to create dynamic Web addresses that may make it impossible to find information the next time you return to a site.

Even Dalmady’s work in January is already hard to reproduce. The Stanford International Bank Ltd site informs visitors the company has been put into receivership and provides no links to its past business.

The recent privacy backlash by Facebook users began when the management of the world’s most popular social networking site attempted to address the issue of who owns the history of conversations that occur between Facebook friends if one of the parties leaves the site.

Changes made last month to Facebook user guidelines implied that the company owned the rights to users’ personal data, including message and photos, even after they shutdown their accounts. The company has since back-peddled and assured its 175 million members that, indeed, users control the data they create on the site.

Susan Feldman, an expert on Web search with research firm IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts, says the problem of the disappearing Web is very real and also partly a mirage. The limitations of current search technology that depend on users choosing the right keywords to find what they are looking for is part of the problem.

Help is on the way from improved search tools such as text analytics and concept clustering technology that will help users find more of the information they may think is lost on the Web.

But until the Web’s important information archives are secured in modern libraries and improved search tools are widely available, the sense that we are losing our collective digital heritage will only grow.

Enjoy the Web’s many benefits, while they are still on your screen. Keep copies of anything you want to remember, or risk losing it, perhaps as early as the next time you refresh your browser. We live in a time where the capacity to record and capture our lives has never been greater.

But using the Web to preserve those memories makes it more and more likely that future generations will consider the early years of the Web to be lost decades.

– At the time of publication Eric Auchard did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund. For previous columns, Reuters’ customers can click here.  –

Pamela Redmond Satran is a developer of baby-naming site nameberry.com, based on the name guides she coauthored with Linda Rosenkrantz. The opinions expressed are her own.

Dear President-Elect Obama,

In the final days leading up to your election, we heard a lot about what you were going to do to help small-business owners. Now it’s time to pony up. Not sure where to start? As someone with the audaciously bad timing to launch my website, nameberry.com, on October 14, I have some ideas:

Start a web-based work initiative
Taking a cue from FDR’s bold work initiatives in his first 100 days, you might train people to work on small web businesses like mine. Instead of the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), call it the WWW Camp, where laid-off mortgage brokers and moms craving flexible hours can learn software coding and database management and website design. The result: More jobs in northern Vermont and southern Virginia; more accessible and affordable help for the new generation of small web-based business owners like me.

And while you’re at it, improve the Internet infrastructure
You’re planning to spend billions on highway improvements, but what about the Internet infrastructure? Spending money on roads promotes more driving, which uses fuel and increases our carbon footprint, while investing in the next generation of technology encourages people to stay home and spend more time on the web. That’s good for me and all the other web startups.

Bring the Small Business Association into the 21st century
I’d love it if the SBA was dealing with 2009 businesses like mine along with coffee shops and dry cleaning stores. The kinds of issues I faced starting my business – finding a talented and affordable designer, figuring out search engine optimization, driving traffic to my site – aren’t even addressed at sba.gov.

Help the midcareer worker retool
My degree in journalism helped me launch a career as a magazine editor and writer and book author, but I wasn’t sure where to turn for my new educational needs in this economy. Who was going to teach me how to embed video on my blog – and then how to get out there and promote the thing? Where was someone accustomed to working alone going to learn how to motivate and manage a team – especially without money in the picture? I figured it out myself, but education and training efforts aimed at the midcareer worker looking to launch or renovate a small business, or stay vital in a larger corporation, would be wonderful.

Challenge Google
At the risk of angering the Great God Google, I think you should look into wresting back control of the Internet and putting the public interest above secret algorithms or pay-for-play. There are thousands of newly-unemployed journalists ready and able to make editorial judgments on the value of websites based on quality and not on the number of times they can cram certain keywords into their copy. Bring back real intelligence and expertise to everyday research.

Champion more entrepreneurs
You got a lot of political mileage out of Joe the Plumber, and made him famous in the process. But how many sinks can one plumber plunge? Referring to me as “Pam the Baby Namer” would drive millions of parents in search of excellent names for their babies – Barack, anyone? – to my small business.

Make government relevant to small business owners again
I’m not worried about my taxes; I’m worried that my business won’t make any money at all and, even with minimal expenses, we’ll have to close shop. I’m worried that, even if we can afford to pay a salary, the cost and trouble of paying social security and medical insurance will mean we can’t hire someone. I’m worried that, without affordable sources of money – including my diminishing home equity and my own IRA – my business will stay small forever.

 By Colin Maclay, Acting Executive Director, and Caroline Nolan, Research Associate, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University

More than one billion people are online, with three times that amount connected via mobile devices, just one indication of how integrated digital technologies are with lives and livelihoods around the globe. While governments have for the most part encouraged these developments, they are increasingly aware of technology’s capacity to disrupt existing power structures and accordingly ambivalent. As governments seek to control information and online activities, private actors – information and communication technology (ICT) firms in particular – are increasingly called upon to assist in those efforts.

Many of us mistakenly assume that Internet governance doesn’t touch us, and maybe it doesn’t – what expression is allowed on the Net and whether your personal information is shared with law enforcement is often governed less by law and more by practice. As Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey have long argued, companies providing technology services are important Internet points of control  and are under great pressure to comply with local laws and practices, which can be at odds with international standards, corporate values, and social norms.

Facets of these corporate dilemmas have been explored by the OpenNet Initiative, the Citizen Lab, Chilling Effects, and other keen observers like Rebecca Mackinnon, but we are just beginning to understand the scope of this rapidly evolving problem.  Most of us remain more familiar with a few infamous incidents in certain countries than with the real challenges arising with less fanfare across the world. The emergent nature of global technologies, business models, and government responses makes these complex problems particularly difficult for law to address effectively , at least in the near term.  These networked, distributed issues require a dynamic approach, capable of evolving and scaling alongside the problem, and ideally ahead of it.

Launching this week, the Global Network Initiative is a multi-stakeholder effort – grounded in a set of guiding principles, supported by implementation guidelines, and a governance, accountability and learning framework  – that establishes a robust, responsive platform for participating companies, NGOs, investors, academics, and others to work together to protect and advance the rights to free expression and privacy in the ICT sector worldwide. The launch represents the empowerment of a coalition that can support companies as they resist governments that seek to enlist them in acts of censorship and surveillance in violation of international standards.

This ground-breaking approach was developed with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!,  Human Rights Watch,  Committee to Protect Journalists, Research Center for Information Law at University of St. Gallen, Switzerland FIR, School of Information at University of California-Berkeley, Calvert, F&C Investments  and other organizations – hopefully, with many others introducing still greater diversity to come. Our varied views and experiences can be challenging, they push - and allow – us to consider the problem and approaches to it across multiple dimensions, ultimately helping us to balance aspiration and reality (or near term progress with long-term success) in a way that no one sector would likely achieve.

The actions of (and expectations for) companies will evolve over time. Early commitments center on responsible decision-making, specifically developing the capacity to anticipate and address concerns relating to privacy and expression.  Among other steps, companies will form cross-functional leadership teams and train employees; conduct human rights impact assessments before entering new geographical or service markets, developing associated strategies to mitigate those risks; and encourage participation in GNI by relevant partners.

Company relations with law enforcement can be complex, due to obligations to support both legitimate law enforcement aims and commitments to protect user rights (which is also clearly a business interest).  Under GNI guidelines, companies will request written documentation explaining the legal basis for government restrictions; will seek to minimize the impact of any such restrictions; and will challenge governments when faced with requests that appear inconsistent with domestic law or international human rights standards.

These activities will be verified through an accountability and learning framework, in which outside monitors will explore what is working and what is not, ensuring that companies are making progress on their commitments, and developing remediation where they are not.  Companies’ public reporting will foster greater transparency with users and the wider public.

Beyond these internal commitments (which companies are already introducing), we are optimistic about the Initiative’s capacity for collective action that can have a transformative effect on government behavior and lasting impact. 

As a university research center, the Berkman Center will focus on building the GNI’s underlying foundation – its capacity for learning and research and information sharing – developing strategies to identify, understand, and address the threats to and opportunities for privacy and free expression.

We are in the early stages of a long road but are fortunate to have recognized that these are network issues: they emerge from and are characterized by the distributed nature of ICTs. Effective solutions should be built upon the same platform, with efforts that are independent yet coordinated; responses that are tried, evaluated and refined over time; and lessons that are shared and adapted; and all the while, striving for transparency. The Global Network Initiative connects our contention that the digital world not only gives rise to new challenges, but also allows the formation of new institutions that respond effectively to them.