Google tries to avoid the regulatory noose

Google is on a charm offensive to convince governments and the general public that the internet advertising company should not be subjected to new privacy or antitrust regulation.

“When markets get regulated, creative innovation is slowed. We don’t think that is a good outcome,” said Eric Schmidt, chief executive. “A much better outcome is for us to use good judgement. We take what we see as the consumer interest as our guiding principle,” he said.

Mr Schmidt argued that, far from abusing its huge market power, Google has benefited consumers by challenging incumbents in various markets. Google’s digital copying of books, for example, came from this desire to put consumer interests first, he said.

The comments appeared an oblique reference to recent news that US anti-trust authorities are making informal inquiries into some aspects of Google’s settlement with publishers of the lawsuits over its BookSearch service, which makes digital copies of titles and serves selected excerpts to users in response to search queries.

Mr Schmidt was speaking at Google’s Zeitgeist event this week in Hertfordshire in the UK, where luminaries, including a smattering of European royalty, gathered for two days of high-level discussion on everything from technology to the environment.

Google is coming under increasing pressure over issues such as how long it keeps data on people who use its internet search engine, and faces criticism from privacy activists over its Street View service, which shows eye-level photos of all the streets in cities around Europe and the US. Greece recently banned Google’s Street View cars from filming in the country, although negotiations with privacy officials are continuing and Google is still hoping to be able to resolve issues.

Meanwhile, in the US, in addition to the BookSearch inquiry, regulators are investigating whether there are any competition issues raised by Mr Schmidt’s position as a director on Apple’s board.

Larry Page, the firm’s co-founder, said he was concerned that regulation would be applied prematurely and without proper consideration.

“I am pretty worried that we are making decisions on these things without enough understanding. The public as a whole and regulators have not engaged enough on this to know what the issues are,” he said.

Mr Page said that data retained by Google was valuable and could be used for the public good, such as predicting flu outbreaks. Watching for trends in Google searches - such as people looking for flu medication - can forecast the beginning of an epidemic up to two weeks ahead of health authorities, he said.

“The less of these logs we retain the more likely we are to all die from an epidemic,” Mr Page said starkly. He did not say, however, whether Google had had foresight of the current Mexican flu epidemic.

Whether or not regulators will be content to allow Google to exercise its own judgement remains to be seen. Both Washington and Brussels have increasingly started to ponder whether Google’s dominance of the internet poses problems. Part of Google’s response has been the increased appearance of Peter Fleicher, the company’s privacy commissioner, at meetings with officials on both sides of the Atlantic, including a presentation last week at a UK Information Commissioner’s conference on privacy.