All too often, the public policy world focuses on subtle legislative distinctions and on regulatory details. But once in a while, an issue comes along that strikes to the heart of the big principles. Such an issue erupted last week in the UK - an issue that incorporates two of the most important subjects on these pages: privacy and innovation.

The British Government's Digital Economy bill includes ideas that worry us - as well as other Internet companies such as Yahoo, Facebook and Ebay. In particular, we are concerned about the bill's Clause 17 which, in an effort to fight piracy, would allow the Secretary of State to amend the Copyright Act to "prevent or reduce the infringement of copyright by means of the Internet" without additional legislation. All of us have joined together and written the UK government to express our opposition.

Let me explain why. The government's stated attempt to spur Brits to get online in an ambitious Digital Britain project is laudatory. We do not object to fighting against infringement of copyright: in fact, we are often inventing new technology solutions to help content creators protect their material. A good example is our Video ID technology which identifies copyrighted material when it is uploaded onto YouTube and then helps the copyright holder sell advertising tied to the video. We also understand why the UK Government wanted to make their legislation future proof, to cope with technical change. But, as we have said many times in the past, legislation is often like a slow moving tank in the Internet world. Innovations happen faster than most politicians can even imagine, and to try and future proof laws requires laws so big and so powerful that the risks of misuse far outweigh the benefits.

While we remain unsure of how this Clause 17 is intended to be implemented, we fear it could require the Government to start gathering more information about users Internet habits, even when no illegal practices have taken place. The first step required of any government using these new powers would be to carry out some sort of assessment of whether significant copyright infringements are taking place. That assessment would have to be based on independent facts - and what "facts" exist other than through user data? Crucially, such an assessment would require examining the behaviour of all UK Internet users. This is wrong. We fiercely protect the privacy of our users across the world and do not believe that fear of illegal activity somewhere on the Internet is enough to justify intrusion of activity everywhere on the Internet.

Another concern with the Clause is that it could stifle the Internet's innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. Great new business models need legal clarity and regulatory space to come to market. Having powers like these in the back pocket, able to be used without significant Parliamentary oversight is enough to put off any young entrepreneur wanting to invent new ways of making content legally available. This was almost certainly not the intention's of the Clause's intentions. but good intentions don't make great laws.

Posted by Sarah Hunter, UK Policy Manager

When hundreds of newspaper publishers gathered this week in India for the World Association of Newspapers' annual Congress, they spent much of their time debating the impact of the Internet on their business. We know the transition to digital news has been wrenching. But we also believe we are here to help publishers attract an ever larger audience of online readers, engage more and more readers, and find new ways of helping them make money, both through ads and paid for content.

Senior Vice-President and Chief Legal Counsel David Drummond traveled to India and gave a speech as part of a debate titled "What do we do about Google?" He prefaced his remarks by imploring the assembled newspaper publishers, "don't shoot, I come in peace." The Internet, with or without Google, offers newspapers new challenges. "If Google didn’t exist, would the industry be any better off than it is today?," he asked, before pausing "Don’t answer that just yet!" In a related effort to reach out to the news industry, our CEO Eric Schmidt published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

For regular readers of this blog, you will have seen we announced two features to give publishers more control over their content and how it's displayed online. First, we announced improvements to our First Click Free feature, which puts publishers in greater control of their content, and how much of it they wish to let users consult for free. Secondly, we announced a new crawler specifically for Google News. It gives publishers the ability to give Google News one set of instructions on whether to crawl their content and another set to Google Search.

This is not the end of the story, just the beginning. We look forward to working with publishers in coming months and years to help insure the survival of a vigorous news industry.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director of Communications and Public Affairs - Northern Europe

During the past few days, leaders of the news industry have explored a subject that's central to democracy: the future of news. I represented Google at a Federal Trade Commission workshop Washington called "From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Digital Age?" We're an optimistic company, so maybe it's no surprise that we believe journalism will not only survive, but thrive on the Internet. And we think we can help.

Why does Google care about the future of the news? Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, and journalism is an important source of the high-quality information for which our users search. It also serves a vital public service. So, as the industry goes through a wrenching period of transition, we're working with newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, web-only outlets and other news organizations that publish online to find solutions together. We applaud the experiments that many publishers are trying and want to work with them to help drive even more innovation. We're focusing on helping news publishers in three key areas:

Traffic: Google makes it easy for people to find the news they're looking for and discover new sources of information. Google sends about 4 billion clicks each month, or 100,000 per minute, to news publishers via Google News, web search and other services. Each click is an opportunity for publishers to show ads, win loyal readers and register users. They can also sell online subscriptions: news publishers can charge for their work and ensure that it's discovered through Google -- these two are not mutually exclusive. Of course, news publishers have control over whether their content is made discoverable through Google. We gave them even more control yesterday when we launched a separate crawler for Google News, which allows publishers to give us a set of automated instructions about whether we index their content for Google News and a different set of instructions for Google web search.

Audience engagement: Google offers news publishers free tools to better engage with their audiences. Examples include YouTube Direct, which helps news outlets solicit and manage online video submissions from citizen reporters, and Google Maps, which publishers use to create and embed custom maps to augment their coverage. You'll see us try experiments like Google Fast Flip, which we launched in Google Labs with more than three dozen publishing partners to provide online news consumers with a "magazine-like" experience.

Revenue: Google provides a variety of advertising solutions to help publishers maximize their revenue. Two of the best-known are AdSense, for serving relevant ads on a publisher's web pages, and DoubleClick tools, for managing, serving and measuring display ads. There's still a big gap between the amount of time people spend online and the amount of advertising dollars spent online, so we're investing in interest-based advertising and other ways to make ads even more relevant (and as a result, more valuable) to publications' readers. Google is also exploring technology solutions to make paid content systems more seamless for publishers and users, such as subscription services and billing platforms.

Just as there's no single cause for the news industry's current struggles, there's no single solution. We would love your thoughts on additional ways we can help journalism thrive on the Internet. Feel free to tune in the webcast of the proceedings and share your ideas with us in the comments below.

Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product

As newspapers consider charging for access to their online content, some publishers have asked: Should we put up pay walls or keep our articles in Google News and Google Search? In fact, they can do both - the two aren't mutually exclusive. There are a few ways we work with publishers to make their subscription content discoverable. Today we're updating one of them, so we thought it would be a good time to remind publishers about some of their options.

Google has strict policies against what's known as cloaking: showing one web page to the crawler that indexes it but then a different page to a user. We do this so that users aren't deceived into clicking through to a site that's not what they were expecting. While the anti-cloaking policies are important for users, they do create some challenges for publishers who charge for content. Our crawlers can't fill out a registration or payment form to see what's behind a site's paywall, but they need access to the information in order to index it.

One way we overcome this is through a program called First Click Free. Participating publishers allow the crawler to index their subscription content, then allow users who find one of those articles through Google News or Google Search to see the full page without requiring them to register or subscribe. The user's first click to the content is free, but when a user clicks on additional links on the site, the publisher can show a payment or registration request. First Click Free is a great way for publishers to promote their content and for users to check out a news source before deciding whether to pay. Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free. Now, we've updated the program so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing. If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day. We think this approach still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis.

In addition to First Click Free, we offer another solution: We will crawl, index and treat as "free" any preview pages - generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story - that they make available to us. This means that our crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user. Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it's not cloaking. We will then label such stories as "subscription" in Google News. The ranking of these articles will be subject to the same criteria as all sites in Google, whether paid or free. Paid content may not do as well as free options, but that is not a decision we make based on whether or not it's free. It's simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it.

These are two of the ways we allow publishers to make their subscription content discoverable, and we're going to keep talking with publishers to refine these methods. After all, whether you're offering your content for free or selling it, it's crucial that people find it. Google can help with that.

Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager