February 2012

It's been said before, but it's worth saying again: Susan Wojcicki doesn't get enough credit outside Silicon Valley.

As Google's senior vice president of advertising, her work has been instrumental to the Internet giant's success: Wojcicki spearheaded the advertising platform AdWords, Google's biggest moneymaker, and pushed for the acquisition of YouTube in 2006. And Wojcicki's ad products accounted for 96% of Google's overall revenues last year, bringing in almost $36.5 billion. So it's fair to say that when she speaks, at least within the halls of Google, people listen.

At Morgan Stanley's Technology, Media and Telecom Conference earlier today, Wojcicki weighed in on a number of Google topics. Perhaps top of the heap these days is the issue of Google+, which has been subject to intense scrutiny. A feature called "Search Plus Your World," introduced in January, integrated Google+ photos and posts into Google's search results. The move caused some privacy advocates to cry foul and may have been cause for the U.S. Trade Federal Trade Commission to expand its antitrust probe to include Google+.

"With Google+, it's not just about building a social network," explained Wojcicki. "It's the idea of what is our experience when it revolves around people based on who you know, based on who you have in your Circles, how we [as users] think about the information that we [Google] give to you."

During the next few weeks, the Obama Administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy will submit to Congress a progress report on its search for a balanced approach to the contentious and complex question of how government-financed scientific research should be disseminated in the digital age.

Advocates of “open access,” who include many scientists, libraries and universities, say that reports of scientific discoveries paid for by government grants should be made available on the Web immediately and without charge to anyone who wants to see them. Opponents, which include many private and nonprofit publishers and many professional societies, argue that an unfettered policy would bankrupt journals and make a shambles of the peer-review and article selection system that has served the world scientific community for centuries. Both sides have bills pending before Congress, and both have bipartisan support, but sponsors of legislation favored by publishers said Monday that they would not push their bill in this session, and neither measure seemed likely to move forward in an election year.

Matt Spaccarelli, an unemployed student who won a small-claims fight with AT&T over its throttling, or slowing down, of his smartphone, wants to make it easier for anyone whose smartphone was throttled to fight the carrier in court.

Over the weekend, he published a Web site containing the documentation he presented to a judge, which helped him win $850. Spaccarelli lists the forms a customer needs to go to small-claims court, as well a subpoena document that someone can use to request information from AT&T. He also includes documents describing what he read to the judge, as well as information about data speeds and government policies on networks.