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Google famously started out as little more than a more efficient algorithm for ranking Web pages. But the company also built its success on crawling the Web—using software that visits every page in order to build up a vast index of online content.

A nonprofit called Common Crawl is now using its own Web crawler and making a giant copy of the Web that it makes accessible to anyone. The organization offers up over five billion Web pages, available for free so that researchers and entrepreneurs can try things otherwise possible only for those with access to resources on the scale of Google’s. New search engines are just one of the things that can be built using an index of the Web, says Gilad Elbaz, who founded Common Crawl and who points out that Google’s translation software was trained using online text available in multiple languages. “The only way they could do that was by starting with a massive crawl. That’s put them on the way to build the Star Trek translator,” he says. “Having an open, shared corpus of human knowledge is simply a way of democratizing access to information that’s fundamental to innovation.”

France, which is studying ways of curbing legal tax avoidance by big Internet firms, has decided to go after all of them to seek payment of back taxes, Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg said. The government had decided, Montebourg said, "to launch tax retrieval procedures covering all of the Internet giants." He did not elaborate and it was not clear whether the comment, made in a wide-ranging interview about French industry, referred specifically to existing tax investigations of the Internet search engine and retail giants Google and Amazon, or was suggesting a broader campaign.

[Commentary] An informed society is one where citizens have the resources, education and skills to access and participate in the free flow of reliable and pertinent information. They do this through a diverse range of platforms and media organizations that empower them to make considered decisions about their economic, social and political lives. And we take it as a given that in a knowledge economy and an age of networked intelligence, better-informed societies are more successful.

But this is a time of information turmoil. Many traditional media organizations are struggling. Scores of newspapers have gone out of business in the United States alone in the last decade. Magazines, radio, non-fiction book publishing and even television are all in various stages of upheaval. The media of the industrial age is changing. Allowed to flourish, new media technologies offer the promise for societies to be better informed, more open and more successful than their industrial age counterparts. A World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Informed Societies will be encouraging governments to adopt a code of conduct to ensure their societies are informed.

This code includes:

1. Access: Government should take all steps possible to ensure that their citizens have access to both old and new media. Governments should enact policies that protect media freedom and the openness of the Internet.
2. Education: Education is a right and requirement for every citizen. In a world of growing resources and tools it is a disgrace that the quality of education is declining in many parts of the world.
3. Media literacy: Governments should ensure that citizens have access to complete, reliable and pertinent information, and know how to use it. Governments should not censor, but instead create an environment in which ideas can be exchanged freely both on and off the Internet.
4. Transparency: Governments should embrace transparency and freedom of information. This may include legislation, regulation, education and partnering with public and private sector organizations to encourage openness. Media organizations should act in a manner that is responsible, transparent and accountable.
5. Privacy: It is inevitable that the data available about each of us will continue to grow. Governments and business should understand that the need for security and profit must be tempered by the need for freedom, rooted in individual privacy. Governments should help educate citizens about the right to privacy.

The Federal Communications Commission has dismissed a request by wireless Internet service providers that it rescind its notice seeking comment on a list of census blocks in price cap territories that are unserved by fixed broadband, a list based on the National Broadband Map.

The FCC said that the request from the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) was not "ripe" for a decision because the notice was not a final action, but instead a request for info that could inform that final action, which is the dispensation of more broadband subsidy money as the FCC migrates traditional phone subsidies to broadband. Cable operators want the opportunity to weigh in and correct what they see as inaccuracies in the map that show served areas to be unserved. Areas identified as unserved will be eligible for Universal Service Fund subsidies for competing broadband providers, including wireless, which cable ops don't want to be used to overbuild their existing wired service.