Wri en Testimony of Markham Erickson
Vice President of Government A airs and Public Policy, Google
Senate Commi ee on the Judiciary
Subcommi ee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights“Big Data, Big Questions: Implications for Competition and Consumers”
September 21, 2021

Chairwoman Klobuchar, Ranking Member Lee, and distinguished members of the
Subcommi ee:
Thank you for the oppo unity to appear before you today. My name is Markham
Erickson. I am a Vice President of Government A airs and Public Policy at Google. I
have worked at the intersection of technology and policy for over 25 years, primarily inprivate practice where I had the oppo unity to work on issues that de ned theevolution of the modern Internet. In my role at Google, I oversee a global team ofsubject ma er expe s focused on the application of law and policy to technology andthe internet, including on issues related to data governance and competition.
We appreciate the topic of this hearing on the implications of data for competition andconsumers. Data should be used to make consumers' lives be er by improving thequality and diversity of products and services available,1 while protecting users’ privacyand giving them control over their data. In this testimony, I will describe (1) how Google
uses and protects data; (2) how data mobility empowers consumers and boosts
competition, including data po ability and advancing open data; and (3) that dataalone does not guarantee be er products for consumers.
How we use and protect data
Data plays an impo ant role in making the Google products and services people use
everyday functional and helpful. We are commi ed to treating that data responsibly
and protecting privacy with strict protocols and innovative privacy technologies.
1

For example: Doctors can use data to improve patient outcomes, scientists rely on data to better predict
weather, and governments rely on data to monitor things like the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. And
brick and mortar retail businesses reduce costs and connect with and help consumers through theinnovative use of data.

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Google combines insights from data with industry-leading technology to develop
products that help people nd directions, grow their businesses, or search for
information. Google provides information about the personal data we collect and how
we use it—such as to provide be er services—to our users and the public. We provide
notice not just through our privacy policy2, but also through our work to actively inform
individuals about data use in the context of the services themselves, helping to makethe information relevant and actionable. On an individual level, what data is collected
and how it is used depends on how each person uses our services and how they
manage their privacy controls.
Data is one element of our adve ising business, where it helps us connect people with
relevant adve isements. Adve ising is Google's main source of revenue, and enables
us to make many of our agship products, including Search and Maps, available forfree to billions of people around the world.3 Google’s adve ising pla orms suppo
businesses of all types and sizes by helping them reach customers. To give an example
of what this means for small businesses, the owner of a local ower store, Studley
Flowers in Rochester, New Hampshire said, “Google Ads has provided us with acost-e ective way to compete with the national ower delivery brands and their larger
ad budgets. Additionally, it provides us with a way to make sure that when locals
search for owers, we stay top of mind against those larger brands. Our investment in
Google tools has ce ainly paid o , and we’re excited to see what’s next.”4
Google also helps millions of website publishers earn adve ising revenue on their sites
and apps. The ads shown are informed by a search query or page content, but can also
be based on a user's interests or other personal data if their privacy se ings permit.5
We do not sell our users personal information to adve isers, or to anyone else.
Our business relies on ensuring our users’ trust, speci cally in how we use and protect
their data. We do this in pa by o ering industry-leading controls to manage privacy
and empowering users to adjust what data is stored in their Google Account. Threebillion users visit their Google accounts every year, where they can review and change
their privacy se ings and delete data stored in their account. For example, Google
2

https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US
https://about.google/intl/en_US/how-our-business-works/
4
https://partnertestimonials.withgoogle.com/?_ga=2.19953275.2136290102.1632085855-932915823.163
0594247#q[15]5https://howwemakemoney.withgoogle.com/
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users can always turn o personalized ads6 in their Account Se ings7 while still using
Google products for free. And since 2019,8 we have o ered industry-leading
auto-delete features that give our users the option to automatically delete data fromtheir account, like their Search History. Sta ing in 2020,9 new accounts auto-delete
some account data by default a er 18 months. We regularly prompt our users to review
and manage their privacy and security se ings with emails and promotions on the
Google homepage.
We also invest in research and development of cu ing-edge privacy and security
engineering techniques that are applied in our products. We share a range of these
innovative tools in open source formats, which are free for anyone—including
competing companies—to use, bene ing the broader ecosystem. For example,
Google’s di erential privacy library has been used by hundreds of developers aroundthe globe to gain insight from data while protecting individual privacy.10
In addition to pu ing users in control, we keep their data secure by default. Every day,we block 100 million phishing a empts and 15 billion spam messages in Gmail andencrypt four billion photos11. Our free Safe Browsing12 tool helps keep the rest of theInternet secure, automatically protecting more than four billion devices every day byshowing warnings to users when they a empt to navigate to dangerous sites or
download dangerous les.
We constantly innovate to improve privacy across our own products and on ourpla orms. This sometimes means nding ways to reduce the amount of personal
information needed to achieve similar outcomes. For example, we recently announced
Privacy Sandbox, a collaborative initiative that aims to help build a more private andsecure web. Through the Sandbox initiative, we are working with the ads industry todevelop new digital adve ising tools that protect people’s privacy and prevent covetracking, while continuing to suppo an open and free Internet enabled by adve ising.
From the sta of this project, we developed these tools in an open manner, and sought
feedback from industry pa ners, civil society, and governments. Because many
publishers and adve isers rely on online adve ising to fund their websites to connect
6

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/465?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop
https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662856?
8
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/automatically-delete-data/
9
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-private-information-private/10
https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/09/enabling-developers-and-organizations.html
11https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/our-work-keep-you-safe/
12
https://safebrowsing.google.com/
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with customers, ge ing this balance right is key to keeping the web open andaccessible to everyone. We are proud of our work to apply innovative solutions thatbalance these interests.
Data mobility empowers consumers and boosts competition
There are considerable options to use available data safely, including tools andresources from Google. Data can be transferred safely in two ways: personal
information can be moved from one service to another based on a speci c individual’s
instruction, and datasets can be shared safely as open data using appropriate privacy
technologies.
Data po ability
Google has been a leader on data po ability for over a decade, enabling our users to
expo their data and take it to another pla orm. Google’s approach to data po ability
is simple: the user comes rst.13 Data po ability empowers consumers to choose
services or online pla orms based on quality and individual preference—not because
they are locked in or because they can not move their data to alternatives.
Since 2011, Google Takeout14 has allowed users to expo their data from over 70
Google products and download them in machine-readable formats so that they canbe easily uploaded to another service. Takeout makes it possible for users to movetheir content to competing services,15 so no one feels they have to continue using
Google if they prefer a service of another company. Since our launch of Takeout, users
have expo ed more than one billion gigabytes from Google products.16
Additionally, through our leadership in the Data Transfer Project,17 Google makes it
easier for companies of all sizes to provide tools that let users move data between
online services. The Data Transfer Project, a pa nership among Google, Apple,
Facebook, Twi er, Microso , and Smugmug, suppo s the direct transfer of data
between providers, allowing consumers to seamlessly and securely transfer their data
directly from one provider to another, rather than downloading and re-uploading their13

https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2009/09/introducing-dataliberationorg-liberate.html
https://takeout.google.com/u/0/settings/takeout
15
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en16
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=FTC-2020-0062-0011
17
https://datatransferproject.dev/
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content. The code available through the Data Transfer Project reduces the engineering
work any individual company has to do to o er po ability to their users.18
Data po ability bene ts both consumers and competition. Giving users control overtheir data through easy-to-use data expo tools boosts competition by reducing theburden of switching services. It paves the way for innovative and new oppo unities forservice providers of all sizes, and empowers people to try new services and choose
the o ering that best suits their needs.
Advancing open data and AI for All
A i cial intelligence (AI) is a transformative technology, and we are commi ed tomaking it accessible to more people and institutions. Google is a leader in releasing
public data and tools that suppo advanced technological applications like machinelearning (ML) and AI.
Many of the largest successes in machine learning have come from data that is openly
available on the web. Google has released over 80 labeled datasets for ML researchersand developers to use.19 For example, we open sourced the Open Images dataset toprovide developers with geographically diverse images to suppo more inclusive
results for underrepresented cultures in ML models. And through TensorFlow—anecosystem of tools, programming libraries, and community resources—we areenabling developers from sta ups, large companies, and nonpro ts to more easily use
ML to build a variety of applications, from fraud detection in digital payments to online
English grammar correction.20 TensorFlow has more than 200,000 users and over 160
million downloads, and suppo s over $15 billion in economic impact in industries
including computer manufacturing and so ware publishing.
In some cases, data that is already publicly available is hard to use because it is hard tond. Google has developed cu ing edge tools to address this issue.21 For example,
Google pays for storage of, and provides public access to, public data available
through Google Cloud Public Dataset Program.22 Kaggle makes data science easier by
providing all the code needed to leverage over 80,000 public datasets.23 We also
launched a search engine for datasets called Dataset Search.24 Using a simple keyword
18

https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=FTC-2020-0062-0010
https://ai.google/tools/datasets/
20
https://www.tensorflow.org/
21
https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/sharing-open-data/
22
https://cloud.google.com/solutions/datasets
23
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets
24
https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/help
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search, users can discover datasets hosted in thousands of repositories across theWeb.25
Google also makes insights from our data publicly available in privacy-safe formats,contributing to impo ant research around the world. For example, Google Trends26
was launched in 2006 and provides access to a largely un ltered sample of actual
search requests made to Google. It is anonymized (no one is personally identi ed),categorized (determining the topic for a search query), and aggregated (grouped
together). Google Trends is a powe ul tool for researchers, journalists, and civilsociety. There are more than 21,000 research papers on Google Scholar that cite
Trends as a data source. 27
During COVID-19, we have leveraged our expe ise in open data and privacy to suppo
governments, health o cials, researchers, nonpro ts, and others to understand thechanging conditions around the pandemic. For example, Google provides a public
repository of open-source data related to the global response to the novel
coronavirus.28 This includes epidemiology and health datasets, as well as data on
government responses. We also share a privacy-safe version of Google’s own mobility
data. Google launched the COVID-19 Community Mobility Repo s29 in April of 2020.30
These repo s provide aggregated, anonymized mobility data. They use di erential
privacy to protect our user data, adding a i cial noise to our datasets and enablinghigh quality results without identifying any individual person.31 The repo s have helped
governments around the world understand how social distancing measures are
in uencing outcomes.
Companies of all sizes utilize code, tools, and knowledge sharing in open sourcepla orms to suppo their product development. Google is one of the largest
contributors to open source code to GitHub, a popular repository for so waredevelopment tools.32 In 2020, Googlers made more than 240,000 contributions to tens
25With this data, computer vision researchers can train image recognition systems. Waze for cities(https://www.waze.com/en-GB/wazeforcities) datasets are to inform mobility projects and policies, fromcongestion to event-specific traffic controls. Alphabet's Waymo Open Dataset(https://waymo.com/open/about/) contains high resolution sensor data collected by Waymo self-drivingcars to aid the research community in making advancements in machine perception and self-driving
technology.
26
https://trends.google.com/trends/
27
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22google+trends%22&btnG=28
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/publicly-available-covid-19-data-for-analytics
29
https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/30
https://blog.google/technology/health/covid-19-community-mobility-reports/
31
https://support.google.com/covid19-mobility/answer/9825414?hl=en&ref_topic=9822927
32
https://github.com/google7

of thousands of projects on GitHub.33 Google’s open source work includes AI building
blocks, data processing tools to process data including TensorFlow Privacy,34 andmodels for language understanding and computer vision. All of these contributions
make it easier for new and existing companies to develop and bring new products to
consumers.
Data alone does not guarantee be er products for consumers
Consumers have many choices over where they share their data—and they can and dochoose to share the same data with multiple providers. In our experience, data by itself
does not guarantee be er or more successful products. It is the investment,
innovation, and method that ma ers most.
Cu ing edge technology or new ideas allows new companies to succeed, sometimes
without any data at all. New entrants such as Zoom, Snapchat, Spotify, or Pinterest
have been successful because they provide an innovative product, not because they
have access to data from established companies.
Conversely, having more data does not itself guarantee success. Many businesses
have had access to data but have had products that struggled to succeed.
Drawing insights from raw or aggregated data, including publicly available data, iswhere a company can add pa icular value to consumers and businesses. The processof using information and feedback to improve products and services is not unique toGoogle or the online world—it takes place across all sectors of our economy, wheredata helps rms improve and innovate and be er serve consumers. It is what acompany makes of the data, not how much data they have or use that determines
their ability to innovate and succeed, and be er serve their customers.
For example, data is just one component of what makes Google Search a usefulproduct for users and businesses. To deliver Search results, Google's systems sothrough hundreds of billions of webpages in our Search index to nd the most relevant
and useful results for our users. The publicly available web is an impo ant data set tomake that happen and we also have invested in indexing a wide range of information
33

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/08/metrics-spikes-and-uncertainty-open-source-contribution-during-a-global-pandemic.html
34
https://blog.tensorflow.org/2019/03/introducing-tensorflow-privacy-learning.html

8from images, books, research papers, and much more to help our users understandthe world's information.35
We know we need to keep innovating to nd new ways for Search to deliver more
useful information faster and more conveniently to consumers. In 2020, we ran over
600,000 experiments that resulted in more than 4,500 improvements to Search.36
Improving our product involves steps as seemingly simple as a synonym system thatallows us to nd relevant documents even if they do not contain the exact words auser typed. For example, a user may search for "change laptop brightness" but the
manufacturer has wri en "adjust laptop brightness." Our systems understand thewords are related and are able to connect users with the right content. This system
took over ve years to develop and signi cantly improves results in over 30% of
searches across languages.37
Our focus on continually improving our products means that our greatest source ofinnovation comes from extensive research and development (R&D). Last year alone we
spent $27.6 billion on R&D, nearly ten times what we spent in 2009.
Advancements in AI and machine learning increasingly suppo ways to minimize theuse of data while continuing to deliver and improve helpful products people rely on
every day. For example, Google has been a leader in federated learning, a machinelearning approach that learns from a user’s interaction with a given device while
keeping all the training data on the device, so that the data does not need to be sharedwith a server.38 More recently, Google published research on Entities as Expe s AI,39
that answers text-based questions with less data.
Conclusion
We appreciate the oppo unity to share our views on the implications of data for
consumers and competition.

35

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-works/organizing-information/
https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-works/rigorous-testing/37
https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/how-search-works/ranking-results/
38
https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html
36

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https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/20/googles-entities-as-experts-ai-answers-text-based-questions-with-less-data/9

We recognize policymakers and regulators are working to protect privacy while also
considering arguments by those who contend that making more data available among
competitors would increase competition. These complex discussions involve de ning
the types of data at issue, as well as identifying the types of services that use data, andthe data necessary to make those services useful. We are encouraged to see some
privacy and competition regulators conferring more formally to contribute theirrelevant expe ise to the impo ant questions being considered, for example when aprivacy practice is being evaluated in an antitrust context. We will continue to engage
with policymakers and regulators, as well as other stakeholders, to suppo though ulregulation that encourages innovation and protects consumers. For example, we havelong suppo ed federal privacy legislation in the U.S.40
We are commi ed to protecting data through privacy, security, and user control, andto continuing to improve our products in a way that ensures more choice andcompetition. We look forward to engaging with this Commi ee on these impo ant
issues.
Thank you for the oppo unity to discuss our work today.

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https://blog.google/competition/#facts

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