Kent Walker, JD ’87

When the Supreme Court declined to review the Authors Guild challenge to Google Books last April, letting stand the Second Circuit’s ruling that the searchable digital library is “fair use” of the authors’ work, it ended a decade-long legal battle. But the case started a new chapter of law, not only protecting a public resource for finding books and information but also underscoring the importance of the fair use doctrine for the new, and quickly changing, digital age in which we live.

As general counsel of a company at the forefront of innovation, from the way that we find information to the way that we drive cars, Kent Walker does not shy away from legal challenges. As Google has grown—clocking about 2 trillion searches annually and over a billion unique searches each month—Walker’s team has pushed the legal envelope to meet the new realities of the post-internet, post-Google world.

A significant part of Walker’s day is taken up by policy and legal debates over issues in countries around the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, early in his career—before venturing into in-house for startups including AirTouch Communications, Netscape, Liberate Technologies, and eBay—he was an assistant U.S. attorney at the Department of Justice. There, too, he enjoyed looking at the new issues. He filed and won the first federal criminal copyright infringement case and assisted the attorney general and deputy attorney general on technology questions and issues like the allocation of federal prosecutors across the U.S.

Walker compares working at Google to taking a law exam—every day—the issues always new. It requires a knack for thinking outside the box, sometimes when the box hasn’t even been invented yet. And that he does. Google has settled an FTC antitrust investigation into search and ads and won a seminal Viacom copyright case against YouTube and a high-profile Oracle case involving copyrights in software. The legal team has handled hundreds of corporate acquisitions and transactions, including Google’s purchase and subsequent sale of Motorola and the Alphabet Inc. restructuring. Google lawyers are advocating for free expression in debates over the European Court of Justice ruling on the “Right to be Forgotten” and legal challenges to content on Google Search, YouTube, Blogger, Google Maps, and more. And new research—from advanced genetics to developments in machine learning—continues to raise new questions.

It’s an exhaustive list, but in talking about the work he does—Walker is upbeat and enthusiastic. This is a man in his element, engaging with the challenges, not shrinking from them. But there is more to it than that. He believes in the power of sharing goods and services and ideas around the world—that it is a rising tide, across generations, that has lifted all boats and that notions of trade and technology are the twin engines of progress for everyone. And Google and the internet are an important part of that equation.

As we sat down for the interview that follows, Walker said, “If you look at the fact that something like 800 million people around the world have come out of extreme poverty in the last 30 years, that is simply unprecedented in the history of mankind. And that’s in large part because of a form of globalization that is facilitated by the fiber networks that connect people in China and Africa and India, to people in Europe and the United States. It’s a fundamental improvement in living standards around the world. It’s the great untold story of our time.”

Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Assistant Professor of Law

Lisa Larrimore Ouellette is a scientist and a lawyer. Her PhD studies in physics at Cornell focused on nanotechnology, and she also worked at the prestigious Max Planck Institute, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), and NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology). She is someone with a view of the big picture, going to Yale Law School to focus not only on patent law but also “innovation law,” a term she uses to cover the various aspects of law that intersect with and affect the innovation process.

Already a prolific scholar, she has published nearly 20 journal articles and 250 posts for the IP blog she launched at Yale Law, called Written Description. An empirical scholar with a firm grounding in scientific methods, her work explores policy issues including the value of scientific disclosures in patents, the patenting of federally funded research under the Bayh–Dole Act, the polarized public discourse over patents, and the integration of patent law with other levers of innovation policy. She has also written about how online search results could address the evidentiary problem of trademark distinctiveness and about the potential for different standards of review to create what she terms “deference mistakes” in areas such as patent and trademark law. For one of her current projects, she is collaborating with Stanford Law faculty to examine if patent peer-review could improve the patenting process.

Prior to her appointment at Stanford Law School in 2014, Ouellette was a postdoctoral fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She also clerked for Judge Timothy B. Dyk of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and Judge John M. Walker, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Ouellette has found her intellectual home at Stanford Law, where she teaches IP: International and Comparative Patent Law, IP: Patents, and Intro to IP.

“This is the best place in the country for studying technology-related law and intellectual property. You have some of the best faculty and students, but it’s also in the heart of Silicon Valley where you can interact with people in tech companies and bring them in to talk with our students. It’s a great opportunity.”
The interview that follows digs in to the legal work that running the tech giant Google requires. —By Sharon Driscoll

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Lisa Larrimore Ouellette: Let’s start off by talking about how lawyering at Google is different from practicing in other environments. You’ve described leading Google’s legal team as like being in a perpetual law school exam, given the ground-breaking nature of many of Google’s projects—from self-driving cars to book digitization to smart contact lenses.  How does this change the job of being a lawyer compared with working in more established markets?

Kent Walker: While we’re celebrating Google’s 18th birthday, we continue to see an incredible rate of change, and the questions and the answers are different every year. We’re seeing the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the company is getting into new generations of hardware and working with different enterprises around the world, and we’ve launched the Alphabet transition, with OtherBets working on driverless cars and advanced genetics and wireless communications balloons.

And the world around us is changing just as fast. The internet has always been a transnational institution, promoting a worldwide exchange of ideas, access to information, and economic progress. Today we’re seeing what you might call the revenge of the Westphalian order, as individual nation states seek to assert more jurisdiction and autonomy, leading to all sorts of legal and policy tensions and risking the balkanization of the internet.

It all makes for a fascinating practice.

Ouellette: It sounds like your perpetual law school exam covers every course in the law school curriculum, and not just in the United States, with users and operations around the globe. So, I’m curious: What has presented the steepest learning curve for you?

Walker: At Google, we are often faced with entirely new products where there’s not a lot of law yet. So there are learning curves for everybody and we’re figuring this all out together. In many cases, our in-house lawyers know as much or more than outside firms because there’s just no area of specialty that’s developed around these areas yet.

Ouellette: How do you gather information about the laws governing technologies that are so new and developing, like flying balloons around the world?

Walker: As you might imagine, it varies by technology. We have enough lawyers internationally that we can go out and ask for their advice from the field. And in some cases, we work with law firms that are even more distributed than we are. But it’s very difficult to analyze the laws of 200 different countries. We do the best we can to make sure we’re complying with all the present and future rules out there, and we’ve usually gotten it right. Our rule of thumb has been if our products are creating value for people and society, courts will usually come out on the side of delivering that kind of benefit.

That’s not to say that there aren’t surprises along the way. For example, we’ve launched in a country only to discover that there’s a 20-year-old law on the books that creates an unforeseen issue—and then we have to adjust our implementation. When we launched Street View in Tokyo, we learned that Japanese streets tend to be fairly narrow and walls in front of houses tend to be fairly low. That meant that the cameras on our cars were actually looking through people’s front windows. So we lowered the camera masts to protect privacy, and Street View has become very popular in Japan. So we adjust as we go along, partnering with our engineers to make sure that we’re complying with both the law and with cultural norms around the world.

Ouellette: It sounds like you’re facing legal problems and adapting new technologies to fit them. I’m curious about this relationship between technological development and legal constraints. Do you find there are times when the legal team is suggesting new technological opportunities? Or, suggesting technological solutions to legal problems, as when you built Content ID to resolve concerns about copyright infringement on YouTube?

Walker: Sure, but we don’t want to take too much credit for our product development! Most of our great ideas come from engineers, but there are times when we need to tweak products to address specific legal issues.

The fundamental innovation of YouTube was very powerful—a new kind of platform that people could use to create and share videos with their friends and family or around the world. And people have loved it.

Hundreds of hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. It’s phenomenal—vastly more video than had been previously created or stored in human history. In developing Content ID, our engineers were able to look at this fire hose of content coming into an ocean of existing videos and detect a potential match to copyrighted content that someone had previously claimed. And the engineers were actually able to go beyond identical matches and look for similarities—images that might have been tilted or tinted, or tiny clips of longer works.

Google now has eight products that are used by more than a billion people around the world. So the volumes, and the need for scale, are immense. We get millions of copyright claims a day for search results alone—people wanting to remove things from search results and the like. And the European right to be forgotten has generated hundreds of thousands of requests. So we work all the time with our colleagues in the engineering team to help identify and address problems algorithmically.

I don’t want anyone to think, though, that you can automate your way out of some of these hard problems. Technology has its limits. For example, on YouTube, depending on context and where it is played, the exact same video clip can be incitement, or news coverage, or parody, or even counter-speech against violent extremism. So you need a combination of algorithmic analysis and human judgment to get the right answers in individual cases.

Ouellette: You were talking earlier about doing things that are pro-consumer, so that the law will evolve to support your technological developments, at least most of the time. But it can be really risky, particularly in a case like Google Books where there could be billions of dollars on the line. How do you assess the likelihood that a judge will agree with you on a case where you’re trying to move the law forward?

Walker:  In many of these areas, it isn’t clear—it’s a matter of judgment. When Google launched in 1998, it wasn’t immediately known whether search would even be legal in many jurisdictions. Search let people find all kinds of information online and it raised, and still raises, issues in areas like copyright, defamation, privacy, etc. But the net benefit to the world of having search engines is so great that the courts concluded that we should all fundamentally be on the same side and make sure that the legal environment accommodates the new technology. A similar dynamic plays out in lots of areas. With Book Search, the Second Circuit ruled that the use was so transformative and the access to books that otherwise would have been lost or inaccessible so important that Book Search fell squarely within the spirit of copyright law’s concept of fair use.

We don’t always get these issues right—there are difficult questions and different perspectives. But it’s some of the most interesting work that our lawyers do—trying to make those calls and helping our engineers design remarkable products that pass legal muster.

Ouellette: It seems like one of the reasons you were so successful with something like Google Books is because of the user-testing—putting it out there and having judges and clerks and regulators see for themselves how powerful and transformative the tool is. I’d say it’s hard to, at that point, put the genie back into the bottle.

Walker: I think that gets to a deep truth. Google is at our best when we lead with our products. Lots of companies have good lawyers and lobbyists, but not every company has our products or our engineers. While you can always come up with a theory as to why a new product might create an issue, in practice, when you see the utility, the usefulness, the value, what my mom calls “the magic” of Google products,  that’s our best ambassador.

Of course you’re right—different generations interact with technology in different ways. But in the long term, we’ve been able to move forward in ways that promote innovation. And I’m proud of the success we’ve had in winning the vast majority of our cases and promoting good laws.

We recognize that new technologies, new ways of finding and sharing and using information, raise important cultural issues. The European right to be forgotten, for example, was heavily debated, even within Europe. It went to Europe’s highest court—the Court of Justice of the European Union—and the advocate general ruled in our favor, but then the full court went in the opposite direction in weighing the right to privacy ahead of the right to access to information. We complied with that decision, and now we’re embroiled in a court case in France about whether or not the French right to be forgotten law should be applied worldwide. The French think of it as an issue of fundamental rights, while we think of it as a potentially dramatic infringement on the rights of people around the world to post and access information. It’s a novel jurisdictional issue that risks a race to the bottom—with every country trying to impose its own standards on internet users in every other country. These are important policy debates and we’re doing our best to fight our corner, on behalf of the company and our users.

Ouellette: Going back to the Google magic you mentioned and the kinds of products you are able to offer—the disruptive innovation. Does working at a company whose mission is “to organize the world’s information” make this aspect of lawyering different from working elsewhere?

Walker:  Much of the work we do is not dissimilar from work that lawyers at other in-house operations do. But the thing that I find most exciting about Google is that we’re on the edge of so much technological and social change. We’re not mature enough as a company to have gotten to the phase where we’re just doing variations on existing products. People ask me about whether a new product will be legal. A traditional legal answer might be “Well, let me look up what the law says about it.” My answer is usually more like “You tell me whether it’ll be socially valuable and I’ll tell you if it’ll be legal.” That’s often the best guide we have, since there might not be a law on point, or the most relevant law might have been written 100 years ago in very different circumstances.

Advising on cutting-edge technology often means that you have a chance to help develop the law. When I was at eBay, there was a question about whether online auctions would be legal in France, because the law, written by Napoleon himself, chartered four families—and only four families—to conduct auctions. Then eBay came along and democratized that process and made it possible for anyone to buy and sell anything. eBay consulted five different law firms before we could find one that said, “Well, that might be legal.” And ultimately the courts found that the value of letting people buy and sell online was so great that they interpreted the law to permit online auctions.

We aim to be on the side of constructive progress, pushing the envelope without tearing through it. We want to be respectful. We recognize that different cultures around the world have different perspectives and needs and issues and all of those are reflected in local laws. We don’t want to ride roughshod over those concerns. But at the same time, we do want to be the evangelists for new technologies, for new ways of doing things that ultimately benefit businesses and consumers.

Ouellette: I know Google has been a leading advocate for patent reform in basically every branch of government, with some degree of success. What do you think is the most important thing that still needs to be changed about the U.S. patent system, and what is the most likely institution for that change?

Walker:  I would start by remembering that the patents and copyrights clause of Article 1, Section 8 is the only article in the U.S. Constitution that has a purpose clause. The goal of patents, copyrights, and similar protections is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. That theme runs through a lot of what we do here.

To further promote that goal in our patent system, I think we need to address issues of patent quality and litigation abuse. The PTO [U.S. Patent and Trademark Office] has recognized that a flood of low-quality patents has fueled an explosion of abuse in litigation. Bad patents are troll food. With the help of the new processes under the America Invents Act, the PTO is trying to get it right, and correct its own mistakes, but the pressure on examiners still results in too many low-quality patents being issued. Moreover, we are still seeing an enormous amount of patent litigation abuse. A remarkable number of the patent cases in this country are filed in just one judicial district, and many heard by a single judge. The patent trolls are still able to insist on frivolous discovery—which makes litigation so costly that small defendants have to settle. But I’m encouraged by both the continuing congressional interest in the area and by the trend of recent judicial decisions from the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit—holding patents to a high standard and pushing back on the worst of the litigation abuse we’ve seen.

We have been pleased to see the U.S. has been moving in the right direction, but we do think that there’s room for improvement. And as Europe devises a new patent system, we hope it continues to move in the right direction as well.

Ouellette: By “low-quality patents,” do you mean patents that don’t meet the current legal standards?

Walker: Well, I think the substantive standards are good ones. The Supreme Court’s decision in Alice, for example, was useful in analyzing the question of patentable subject matter and setting out a framework for how to assess whether or not a patent has made a unique and non-obvious contribution to the art.

If you look at the process in Europe, European patent offices have traditionally been very careful about granting new patents. There’s the old line from Jefferson about how hard it is to draw a line between what is worth what he called the “public embarrassment” of an exclusive patent and what is not.  A patent should recognize non-obvious and important contributions that advance science and the useful arts. The patentability standard, and a lot of rules that are designed to implement it, make sure that we are not granting patents too liberally. But a very high percentage of patent applications are ultimately granted. The PTO examiners only have a relatively small amount of time to review very complicated patent claims. So, understandably, there are some mistakes and we need to have robust ways of reviewing those to ensure that the PTO can ultimately get it right.

Going back to your question about how we work with our engineers, one of the things we’ve done is create a Google patent search tool to make it easier for examiners in the U.S. and around the world to find examples of previous work so they can say, “Hang on—this idea isn’t novel—it’s already been invented by someone else. We shouldn’t grant a patent for this.” You need both clear standards, good processes for deciding what’s patentable, and well-informed patent examiners.

Ouellette: I use Google patent all the time. I think we’d both agree that the legal system affects innovation through far more than just patent laws. So what do you think are the most important non-patent areas that legal scholars focused on innovation should be paying attention to?

Walker: The information revolution has led to a new generation of information law. What does information law cover? A lot. Privacy is one obvious area—promoting useful applications of data to personalize and customize services while not doing things that violate people’s sense of what should be private, which often varies by culture and era.

The questions of jurisdiction that we touched on before are increasingly important for the internet, as different countries and jurisdictions view it in different and often mutually inconsistent ways. We want to avoid creating a kind of “splinternet” that would be technically inefficient, bad for users and, more fundamentally, against the spirit of international bridging and exchange.
Copyright is another obvious area. The balanced U.S. system, with limitations and exceptions like fair use, combined with safe harbors and the like, is one of the reasons that the U.S. has seen so many successful internet companies. So we’re constantly looking to see if we’re striking the right balance while making sure that content owners have their legitimate interests protected.

Questions of platform liability and safe harbors cut across many of these issues, raising questions of who should be liable when people do or say bad things on the internet.
You might not think of competition as an information law issue, but there’s a lot of economic thinking about network effects, lock-in, multi-sided markets, and so on that are important for online platforms. It’s easy to misread the growth of new platforms as bad for competition—in fact, the internet may be the most competitive marketplace in history. We see incredible choice—competition just a click away—low prices and constant new entrants. Lots of smart people wrote that Netscape had an insuperable advantage, and then Yahoo was going to be the dominant company, and then Google was very strong, and now you see Facebook and Snapchat growing very quickly. Trying to apply competition doctrines that have evolved over a hundred years to these new platforms has been interesting and very challenging. And there’s always the risk that you’ll over-correct, or that antitrust becomes a tool of incumbents who are worried about new kinds of competition.

Finally, there are questions about the rules that will govern the internet of things and new stuff coming down the road, like self-driving cars. We’re seeing great developments in software, smart data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Everyday processes will increasingly be handled by machine learning. We’re thinking about questions of liability, avoiding algorithmic discrimination, and encouraging policymakers to think about the meaning and purpose of work, as machines take over more tasks and people transition to jobs that we can’t even imagine yet. Those will all be very fruitful, interesting areas for people to study and debate for years to come.

Ouellette: Stuff to look forward to.

Walker: I don’t think the machines are going to put us out of work just yet.

Ouellette: As a member of a company that’s always pushing the boundaries of new technology, does that affect how you think about the institutions that should be making these kinds of decisions, such as having the future of privacy decided by Supreme Court justices who are still communicating by paper memos?

Walker: We communicate via paper memos here at Google from time to time too, so I’m not too fussed about that. I would say that different branches have different relevant institutional competencies. The courts are sometimes less influenced by special interests and can look at the first principles of things. But the courts take time and it’s often difficult to get a sweeping ruling.

Congress has sweeping powers, but it’s sometimes harder to get an alignment on new rules, given both the ideological tensions we see these days and the lobbying from all sides. As you know, the House passed the patent reform bill a few years ago by a vote of 325 to 91. It was overwhelming. And the House passed reforms to ECPA [the Electronic Communications Privacy Act] unanimously! But in each case the Senate leadership refused to let the bill go to the floor for a vote. So, congressional legislation has its challenges.

The executive branch has been able to move forward in some areas, like new rules for self-driving cars that help promote innovation. But regulations can’t change the fundamental legal framework. So you have to pick and choose to figure out how the different branches work together.

In patent reform, for example, even as we’re pushing further forward in Congress and the courts have been making some changes, it’s been interesting to see the broad recognition of some of the abuses we talked about earlier. I think the branches have worked together well on that. And we see similar movements in other countries.

Ouellette: As a member of a company that’s always pushing the boundaries of new technology, does that affect how you think about the institutions that should be making these kinds of decisions, such as having the future of privacy decided by Supreme Court justices who are still communicating by paper memos?

Walker: We communicate via paper memos here at Google from time to time too, so I’m not too fussed about that. I would say that different branches have different relevant institutional competencies. The courts are sometimes less influenced by special interests and can look at the first principles of things. But the courts take time and it’s often difficult to get a sweeping ruling.

Congress has sweeping powers, but it’s sometimes harder to get an alignment on new rules, given both the ideological tensions we see these days and the lobbying from all sides. As you know, the House passed the patent reform bill a few years ago by a vote of 325 to 91. It was overwhelming. And the House passed reforms to ECPA [the Electronic Communications Privacy Act] unanimously! But in each case the Senate leadership refused to let the bill go to the floor for a vote. So, congressional legislation has its challenges.

The executive branch has been able to move forward in some areas, like new rules for self-driving cars that help promote innovation. But regulations can’t change the fundamental legal framework. So you have to pick and choose to figure out how the different branches work together.

In patent reform, for example, even as we’re pushing further forward in Congress and the courts have been making some changes, it’s been interesting to see the broad recognition of some of the abuses we talked about earlier. I think the branches have worked together well on that. And we see similar movements in other countries.

Ouellette: I don’t think we really touched much on government controls, freedom of information, and challenges that Google has faced in China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other countries. Are these growing problems, or are countries adapting to Google?

Walker: Both. On the one hand, countries are getting somewhat more accustomed to the fact that people can upload almost anything and view almost anything on the internet. We’re playing the long game to some degree. If today’s kids are used to a world of widespread access to information, by the time that they’re decision makers, it will be taken as a given.

Those changes just get woven into the social fabric. So from that perspective, I think things are getting better and better and I think there’s a rising tide of free expression around the world. At the same time, there’s a lot of kickback and we see it, not just in countries that have been traditionally challenging, but in Europe, for example, with the right to be forgotten. What is the right balance of privacy rights and free expression rights?

We’ve had issues in Brazil because it has laws that make it illegal to criticize political opponents. So, as you can imagine, we get a spike in complaints every time there’s an election season in Brazil. And then Turkey recently had a terrorist attack and a coup attempt, and the government has responded strongly in seeking to remove online content. So we’re constantly balancing those things and pushing for free expression, pushing local regulators to be more accepting of more speech. We believe that free speech and free access to information are important values, while recognizing in some cases that democratic governments may go through a court process and come to a different conclusion. We can’t really be in a country and not comply with its laws, but we do advocate for the best interpretation of those laws we can.

Ouellette: You were in this position when you pulled out of China, weren’t you?

Walker:  We have had our challenges with Google Search in China. We have said that we would love to find ways to serve the citizens of China wherever possible, but that’s an ongoing conversation. People tend to think of China as unique. I tend to think of China as part of a spectrum of different countries around the world—many of which have different rules governing content than we have in the U.S.

If you look at India, until a few years ago, it was illegal to show a picture of two people of the same sex kissing. How do you respond to that law? On the one hand, we have a big operation in India. We have thousands of employees and contractors. Do you violate that law and put your people at risk? Do you comply with it even though it’s not a value that we support as a company? The spectrum is broad, including China, Russia, India, Brazil, Europe, and even Canada. We have a case pending before the Canadian Supreme Court over whether to apply Canada’s law of trade secrets worldwide. And it’s a compelling, individual set of circumstances—they often are—but the implications are quite challenging. So it goes back to this notion of being a multinational company in the era of the internet, where we’re trying to serve people globally and locally simultaneously and bridge those divides.

Ouellette: Do you think there’s anything our law students today should be doing to prepare for this increasingly transnational legal practice?

Walker: That’s a good and a hard question. I don’t think it’s realistic to think that you can master the laws of several different countries. Rather, the lawyers who make the best judgments in transnational practice are the ones who understand the core principles in the area, really grok another country’s laws from a cultural and political, as well as a legal, perspective and then find effective ways to advocate for their clients and their convictions. Other than that, it’s great background to have had experience with how different countries approach similar issues. The cultural differences, the political differences—and sometimes just because different countries have different traditions. But in many cases, there’s no substitute for having done it and having wrestled with some of these concerns.

Ouellette: I understand that when you were a law student, you founded the Stanford Law and Technology Association, which is still thriving here today. What questions do you hope your successors are focusing on?

Walker: I think the field is on the brink of more amazing things than we’ve seen thus far.

We talked earlier about the rise of smart data. Information intelligently analyzed is unlocking fields like artificial intelligence and machine learning and genetics, and those theoretical advances will, in turn, make possible fundamental breakthroughs in fields like climate change, personalized medicine, even agricultural and international development. To deal with that, we’re going to need new, nimble regulatory and ethical frameworks to keep up. I hope and expect that the current members of SLATA will be in the midst of that.

Ouellette: Google has been involved in lots of high-level disputes that end up in the news all the time, but I’m sure that those kinds of things are only a small part of your daily workload. What’s the most interesting project you’ve worked on that hasn’t made headlines?

Walker: Often, the ones that are most high-profile are the ones people think about and it’s easy to rattle those off—the Viacom lawsuit, the Oracle lawsuit, a resolution with the FTC, what’s going on with the European Commission now, or SOPA/PIPA [Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act] where we were able to help mobilize an unprecedented number of people to weigh in on fairly dry intellectual property questions. Fifteen million Americans wrote their representatives and a variety of NGOs and other companies weighed in too.

But a lot of the stuff we do is behind the scenes. In some senses, we’re like soccer goalkeepers—we’re trying to keep bad things from happening, we’re trying to pave the way for great technology to roll out, seamlessly in the world, and then be adopted by the next billion users.

One example: We’ve invested a huge amount of time and effort in getting privacy in Europe right, rolling out unprecedented new controls for users and disclosure about what we do. It’s important that you feel comfortable with how Google handles information and keeps it secure in a way that benefits you in a real and tangible way. And we’re rolling out those controls now, touching hundreds of millions of users with these processes. It doesn’t make a headline, but the absence of the headline itself is a positive sign because it shows we haven’t hit tripwires of user concerns or cultural issues or legal challenges, and so we’ve done our job right there.

We don’t go looking for fights,we’re ready for them when they come, but our goal is to be diplomats rather than warriors.

Ouellette: My last question for you: Do you have any advice for aspiring Googlers among Stanford Lawyer readers?

Walker:  We are lucky enough to be able to hire only a fraction of the many great people who apply. The ones who stand out the most are people who have accomplished something notable, who have a passion for our issues, and who have a quirky mensch-iness about them. We call it Googley-ness—that’s a little cute, but it conveys a sense of integrity and imagination and smarts and friendliness. The kind of people you’d want to have as colleagues. I’m not sure if that’s good advice for people, but it’s a road map of the kinds of things we’re looking for.