Google GC Kent Walker on Internet Disruption and Censorship

As we all know, the internet continually disrupts society on a
global scale. It has become a platform for the international
exchange of ideas and, more importantly, brought hundreds of
millions of people out of extreme poverty. But with this disruptive
platform comes challenges of safety and security, access to
information, and censorship within multiple legal systems. How can
we appropriately apply the legal standards and expectations from
every country in the world to the internet which is, by nature, an
international platform?

In this episode of In-House Legal,
Randy Milch interviews Google Senior Vice
President and General Counsel Kent Walker about
his path to general counsel of Google and the current legal
challenges the multinational technology company faces. Walker
examines internet disruption and censorship and talks about how
Google approaches the legal balance between personal privacy and
the government’s need for access to information.

Walker begins by talking about his path through the U.S.
Attorney’s office, AirTouch Communications, Netscape (which became
AOL), eBay, and then ending up in his current position at Google
and how different sources of training gave him the experience to be
a successful general counsel. Through his history in tech
companies, he has interacted with the evolution of information law
in privacy and defamation, jurisdictional questions, intellectual
property definitions, the limits on patents and copyright, and new
questions about antitrust in a digital economy.

Milch and Walker then transition into a discussion on threats
arising to the internet as it is today. As Google is intimately
involved in the balance between necessary encryption and government
access to information, Walker discusses how his legal department
approaches this fine line. Discussion inevitably turns to
censorship and the “right to be forgotten,” a misnomer actually
meaning the right to be delisted from the search engines. They talk
about self-censorship within tech companies like Facebook and
Twitter, collaboration in Silicon Valley after the Snowden
Revelations, and the international goal of access to information
and freedom of expression.

As general counsel and senior vice president for legal, policy,
trust, and safety at Google, Kent Walker is
responsible for managing Google's global legal team and advising
the company's board and management on legal issues and corporate
governance matters. Before joining Google, Walker held senior legal
positions at a number of leading technology companies. Earlier in
his career, Walker was an Assistant U.S. Attorney with the United
States Department of Justice, where he specialized in the
prosecution of technology crimes and advised the Attorney General
on management and technology issues.