TechCrunch reports Turkey is claiming Google owes them 71 million Turkish Lira or 47 million US dollars in back taxes.

In fact, the Turkish government is fining Google for the money. Google claims all the funds are through their Ireland branch and Google does not owe Turkey any taxes. Google technically has a company in Turkey named Google Reklamcılık ve Pazarlama Ltd. Şti. but the company is technically set up as a ‘liaison’ branch. If set up properly, TechCrunch reports Google would owe little to no taxes to the Turkish government.

Two years ago, Norway complained that Google was evading taxes in their country.

Google announced that it had released voice search for Mandarin Chinese for Nokia S60 phones. This is potentially huge — if Google gets it right — because of the massive population in China. It could also drive more search usage and frequency. Google trails Baidu on the PC but mobile represents an opportunity for Google to grow share in that largest of all internet markets.

Google now says it understands a range of English accents, and Mandarin although it doesn’t yet get all accents in Mandarin. In addition, the capability will be coming soon to the Android and iPhone platforms in China. Dell has introduced a yet-to-be released Android handset (Mini 3i) and the iPhone just launched with the number two Chinese mobile carrier China Unicom. According to the Google Blog:

Although this only works on the Nokia S60 at the moment, we’re working on adding support for Mandarin speech recognition to our products on other mobile platforms, such as Android and iPhone. And bear in mind that this is a first version of our system in Mandarin, and it might not be as polished as our English version. For example, if you have a strong southern Chinese accent, it might not work as well as for people with a Beijing accent…

There are almost 700 million mobile users in China, more than 2X the US population as a whole. China Unicom reportedly has roughly 140 million subscribers. The largest US carrier Verizon has 89 million mobile subscribers. China Mobile, the largest carrier in China, has roughly 500 million users.

Here’s Google’s attempt at vintage “news on the march”-style newsreel footage. Unfortunately there’s no demo of the Mandarin capability:

Oh, the irony: The People’s Daily, the main newspaper of China’s Communist Party, says Google censored its web site by adding a malware warning to search result listings for the newspaper’s book section.

The paper says the malware warning appeared after it ran an article about a Chinese group that has suggested Google’s book search settlement might violate the rights of Chinese authors. The paper says the malware warning appeared for three days, and claimed that its book section was “maliciously blocked by Google.”

Google called the claims “absolutely incorrect” and pointed out that its malware warnings are generated automatically and without human involvement.

It’s all ironic, of course, due to the long-running battle between Google and China over censorship issues. Usually, though, it’s Google (and others) accusing the Chinese government of censorship, not the other way around. Or, as the Inquirer calls it, this is a case of “wok calls kettle black.”

Right now there’s a court case in Italy that involves Google executives, who are being tried for violating Italian privacy laws. The case illustrates international conflicts of law issues and challenges for companies doing business (via the internet) in multiple nations with differing cultures and corresponding legal rules. In a less serious way Google has encountered this type of thing before with its Street View product on Maps in trying to comply with different privacy rules in the US, Canada and Europe. But this is the first time (to my knowledge) that jail time is at stake.

What happened? According to the BBC’s summary of the facts:

[A] video, posted on Google Video in 2006 shortly before the firm acquired YouTube, showed a teenager with Down’s Syndrome being bullied by four students in front of more than a dozen others.

Prosecutors argue that Google did not have adequate content filters or enough staff to monitor videos.

They also argue that Google broke Italian privacy law by not preventing the the content from being uploaded without the consent of all parties involved.

There would be no civil, let alone criminal, liability if the incident had happened in the US. Publishers are generally insulated from liability in circumstances involving third party content postings on their sites. Notwithstanding stricter Italian privacy law, my guess is that anti-American and anti-Google sentiment are a subtext in this case.

Named Google defendants include David Drummond, Google’s SVP of  Corporate Development, and former Google CFO George Reyes. The BBC article says that the defendants could face up to three years in jail if they’re convicted. However if they were to in fact be convicted appeals would take place that would likely succeed. As unfortunate as the underlying facts may be there’s something inherently unreasonable at the heart of this case and probably the Italian courts will (eventually) recognize it.

This case illustrates how we truly live in a global society — certainly where the internet is concerned. And in most places, including the US, legal rules have not caught up to internet and technology developments.

Google Can Sell Trademarked Keywords, EU Adviser Says from Bloomberg News reports the EU’s highest court has ruled Google can sell trademarked keywords in search ads. As we reported back in June 2008, Louis Vuitton sued Google over trademark issues with search ads and Google then appealed to this court. Google has won that appeal and has set the law on this matter across the whole European Union.

Advocate General Luis Miguel Poiares Pessoa Maduro said in a non-binding opinion to the European Court of Justice today in Luxembourg:

It is important not to allow the legitimate purpose of preventing certain trademark infringements to lead all trademark uses to be prohibited. Since the use by Google does not involve identical or similar goods or services, in principle there can be no risk of confusion on the part of the consumers.

In the US, Google recently allowed trademarks to be used in the AdWords copy.

Google reportedly made a number of concessions to European officials concerned about the European implications of the Google Books Search settlement deal. The company is fighting on both sides of the Atlantic to gain regulatory and judicial acceptance of the deal previously announced, which has been criticized by a number of self-interested parties and legal observers who contend that Google will have a near monopoly of so-called “orphan” books if the deal goes through. Orphan books are those that are still covered by copyright but rights ownership is uncertain or authors cannot be located.

According to a Bloomberg story about the EU concessions:

1. Google will let two representatives from outside the U.S. join a board administering its digital books settlement
2. Books that are commercially available and under copyright in Europe won’t be considered out of print under a proposed settlement with U.S. publishers

At an EU hearing today in Brussels, both Google and its critics were presenting their respective cases before European Commissioners. Google blogged about the hearing and the benefits to readers of digitizing the European collection. Meanwhile opponents, including Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo (part of the so-called Open Book Alliance), sought to play up the negatives of allowing Google to proceed.

“We are fighting this cartel that is being proposed by the parties to the U.S. settlement and Google,” Peter Brantley of the Open Book Alliance told reporters ahead of the EU hearing.

(Previously, Microsoft abandoned its own book scanning project.)

Two EU Commissioners, Viviane Reding and Charlie McCreevy, issued a joint statement generally in favor of book digitization and a US-style settlement that would be pan-European.

Germany and France have been two of the biggest critics of the US deal, however. In fact France is going to file objections to the book search deal with the US court in New York overseeing the settlement agreement. A hearing to approve the US settlement is scheduled for October 7. According to statements made to Reuters French Culture Minister Nicolas Georges expressed broad concern about Google’s control over “orphaned” material:

France is concerned about European authors’ rights, Georges said.

“There are lots of European works in Google’s database. Google can digitalise these works without the permission of European authors,” he said.

He cited worries over the copyrights of orphan works, which are books or other materials that are still covered by U.S. copyright law, but it is not clear who owns the rights to them.

“Google will have a monopoly digitalising European orphan works without permission,” Georges said.

Germany previously filed similar objections with the US court.

We can probably expect more concessions from Google in the US and abroad before the settlement deal is formally approved (and there can be a similar arrangement in Europe). I would be very surprised however if the court or regulators entirely blocked the deal. It’s pretty clear that lots of stakeholders want book scanning to proceed and that governments lack the will and resources to do it themselves.

Google Executive to Quit from the Wall Street Journal reports Kai-Fu Lee, the president of Google’s China operations is leaving the company. Kai-Fu Lee has helped Google gain market share in China but still is a weak second to Baidu, which has 76% share in China, whereas Google has about 20%.

Lee left Microsoft in 2005 to join Google, which sparked a legal war between the two companies. The two companies settled the matter privately about a year later. Now, Lee said he wants to pursue his own new ventures and says it is a perfect time to do so. The China division will be run by two executives, Boon-Lock Yeo, currently director of Google’s Shanghai engineering office and John Liu, currently leads Google’s sales team in greater China.

More coverage on this news can be found at Techmeme.

A fire has broken out at Google’s UK headquarters in Victoria, south west London. The fire appears to have been started on the rooftop, possibly due to the barbecue that is used there.

Right now, it appears the fire is under control and that no one was hurt. The 6 floor building has been evacuated after six fire engines and 25 firefighters were called to the see just before 2pm local time. A Google spokesperson told the Telegraph:

All I know is that there was a barbecue on a roof terrace above one of the Google floors. We have all been moved away from the building and we are waiting for the fire brigade to tell us when we can go back in.

The image comes from Breaking News.

The Google Mobile blog announced that Arabic and Hebrew mobile searchers are now able to see universal results directly on their mobile devices. Although not related, this comes soon after Google Translated recently added 9 new languages.

I know a bit of Hebrew, so I tried to test out the search results on Google Israel on my iPhone. Unfortunately, I did not see the same mobile friendly results, with universal search, on my iPhone. Maybe it was related to me searching on my iPhone or searching in the states, I don’t know.

What it should look like is:

What I see on my iPhone:

Heck, it doesn’t even look iPhone friendly. To give Google some credit, the iPhone is not fully supported yet in Israel, so maybe this is not functional on the iPhone yet. Maybe it is only working on supported mobile devices?

The NY Times blogs about an interesting lawsuit between online mortgage lead generator LendingTree and one of its partners Mortech, Inc., which is allegedly about to help Google launch a LendingTree-like loan aggregation or mortgage lead-gen service. According to a press release issued yesterday about the litigation by LendingTree: 

Mortech, whose technology helps automate lender offer pricing, violated its contractual covenants by partnering with Google to launch an online mortgage loan aggregator service similar to LendingTree.

Despite repeated efforts, LendingTree was unsuccessful in resolving the dispute amicably and therefore took legal action. LendingTree has filed a motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction enjoining Mortech from assisting Google. A hearing has been scheduled for September 2.

Nobody went formally on the record with the Times to discuss the claims in the suit. Google issued one of its familiar, general statements but did confirm a mortgage-related test:

[W]e are currently working on a small ad unit test that will run against a limited number of mortgage-related search queries in the U.S.

As the Times piece points out Google is not a party to the litigation. It also cites Google “merchant search” (UK) as the potential model for this hypothetical new mortgage quote offering. Google merchant search is not live today but here’s a screenshot of what the UK test looked like:

The focus on mortgage search or quotes is a bit of a red herring I suspect. The UK test was really about developing a model to deliver leads on a CPA or pay-per-call basis. In this case many were small business advertisers (mortgage brokers). Mortgages happened to be the content or category used in this test. One of the clues here is the name of the service: the broadly applicable “merchant search,” not “mortgage search.” 

To the extent that Google is planning to introduce a similar service in the US, you can be sure it’s not about a single vertical but rather about testing a distinct marketplace or CPA model — with an eye toward smaller advertisers (though not exclusively).

Postscript: Here’s the relevant language from the complaint (the complaint was sent to me by Clint Boulton at eWeek) about Google’s program:

LendingTree recently learned that Google imminently plans to launch a loan aggregation service in late August or early September of this year that would compete directly with LendingTree. LendingTree has also learned that Mortech intends to make its pricing engine services available for use with Google’s new service and will send information related to mortgage loan offers to be displayed to consumers on Google’s website.

LendingTree obtained “screen shots” of the trial version of Google’s service that further indicate that, like LendingTree’s service, Google will provide customers with conditional loan offers in addition to lenders’ contact information.