After several months of privacy backlash, search engine and advertising giant Google has launched a new Public Policy blog in an effort to create a open discussion about the issues that not only impact their business, but the internet overall.

Google hopes the new Public Policy blog will start the necessary conversations around issues including net neutrality, privacy, child online safety, copyright and trademark protection, content regulation, and so on.

While Google have been writing posts about these issues internally for several months, they’ve only just decided to open it up to the public, which is why the new blog already has so much content. According to the release post:

“We hope this blog will serve as a resource for policymakers around the world — including legislators, ministers, governors, city council members, regulators, and the staffers who support them — who are trying to enact sound government policies to foster free expression, promote economic growth, expand access to information, enable innovation, and protect consumers. We also hope (cliche alert) that this blog will promote real conversation, so we’ve enabled comments.”

While the premise of the blog is great in theory, it does smell of a PR exercise in light of Google’s recent publicity issues. They suggest the blog is aimed at policy makers, but it will be interesting to see how they respond, should readers make recommendations on how Google handles its data. “Don’t be evil” - we’ll see…