His comments are fair and yet I can’t help but wonder about Google’s complicity with a range of autocratic regimes to censor some of its content, from search returns to YouTube clips:
The use of the web by Arab democracy movements could lead to some states cracking down harder on internet freedoms, Google’s chairman says.
Speaking at a conference in Ireland, Eric Schmidt said some governments wanted to regulate the internet the way they regulated television.
He also said he feared his colleagues faced a mounting risk of occasional arrest and torture in such countries.
The internet was widely used during the so-called Arab Spring.
Protesters used social networking sites to organise rallies and communicate with those outside their own country, such as foreign media, amid tight restrictions on state media.
‘Completely wired’Mr Schmidt said he believed the “problem” of governments trying to limit internet usage was going to “get worse”.
In most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television”
“The reason is that as the technology becomes more pervasive and as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television.”
“If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket,” he added.