Google boss predicts autocratic countries’ pushback against Internet

PanARMENIAN.Net - Life in authoritarian states is likely to get tougher before it gets better as their citizens gain more access to the Internet, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt said.

Speaking at a seminar in Washington, Schmidt said hundreds of millions of people in non-democratic nations will be trading in their basic cellphones for Internet-connected smartphones as prices fall over the next few years.

"When that happens, all of sudden, we are going to hear the distinct voices of the citizens of those countries in a way that we've never heard before," said the globe-trotting Schmidt, a recent visitor to North Korea.

"But their governments are not like our governments... In that context, (autocratic) governments are going to work really, really hard to stop this, because the way to really get a dictator going is to threaten his authority.

"They're going to do things like restrict speech and restrict assembly but they are going to find it impossible to do as comprehensively as they can," he added.

This "mobile revolution" will become "the defining story" for the 57 percent of the world's population that lives in autocratic countries over the next five to 10 years, he predicted.

Schmidt delivered the keynote speech at a Google-sponsored "big tent" seminar, the first ever in the U.S. capital that cast a spotlight on freedom of expression in the digital age.

He quipped about Iran's plans for a homegrown "Halal Internet", Israel would be wiped off its online maps, he predicted, and how officials in Pyongyang had tried but failed to get him to spill the beans on the next version of Google's Android mobile software.

And while he once thought North Korea to be "the absolutely worst place" on Earth, Schmidt extended that dubious honor to Eritrea, scene of an apparent coup in January that went largely unreported for weeks, AFP reported.