Google Boss Fears ‘Digital Ethnic Cleansing’

11 years ago | Posted in: Business | 728 Views

Two of Google’s most senior executives have used a lecture in London to press their belief in the transparency of the internet and warned of the dangers of “digital ethnic cleansing”.

After two weeks spent fending off questions over the company’s tax affairs, executive chairman Eric Schmidt and director of Google ideas, Jared Cohen, devoted much of their time at the London School of Economics to railing against censorship.

Mr Schmidt said: “People who are trying to restrict communication and information, which we are actually very strongly opposed to, will do it by simple omission.

“If you do not know what you are missing, you do not know it was censored, but it is going to be impossible to completely keep information out.”

However, Mr Schmidt does believe some information that appears on the internet needs to be controlled.

The example he uses was when the instructions for a 3D-printed plastic handgunwere published by a website operating in the US.

The website that originally posted the details was effectively shut down by the US government, but by this stage the designs had been distributed widely across the internet and appeared on other sites.

Mr Schmidt said: “People will die because of this guy’s reckless act and because of this information.”

But Mr Cohen admitted that “cyberspace is the world’s largest ungoverned space”, with Mr Schmidt then adding: “There is no delete button.”

Another concern they have is the internet’s future capability to be used for “digital ethnic cleansing” by dictatorial regimes.

Mr Schmidt said: “Imagine you do not like the Kurds, we will just give them a slow internet connection.

“The bandwidth has a significant impact on development, economic opportunity and education.

“More data is good, more transparency is good and particularly with governments.

“If you move to an open transparency model for government, which indeed the David Cameron Government did (in the UK), it has a huge impact.”

source:www.bbc.com

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