22 March 2006

Google CEO defends recent civil liberty actions

The meeting follows recent criticism over the past months of the company's actions, especially those regarding the Chinese market and censorship issues.
Mr Schmidt said the decision of how to act over the situation with China, which took over a year of internal arguments, was "one of the most controversial decisions the company has ever made". The priority for Google came down to giving the Chinese people access to as much information as possible as quickly as possible.
Mr Schmidt responded to queries about setting up embargos on filtering technology to China, saying that personally he did not feel that they work, then going on to cite the example of Cuba. "The technology we have is incredibly empowering to citizens," he said. Mr Schmidt also claimed that their behavior might be changed more by giving their citizens PCs, faster connections, and more access to the internet and information, rather than initiating restrictions.
Mr Schmidt then stated that Google received more attention than the other major search engines concerning its role in China, primarily because of the company's size and prominent position on the internet. Additionally, Google's was the only significant stand on the issue. Mr Schmidt also retaliated against the idea that Google doesn't protect the rights of the individual strongly enough by pointing out that Google was the one company that fought the U.S. government over its recent attempted subpoena of search data. He went on to say that the company saw it as a very serious issue, and that he was pleased with the judge's recent comments on the case. Mr Schmidt thought that if the final result was a sufficiently narrow number of searches, then that would be a good result for Google.
The most recent news from the federal judge ruling on the case, detailed elsewhere in the bigmouthmedia newsletter, is that Google will not have to hand over all search engine users' search queries to the government. This news will no doubt have Mr Schmidt overjoyed at the result.

Home | Careers | RSS | Contact Us | Newsletter

International sites: