The Internet has begun to be used by dictators who want to control people, and Google is not unaware of this.
"With what's been happening over the last year, governments have realized that you're not going to turn off the Internet," said Google chairman Eric Schmidt.
According to the Guardian, this statement was made during the SXSW in Austin, Texas.
Schmidt, of course, went a step further and said that the new model of a dictator is to infiltrate and try to manipulate the Internet, something that has been evident so far in countries like China.
This statement is very important, especially if we take into account the current international context, with the demonstrations taking place in many countries and the conflicts that are in the global spotlight.
More often than not, the Internet has played a significant role in uprisings, such as those in Ukraine, Venezuela, Turkey, and Egypt. In most of these cases, governments have attempted to interfere with Internet freedom, blocking social media and other tools often used by protesters.
“We want to empower mobile phones and connectivity, especially for people who don’t have them. In the book, we can say that revolutions will be easier to start but harder to finish,” Schmidt said, referring to a book he co-wrote with Jared Cohen about how the new digital age will shape the future.
It should also be noted that Google and Eric Schmidt have reacted strongly after the NSA scandal in recent months, calling for increased transparency from the government and upgrading the security of their networks by using SSL by default to protect users.
“The solution to this is to encrypt data at multiple points at the source. We had already done that, but now we’re just accelerating our activities,” Schmidt said. “We’re pretty confident that right now the information that’s inside Google is safe from the prying eyes of any government, including the U.S. government. We were attacked by the Chinese in 2010, we were attacked by the NSA in 2013. Those are the facts,” the Google chairman said.
Schmidt has previously said that encryption is key to ending the Internet censorship that occurs in countries like China, where the Great Firewall blocks many websites as the government tries to eliminate Internet content that is unfavorable to them and limit citizens' access to information.
