Former Google CEO and Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt believes China’s multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure could cause the internet to split.
Eric Schmidt said it’s very likely we’ll see an internet split in two. One will be dominated by China and the other will be led by the US, he told CNBC.
“The most likely scenario now is not a split, but a split into a Chinese and a non-Chinese internet led by America,” he said.
Schmidt, who recently visited China, kept his distance from the country’s tech scene, but warned that there was a “real risk” that the Chinese government could gain complete control of parts of the internet through deals like China’s giant Belt and Road infrastructure project.
“We’re going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. But there’s a real risk that along with those products and services, there’s going to be a different kind of leadership from the government, with censorship, controls, and so on.”
“Look at the way the BRI is working – the Belt and Road Initiative, which involves 60 countries. It’s very likely that these countries will start taking over the infrastructure that China owns, but with some loss of freedom.”
Schmidt’s comments about a Chinese-controlled internet come amid internal discussions at Google about a censored version of its search engine for China, codenamed Dragonfly.
The comments are not coincidental, as the US recently banned government employees from using devices from Chinese tech companies Huawei and ZTE.
Google pulled out of China in 2010 over government-imposed censorship regulations. In 2018, with the announcement of Project Dragonfly, thousands of Google employees signed a letter opposing Google's return to the Chinese market.
It was one of the latest ethical dilemmas for the company's employees, as the previous one was over Google's participation in an AI project for the US Department of Defense.
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