Government censorship of Internet to increase, warns Google

28 June 2011
Source: New Media and Search

Google chief says the censorship is to get worse, and he fears for his employees safety across the world

Government censorship of the Internet is set to increase as heads of governments feel that civil society is using new technologies for pro-democracy movements, according to Google chairman Eric Schmidt.

This increase of states cracking down harder on Internet freedoms could be due to the recent Arab Spring movement, where Pro-democracy protesters in Tunisia, Egypt and several other Arab states have used Google owned Facebook and Youtube.

Stating that some governments wanted to regulate the Internet as they regulated television, Eric Schmidt said he feared his colleagues in such countries faced a mounting risk of occasional arrest and torture.

Without directly naming the countries, Schmidt also said he was concerned about the danger faced by employees of the company in parts of the world that deemed found illegal material on its search engine.

Schmidt said, "The reason is that as the technology becomes more pervasive and as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television."

"If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket," he added.

Speaking at summit on militant violence organised by Google in Dublin, Schmidt said he believed the "problem" of governments trying to limit Internet usage was going to "get worse".

The Chinese government and Google have regularly argued over attempts made by the government to limit public access to the search engine's Internet services.

An effort to steal the passwords of hundreds of Google email account holders, including U.S. government officials, Chinese human rights advocates and journalists was unearthed by Google this month. However, China has denied its involvement on the issue.