Eric Schmidt: prediction

Transcript context

…What is the chance, in your view, that the Internet simply fragments globally over, say, the next 20 years? China has the Great Firewall. The European Union is going its own direction with tech and Internet regulation, and it’s mostly not their companies they’re regulating. What’s the chance that, say, 10, 15 years, we just have three or four separate Internets? We spend a lot of time worrying about this. In one of my books, we wrote quite a bit about this subject, we called it balkanization. My friend from the Balkan says, “Please don’t use that term.” [laughter] So you use the right term, which is to splinter. I think the most likely scenario now is not splintering but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led Internet and a non-Chinese-led Internet, presumably led by America. If you look in China — I was just there — the scale of the companies that are being built, the services that are being built, the wealth that has been created is phenomenal. The Chinese Internet is a greater percentage of the GDP of China, which is a big number, than the same percentage in the United States, which is also a big number. So, if you think of China as like, “Oh, yeah, you’re having good with Internet,” you’re missing the point. Globalization means they get to play too. And I think you’re going to see a fantastic leadership in products and services from China, and there’s a real danger that, along with those fantastic products and services, comes a different leadership regime from the government, which is censorship and controls and limits and so forth. And if you look at the way the BRI works, which is their Belt and Road Initiative — sort of 60-ish countries — it’s perfectly possible that those countries will begin to take on the infrastructure that China has as well, with some loss of freedom. Do you think the major Chinese tech companies have managerial strengths that the US tech companies do not? Or are they, in some ways, beyond our frontier?…

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