Eric Schmidt and Thomas Friedman at PDF

What a treat to see Eric Schmidt being interviewed by Thomas Friedman on stage. I’m very impressed with Andrew, he’s come a long way since the first PDF. Eric Schmidt said, "This is a pretty important event". Cool.

I’ll try to paraphrase the conversation – there may be some direct quotes in here, but don’t quote me. If I’ve misinterpreted anything, please forgive me.

TF: Some people (namely, Andrew and Micah) say, "The Internet is the dial tone of the 21st century". Should it be free? Should it be a right?

ES: It’s not as important as healthcare, but close. If you’re not a part of it, you really miss out. Things have grown by a factor of 100 over a 10-year period.

TF: Does search follow Moore’s Law?

ES: We see a network effect. More and more people put information in, and that makes it more valuable for them. This is voluntary, but if people choose to put in information about themselves, the computer can understand them better.

[Eric looks up, sees many audience members aren’t looking at him, but rather at their computers.]

ES: It’s a permanent change. People are online while you’re talking to them in a group setting. I tried to have a meeting, just one, where people didn’t bring their computers and type. It didn’t work.

ES: Most people understand politics as pre- and post- TV. You can imagine the same thing happening with this personal medium. You can get a personal communication from a politician.

TF: How you live your life must change because everything becomes so transparent. When you went to work at Google, you got to hand them a resume, and you got to write it, and this was a proxy for you that you controlled. Now, you can search for all the public information about a person, and it’s all out there. Bush would never be elected today, if there were a record of his college antics.

ES: At 21, you should change your name! No, that only looks like me, that wasn’t really me. J

ES: Too much sharing at a young age is an important issue. Every phone has a camera, everyone is a media agent now, if there’s an accident, people film it. And information before that was public, but hard to get to, is now generally known.

TF: I’ve been scared that someone would call me out about something, skipping in front of them in line accidentally, and then it would be all over the net.

ES: By looking at the wrong records, it’s possible you can come to the wrong conclusions.

TF: People in Bahrain looked at Google Earth to see how much land the ruling family took over.

ES: When Bahrain shut down Google Earth, there was a backlash that drew more attention to the issue – sometimes the cover up is worse than the mistake.

The arrival of the Internet in China is changing Chinese politics.

TF: Should Google be a regulated utility? Should the public have real transparency into how decisions are made?

ES: Globally, many do try to regulate us. We face issues now that were not top of list before. We made a decision 5 years ago to be more transparent. We try hard. There are good alternatives you’re not forced to use us if you don’t like us.

TF: Do your recruiters look at people’s backgrounds?

ES: We’ve put in a scientific way of finding the best candidate. GPA, school, is there something special about them? What does this person have beyond the normal corporate view? The fact that you have a broad range of interests means you'’e much more likely to succeed.

The cost of becoming an entrepreneur has gone down dramatically. On the net, every avenue will be tried. It’s a biodiversity strength. The thing that ultimately wins has been tested against many other things.

[Talking about mashed-up video of candidates online]:Seize the moment to make the clips of yourself. Will it be done to you or by you? Internationally, this technology should accelerate an open dialogue in processes that are less than democratic. Dictators take over the press, and the Internet prevents that.

We don’t know whether online video means more soundbytes or more spin.

[An audience member asks Eric how Google views the government’s attempt to limit what military footage is posted online by service people. Eric got a round of applause for saying, "We would prefer that they not" – meaning, that the government not limit what’s posted.]

Bob Frankston asks from the audience, if I understood him correctly, whether the communication that the net allows could one day do away with some of the bureaucracy or administration of government, so that it wasn’t an elected official who needed to have the last word, but that issues could be figured out and resolved by the population themselves without having a hierarchy of approval.

ES: I don’t think you’re ever going to get rid of politics. Do you use the net to make the world more flat, or more polarized? My view is that it will become more flat, the benefits are so overwhelming.

Comments

[Keith Jones]

Eric Schmidt owes his success largely to a global network of mobster fiends is what I hear from rival mafia. They say it was him that was directly responsible for the colosal profits made from promoting child pornography with the Google search engine.
http://endmafia.com
http://cid-21ccdb1c1e0c985a.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!21CCDB1C1E0C985A!130.entry