Google Chairman Eric Schmidt: "The Internet Will Disappear"
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt: "The Internet Will
Disappear"
Christopher Patey
•He also discusses online dominance on a World Economic
Forum panel with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, while Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is
asked about privacy issues.
by Georg Szalai
1/22/2015 11:10am PST
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt on Thursday
predicted the end of the Internet as we know it.
At the end of a panel at the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland, where his comments were webcast, he was asked for his
prediction on the future of the web. “I will answer very simply that the
Internet will disappear,” Schmidt said.
“There will be so many IP addresses…so many devices,
sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that
you won’t even sense it,” he explained. “It will be part of your presence all
the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your
permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the
room.”
Concluded Schmidt: “A highly personalized, highly
interactive and very, very interesting world emerges.”
The panel, entitled The Future of the Digital Economy,
also featured Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and others.
Earlier in the debate, Schmidt discussed the issue of
market dominance. The European Union has been looking at Google’s search market
dominance in a long-running antitrust case, and the European parliament late
last year even called for a breakup.
“You now see so many strong tech platforms coming, and
you are seeing a reordering and a future reordering of dominance or leaders or
whatever term you want to use because of the rise of the apps on the
smartphone,” Schmidt said Thursday. “All bets are off at this point as to what
the smartphone app infrastructure is going to look like” as a “whole new set”
of players emerges to power smartphones, which are nothing but super-computers,
the Google chairman argued. “I view that as a completely open market at this
point.”
Asked about his recent trip to North Korea, Schmidt said
the country has many Internet connections through data phones, but there is no
roaming and web usage is “heavily supervised.” Schmidt said “it’s very much
surveillance of use,” which he said was not good for the country and others.
Sandberg and Schmidt lauded the Internet as an important
way to give more people in the world a voice. Currently, only 40 percent of
people have Internet access, the Facebook COO said, adding that any growth in
reach helps extend people’s voice and increase economic opportunity. “I’m a
huge optimist,” she said about her outlook for the industry. “Imagine what we
can do” once the world gets to 50 percent, 60 percent and more in terms of
Internet penetration.
She cited women as being among the beneficiaries, saying
the Internet narrows divides.
Schmidt similarly said that broadband can address
governance issues, information needs, personal issues, women empowerment needs
and education issues. “The Internet is the greatest empowerment of citizens …
in many years,” he said. “Suddenly citizens have a voice, they can be heard.”
During another technology panel at the World Economic
Forum on Thursday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries and
others answered questions on the need to regulate privacy standards on the
Internet and for tech companies following the Snowden case, the Sony hack and
the like.
Mayer said that the personalized Internet “is a better
Internet,” emphasizing: “We don’t sell your personal data … We don’t transfer
your personal data to third parties.” She said users own their data and need to
have control, adding that people give up data to the government for tax assessment,
social services and other purposes.
Fries said Liberty Global subscribers view billions of
hours of content and generate billions of clicks, but added that “today we do
nothing.” He explained: “We generate zero revenue from all of that
information.” But he acknowledged that big data was big business for a lot of
people.
Both executives said transparency was important to make
sure users know privacy standards and the like.
Gunther Oettinger, a conservative German politician
serving as the European Union’s commissioner for digital economy and society,
said on the panel that “we need a convincing global understanding, we need a UN
agency for data protection and security.” Asked what form that “understanding”
should have, he said he was looking for “clear, pragmatic, market-based
regulation.” Explained Oettinger: “It’s a public-private partnership.”
Fries said such a solution was likely not to happen in
the near term, given the size of the EU. “I think it is going to take several
years,” he said, adding that some countries’ parliaments would likely take a
stab at it.
But he warned that a joint solution would make more
sense. “We don’t want Germany to have its own Internet,” Fries said. “Some
countries may build their own Internets” and “balkanize” the web, he warned.
Mayer said on the issue of regulation: “I like Tim’s idea
better of the beneficent marketplace.” She spoke of fellow panelist and
computer specialist Tim Berners-Lee, known as the inventor of the World Wide
Web.
Asked how Yahoo stores and handles client records, she
said the online giant “changed the way we store and communicate data” after
Snowden and also changed encryptions between data centers. And the company
protects users through encryption methods, she added. Mayer said that trust and
confidence of Yahoo users has rebounded since.
Mayer was also asked what happens if a government asks
for a user’s data, a question that has new significance after the recent
terrorist attacks in Paris, which have led some to call for increased
surveillance powers of the Internet for governments. Mayer said Yahoo always
assesses if such a request is reasonable. “We have a very good track record for
standing up to what’s not reasonable,” she said.
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