A Sydney Morning Herald interview with the Google "Internet evangelist" and noted "founding father of the Internet"
covers copyright, cyber-bullying, Internet regulation and censorship and so much more....
On the issue of cyber-bullying which is hot in Australia (six of the eight Australian states have banned YouTube in schools)...
Do you think that blocking access to the services like YouTube at schools is going to solve the problem?
No. I believe many young people have skills that may be well beyond those of their parents and teachers and they will find ways of accessing information.
We should teach kids what is socially acceptable and what isn't. That's a very important part of growing up and learning. For older people who abuse the system, similar kinds of consequences need to be instituted, but this is as much an education problem as it is anything else.
On regulation...
Will this lead to governments trying to enforce some kind of regulation on this type of content on the internet?
This is a really interesting medium because for the first time, consumers of information have become the producers of it. The internet is not unique in that regard. As soon as digital video recorders came along, or photographs could be taken with mobiles, these technologies allowed people to capture information and share it.
Whether there's an internet or not, you'll find video recordings and DVDs and things which people produce themselves because the technology permits it.
So if we're worried about the production of content by consumers, we need to worry about it across the entire spectrum of technologies for distribution. This is not just unique to the internet. And it does raise important social questions, which is why it's so critical for governments to understand more deeply how the internet works, what can be done technically, and what may have to be done from the legal point of view.
On not being evil...
Google's corporate motto, "Don't be evil"; has that become something of an albatross?
I don't consider it an albatross at all. The founders not only believe that but try to make sure that everybody that's hired at Google understands that.
Also the motto that we're trying to organise the world's information continues to be the general objective of the company. It is fair to say that as the company has grown bigger it has become a bigger target in some sense for anyone who likes to shoot at large targets ... but the company is still very, very much aligned with the feeling that we should not be evil and we should do everything we can to help people to get access to information, wherever it comes from.
Comments