>>Eric Schmidt: Thank you.
It's great to be back.
I think the feeling of being here, being with you, is something I look forward to every
year.
And when I think about this conference, which we started in California about 10 years ago,
I think about it as a metaphor for Google's evolution.
You know, we started off at Search and I think now about the success of Android, targeted
advertising, the display advertising business.
I think about our Gmail and, in particular, our enterprise business and the wins we have
there -- Google Glass, self-driving cars, the Chrome and Android platforms -- as economic
and technical platforms, and I wonder what's next, right?
What can we do to make the world a better place?
And the reason I've gotten so interested in this is that technology is the key driver
of almost all human progress, if you look at human history, and I tend to think of,
you know, look at what we've accomplished here and how incredible it is that we have
all of these things.
And then you go to North Korea where none of this is true, and then you begin to realize
that there is a greater purpose to what we do, that you do, and that I want to do in
life.
There are so many people who are suffering in one way or the other for the lack of the
things that we take for granted here.
In North Korea, for example, the people are taught over and over again to do exactly what
the dear leader says, without doubt, without question, in a bizarre and sort of the last
socialist country, if you will.
And the entire system relies on the lack of information.
It absolutely requires that there be no information to create doubt.
Right?
So a simple insertion of doubt causes everything to unravel.
Because people have been told that there are not alternatives, there's not other choices.
And of course from my perspective, this will fall at some point because information will
eventually reach everywhere in the world and that's what we all do together.
So we tend to think of everyone being online.
Everyone we know is online.
Everyone we know has a mobile phone.
Everyone we know is actually enjoying the prospects and the power of this information
revolution.
But it's not actually true.
What's interesting is roughly 2.3 billion people are online, roughly 3.4 billion people
have mobile phones -- although there's more mobile phone numbers -- so we're only either
halfway or maybe a fourth of the way done.
It looks like there's 5 billion people going to join us who have never had access to the
world that we're talking about in the next 5 to 10 years.
This is remarkable.
This is life-changing for them.
This is an extraordinary change for them.
So much bigger than the change that will happen for us.
So this is what I want to talk about today.
Wherever I go, I wander around looking at technology and sort of Google and other things,
and I see remarkable things.
I went to Tunisia right after the fall of the dictator Ben Ali, and after the dictator
fell, the question is what should the revolutionaries do.
Well, I'm pleased to report that they've become Android developers, right?
One skill, another skill, it works.
Whatever.
When we were in Libya, I did this with my colleague Jared Cohen and we wrote a book
together this year.
We found Libyan school girls who had used Google Maps to plot the NATO bombings so they
could get safely to school.
Those maps were so accurate, they were the ones used by the relief missions and so forth
during the conflict.
Right?
You think Google Maps matters?
Ask these girls who are alive.
In Myanmar, it turns out that in 2003, Myanmar decided before they opened up to ban all forms
of email, and they banned Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail.
Gmail, of course, was introduced in 2004.
A hundred percent market share.
And the country now, now that it's finally opened up -- right?
-- has now experienced the rapid growth.
SIM cards in Myanmar were $5,000 a SIM card.
Now they're $20.
Leading to their entire telecommunications systems being overloaded.
This is the hunger that we saw in our trips.
When we were in Pyongyang, the government asked us when the new release of Android was
coming out.
As if we were going to tell them.
[ Laughter ] >>Eric Schmidt: When we went to Iraq, the
looted artifacts have been sort of semi-restored and using the Google Art Project and Google
internal mapping, we were able to restore the visual imagery of the priceless -- right?
-- history of the Iraqi civilization that we all know about.
In Mexico, Mexico is building, using a platform called Google Maps, a system to follow the
sort of horrific gang violence that goes on in the country in something that they call
Plataforma Mexico.
What was interesting was that we went to Chad -- right?
-- the poorest country on Earth, and Chad uses Google's products and the Internet to
track theft and misuse of the oil sector, which is the only source of revenue for that
country.
When you fly into the Maasai, you see -- sorry.
When you fly into Kenya, you find Maasai nomads with a spear on one side and a mobile phone
on the other.
Very proud, by the way, of the spear, the mobile phone, and, of course, the four wives.
In Pakistan I met one of the toughest things I've ever seen was women who had been attacked
by acid and their faces had been disfigured, but on the Internet no one knows that, and
in a country where this provides great shame, they've been able to build economics and societies
and build lives for themselves.
If you'd asked me when I joined this country in 2001 if we would see this and this would
be before us, I would have told you you were crazy.
When these 5 billion people come online, the vast majority of them will face new challenges,
but most of them are coming online in countries that are relatively repressive, and so for
them, the expression of information, the empowerment that I'm -- that we joke about here is much
more profound than we all -- that we all take for granted.
In wandering around, what I've found is that the mere concept of the Internet itself was
empowering.
They didn't even know what it was but they knew it would empower them.
That's the hunger that we see.
And what's interesting, of course, is people are the same everywhere.
They all care about free expression, freedom of assembly, critical thinking, and they want
some form of meritocracy and safety for themselves.
So don't underestimate the power of these ideas and what you can do.
Last year, the Boston Consulting Group surveyed consumers in 13 of these countries asking
them what they would be willing to do to give up Internet access for the entire year.
The numbers were: 22% would rather give up daily showers; 27% would sacrifice sex; and
75% -- three-quarters of the people -- would rather give up alcohol.
So that gives you a sense of the importance of the Internet.
So the challenges that the Internet provides are manifold.
There's the issues of balkanization and censorship.
There's the issues of empowerment of evil people and so forth.
But the overwhelming benefit to these people is really, really something.
And I think that the biggest -- it's sort of great, because the dictators and autocrats
who face this don't actually know exactly what to do.
The force is too powerful.
The force for hunger for information and empowerment, it's simply too strong.
And the Internet matters in many, many political contexts as well.
Human societies hardly ever self-reform.
They require some -- historically, if you look at sort of human history, it's mostly
through war.
The Internet is that outsider.
The Internet is the thing that will cause these generally peaceful societies to change.
And in fact, there are no countries where the situation on the Internet has gotten worse
-- sorry -- because of the Internet.
So imagine a world where people know what they have read and have been taught in school,
one where they can get their information from in-person conversations where they have no
choices in television and radio, a world without banter, a world without criticism.
This is North Korea.
Or imagine Chad and Somalia or Ivory Coast today where the most profitable business in
the country is the telecommunications industry, which is 10% of the GDP.
It's literally the only legitimate business, it seems, in many of these countries.
So to me, when I look at this, these countries are undershooting their potential, and that
mobile phones can solve that problem.
We're enormously proud at Google of the success of Android, and you'll hear lots more about
this over the next few days, but think about what a phone -- in particular, an Android
phone -- can do with education, right?
You have no access to textbooks.
You have no access to information.
All the learning you have is not written down and it's from a village elder and so forth.
Education -- especially literacy -- delivered on phones.
We can, with phones, end illiteracy in the world completely.
Violence, right?
Especially that against women, which is often horrific, checked by cameras on mobile phones.
People really do pay attention if you take a picture of something evil and you post it.
Corruption, the most persistent of all.
If you ask people in these countries, the number one issue?
Corruption.
Checked by mobile phones because we can track the flow of things.
And even an authoritarian government cares about its imagine and pride.
The imagine of citizens in China with their phones using that to police, and we'll talk
about that with Ambassador Huntsman.
But governments are resisting this.
So if you go back, what are examples of countries and societies that are better off with the
Internet?
China, using Weibo to pressure governments after the railway disaster, environmental
action.
Somalia, the privatization of government services and the use of mobile phones for safety.
Nigeria, the development of all new economic activity away from the 409 scamming and replacing
it by modern IT, modern e-commerce -- right?
-- through there.
Iran, using the rigged elections -- right?
-- can actually be turned over by technology.
So to me, when I look at the Internet and what we do, I would offer sort of a call to
action to all of you -- certainly to Google, but to all of you -- that I want you to refuse
to accept the belief that the challenges before us are intractable, that somehow these are
not solvable problems.
The endemic ones, the ones that drive everybody crazy.
You pick it.
Corruption, education, violence, and so forth and so on.
Which have been with us forever.
We have an opportunity, in the connected age with these new platforms, to actually build
solutions that actually solve these problems.
Furthermore, we have customers -- the majority of the human race -- who want them now, right?
So I would ask all of you, as we begin our sessions, to think about the market that you
currently serve and the problems they have, which we all understand, and you do such a
good job of serving, but I want you to add another market, this much larger market, who
are even more needy and even more excited about what we can do together.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]