Is this the "Internet Election"?
By Jon Bartholomew
Posted on Thu Aug 28, 2008 at 12:26:57 PM EST
This morning at the Big Tent, Air America and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow hosted a discussion with Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. The subject of the talk is how the internet is impacting the 2008 elections.
Maddow started out with pointing out that for the last several elections, broad claims have been made that the internet was making a major difference - but has it? Eric Schmidt responded that it is becoming more and more the case. His example of how the internet has recently made a big difference was how in the 2006 Senate races the GOP candidate in Virginia used the word "macaca" to describe a person of color, and it got around on Youtube, which may have been the pivotal point in that election. The viral nature of that video made a big difference in the shift of power in the US Senate.
Is that just increasing? It seems to be the case. More and more citizen journalism is emerging, and here at the Big Tent that is certainly evident.
Maddow then moved the discussion to the power of the government and corporations to violate the privacy of our citizens. Schmidt responded that they strive to have the best privacy policy on the internet among their competitors and that there is a real balance that needs to be made between the need for the government to access information and the right to privacy, but that in the end it is a cultural decision for us to all make where that balance lies.
Maddow also pushed on the question about how Google goes along with the Chinese government's censorship rules for the internet. Schmidt's response is that they made a decision at Google to connect to all the people in China within the rules of the Chinese government, but want to open the networks up completely. He inferred that they have set up results for banned searches in such a way that it helps the Chinese people figure out how to get around the ban. It still felt like he was hedging the issue.
I am sure someone else covered this discussion better than I have, so when I find another source I will post it in the comments below.
Tags: net neutrality, new media, media reform, media and democracy (all tags)
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