Google’s Eric Schmidt: The Internet Will Be In Chinese
Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, ruffled some feathers this past week when he said that five years from now the Internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content (see link).
How could this be? Well, China’s population is over 1.3 billion, and the country’s Internet penetration is increasing. There are 338 million Internet users in China, which is larger than the entire official US population, which is estimated at a little over 307 million.
What does this mean? Given the number of Chinese Internet users, there will be an ever increasing amount of Chinese content on the web. Moreover, the Chinese IDN market will be huge once Chinese Internet users grow accustomed to ICANN’s new IDN friendly stance. The lurking spoiler could be the censorship-happy Chinese government, which could further regulate dot CN names, and the country’s Internet as a whole, at the drop of a hat.
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I can see that there will be a large Chinese Internet community but I cannot see how the Internet is going to convert to being Chinese.
Thank you! You often write very interesting articles. You improved my mood.
Valuable thoughts and advices. I read your topic with great interest.
@Nigel – A greater percentage of internet users being Chinese means more Chinese content on the web and more demand for Chinese IDNs.
Well, IMHO, should the number of Chinese language sites begin to catch up with the number of exisiting English language sites, search engines, such as Google, can just default to providing in their search results only English language sites. For a much broader search, users might then be able to click some check boxes to include Chinese langauage sites, Spanish language sites, French, etc.
Idiotic provocative statement by Schmidt here. Lot of CEO’s have a penchant for this kind of thing. In the future there’ll be a lot more hard drives filled with Chinese content. There’ll be a lot more hard drives period. Not everybody else’s non-Chinese dominated drives being invaded by armies of censorial Mandarin characters. The internet is not a zero sum thing and never will be. It grows to fill the need.
@Nigel The Internet isn’t going to convert to Chinese. The English Internet you know and love will still be here just as it is now.
All he is saying is that there will be more pages of Chinese content than there will be of English content.
I’m pretty sure you don’t read the Chinese content that exists now and you will be equally unaware of it then.
Yes, I have Chinese IDN and love it very much: 张家.com
But why it still show as strange code in browser address. It need to be fixed, I think.